Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984) | 31 Days of Horror: Oct 2

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The fourth time’s the charm! Or is it?

Tonight’s film is the next chapter in the continuing story of Jason Voorhees. It once again brings together a small group of young people as fodder for the psychotic killer. Billed as the final chapter in this franchise, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter retreads the same ground in the most incoherent way so far, going through all of the motions without either humor or heart present in previous installments.

Before Viewing

What do you expect from a Friday the 13th trailer? The omnipotent voiceover reminds audiences that Jason has been around three times before (technically only two, right?), but he has returned once again. He’s supernatural, not making a sound or even breathing as he attacks numerous young people in a cabin, kicking in the door and throwing several out a window. But this time it looks like he’s met his match as a young woman appears to stab him with his own knife. Is this really The Final Chapter, as the trailer wants us to believe? (Spoiler: No, no it’s not!)

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

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After Viewing

After a brief recap of the story surrounding the murders at Crystal Lake (edited from the previous installments), the film begins in the aftermath of the last film as emergency crews collect the dead bodies, including Jason Voorhees’ (Ted White), at Higgins Haven. His body is taken to the Wessex County morgue, where the slovenly coroner, Axel (Bruce Mahler), puts it aside. He is more concerned with having sex with the nurse on duty, Robbie (Lisa Freeman). Unfortunately, no one checks that Jason was actually dead, and he kills both of them before stumbling back into the woods.

A group of six young adults on their way to a local cabin pass by the roadside grave of Jason’s mother, Pamela Voorhees (RIP). Nearby is a hippie hitchhiker, who becomes Jason’s third victim. When they arrive at their cabin, the next-door neighbors, Trish Jarvis (Kimberly Beck) and her younger brother, Tommy (Corey Feldman), introduce themselves to the four boys and two girls. That evening, Tommy watches Samantha (Judie Aronson) change her clothes from his window. The next day, the group heads to the lake and meets twins Tina and Terri (Camilla & Carey More), who join them in skinny dipping. Tommy and Trish stop by, but seeing the naked adults, Trish turns her young brother around.

Heading back to their house, Trish’s car stops running. Tommy tries to fix it when Rob (Erich Anderson), a backpacker hunting for bears, steps out of the woods. They give him a ride back to their house, where Tommy rushes him past his mother, Tracey Jarvis (Joan Freeman), and excitedly shows Rob his collection of monster masks. Rob heads back out into the woods after dark. At the party next door, Tina begins coming onto Paul (Alan Hayes), which upsets his girlfriend, Samantha, as well as Ted (Lawrence Monoson), who invited her. Samantha storms off to the lake, strips off her clothes, and swims naked to a raft where she is stabbed by Jason, who’s hiding in the water. Paul has second thoughts and heads after Sam, but takes a speargun to the groin and dies.

Tina then decides to hook up with Jimmy (Crispin Glover), the other odd single guy in the group. Upset by her sister taking the boy she was with, Terry leaves in the rain and is killed by Jason. Virgin Sara (Barbara Howard) decides that Doug (Peter Barton) is cute, and they go upstairs to have sex in the shower. Tracy comes home from jogging (at night, in the rain) and notices the power is out at her house. Checking outside, something shocks her, and she is presumably killed off-screen. Trish and Tommy return home (from where? Who knows!). She goes to look for her missing mom and discovers Rob’s tent in the woods, where he startles her, nearly killing her. He tells her he’s looking for the killer of his sister, Sandra, whom he strongly suspects is Jason.

Jason still has a lot of work to do before Trish returns, so he impales Jimmy’s hand with a fancy cork-screw and smacks him in the face with a cleaver. Jason then defenestrates Tina onto the group’s station wagon below. While Ted is watching an old stag film he found, Jason impales his head with a knife through the movie screen. Finally, the killer crushes Doug’s head in the shower (post-coitus) and chases Sara, putting an ax into her chest. Next door at the Jarvis house, Trish and Rob tell Tommy to lock up as they go next door to investigate. They discover the power is out in that location as Rob is attacked by Jason in the basement and killed. Trish runs from the maniac, running into almost every dead body on the property before making it home.

At the Jarvis house, Trish nails the door shut, but Jason makes a new entrance by throwing Rob’s dead body through the window and grabbing Tommy. Trish beats the killer with a hammer until she and Tommy can escape to Tommy’s room upstairs. Incapacitating Jason with a TV to the head, they attempt to sneak away, but Jason pops up and chases Trish back to the neighbor’s house, throwing her out a window. Tommy, having seen Rob’s newspaper clippings about Jason, shaves his hair off haphazardly to make himself look like a young Jason. When Trish and Jason re-enter the Jarvis house, he becomes confused by Tommy’s appearance. Trish knocks Jason’s hockey mask off, revealing a mutated face, allowing Tommy to grab the killer’s machete and hack at Jason until he’s dead. Later, at the hospital, the doctors tell Trish that she and Tommy will be okay. Tommy comes in and hugs Trish as the camera freezes on the weird, vacant stare in his eyes.

“Jason’s body has disappeared from the morgue. It was not stolen. Two people at the hospital are missing. Coincidence? He’s alive!” – Rob

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter is one of just three unnumbered sequels in the Friday the 13th franchise, being the fourth overall film. It follows the original film from 1980, Friday the 13th Part 2 from 1981, and Friday the 13th Part 3D from 1982. It may seem hard to believe in hindsight, but Part III was intended to be the final film in the franchise. The oversaturation of slasher films in the early 80s made it harder for horror films to garner audiences. This is why Jason was killed at the conclusion of the last film and appeared to stay dead. But you can’t keep a good killer down, at least in these types of films, so he was resurrected for a fourth, and again, final outing. And that’s what they honestly tried to do. Jason appears to have been killed at the conclusion of this film, with a potential open-ended moment involving Tommy. That final look on the boy’s face can be read in several ways: he is either traumatized from the attacks and has suffered a mental breakdown, which could make him a future killer to continue the franchise, or he’s become possessed by the spirit that caused Jason to be a nearly unstoppable killer. In short, not the end.

Regardless of whether this film should exist or not (or if it’s the last in the series), it’s still a prominent release of one of the most famous slasher horror franchises in history. As a sequel, it still needs to adhere to certain rules for the genre and for the Friday the 13th series in order to feel like a part of the franchise. The first component is having a killer, who starts the film deceased (or at least apparently deceased). Next, a group of horny teens or young adults is needed. Check! They even have characters mention at least three times how horney they are. No mincing words here, this group is DTF! And there are more of them, too. It starts with six people coming on vacation, plus Trish and Tommy next door, and then two more characters appear–twins! This will work just fine. But here’s where everything starts to break down. Adherence to the formula has blinded the creatives from actually developing some characterizations. There’s not much to differentiate these kids from the ones seen in any other slasher film, or from each other in this one. The one thing that does stand out is all of the ‘T’ names: Tracey, Trish, Tommy, Ted, Tina, and Terri. They’re all a mix of heterosexual teens, all white, and mostly bland. The twins stand out, as does Jimmy, the eclectic “dead f**k,” as Ted teases him. And of course, the young Tommy. No one wants to see Tommy get hurt. But what seems to be emphasized is the nudity and the killings over anything else. It seems as if Judie Aronson was ok being naked, so the filmmakers took every chance they could get to make her take her clothes off. Once, while Tommy watches out the window (with only her nude back being shown). Once, when she skinny dipped at the lake during the day. And then her death scene, where she strips, wearing no underwear to swim in.

The killings are both some of the best elements and the worst elements in the film. For starters, the volume of killings is at a franchise high, with 14 deaths, including Jason. This tops the ten deaths in both the Original and Part II, and squeezes past the 12 bodies found in Part III. But volume is not the same thing as good. While Alex’s death is interesting, having his head unscrewed, many others are light on blood or poorly staged, lit, or filmed. Samantha’s death on the boat makes it difficult to see what is happening, and both Terri and Tracy are killed off-screen, though we do eventually see Terri’s body with the knife impaled in her back. When slasher sequels are derided, it’s often said that they have dumb characters, among other things. This may have been the film to inspire those comments. Characters are often in specific situations just to be killed, like Tina peering out the window and noticing her sister’s bicycle is still at the house. She pulls back, thinks again, looks back out the window, starts to pull away, and then looks even harder. It’s like she’s waiting for the killer to finish climbing up the trellis and pull her out the window. Her death, bouncing off the roof of the station wagon, provides relief from some of the stab-and-slash aspects that many of the others die from. But for every scene like Tina’s death, there’s Paul’s death by speargun to the groin. It’s dark and poorly lit, making it difficult to tell what’s occurring, other than he’s raised into the air in some fashion.

The film features some notable actors of the time, not known primarily for their horror work. Peter Barton was the face of The Powers of Matthew Star, a sci-fi television show where he costarred with Amy Steel, an actress from Part II. Crispin Glover became famous the following year for appearing in the sci-fi comedy Back to the Future. Judie Aronson would next appear in the 80s classic Weird Science as the love interest/girlfriend of Wyatt (Ilan Mitchell-Smith). And Corey Feldman was known for his work in both The Goonies and Stand By Me. But even these notable actors aren’t able to save the film from gaps in the story. This may be too nitpicky, but there are some continuity errors in the film where characters suddenly change what they’re doing–randomly appearing or disappearing, or do things for no other reason than to put themselves in harm’s way. Mrs. Jarvis is shown to be an avid jogger, running in the mornings with Trish, except that she returns after dark in the rain to the power-less house. Maybe she was just caught in the rain, and maybe she chose to do a second run that day. Who knows? Tommy is seen following instructions from Trish to “fix the lights,” as if it were just a blown fuse, where he is wandering in the dark basement of their house. It’s a tense couple of minutes, but nothing happens. When Trish returns, breaking the glass in the front door (which is later seen without glass or a window of any kind), Tommy comes wandering downstairs, the lights on and showing no issue or concern. Was something cut from here? It feels like something went missing.

Luckily, fans of the series would not need to wait long to realize that the series wasn’t finished. New Friday the 13th films were released in four of the next five years, which included part 5 A New Beginning (1985), Part VI: Jason Lives (1986), Part VII: The New Blood (1988), and Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989). That still was not the end, as the series continued through 2001 with Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (part 9 in 1993) and Jason X (a sci-fi horror mashup released in 2001), the monster v. monster battle royale Freddy vs. Jason (2003), plus a reboot of the series Friday the 13th (2009), which combines elements from both part 1 and part 2. So the real final chapter of this story is that marketing on films like this is everything, and even when studios decide they’re done, audiences can continue demanding more. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter may actually be the final proper entry in the slasher series, as these films are rumored to go down in quality even further as time progresses.

Assorted Musings

• This was Corey Feldman’s first horror film. He would return for a small cameo in the next Friday the 13th film, A New Beginning, as well as having appearances in Gremlins (1984), The Lost Boys (1987), and the Tales from the Crypt film Bordello of Blood (1996), among others.
• The events of Part 2, Part III, and The Final Chapter all take place over 3-4 days, which implies that Rob collected all the newspaper articles on Jason in a day or two and gathered all his gear immediately after learning his sister had been killed, which makes little sense.