The title is essentially meaningless today, but Friday the 13th - The Final Chapter is a fierce, brutal, no-holds-barred gorefest that remains a fan favorite thanks to terrific splatter effects (courtesy of Tom Savini, who reportedly only agreed to work on this film so he could kill the Jason character he created in Part 1), as well as a quirky and likeable cast that includes Crispin Glover as horny Jimmy (a year before Back to the Future made him famous), Lawrence Monoson as lovelorn wisecracker Ted (his next film after The Last American Virgin), and Corey Feldman as 12-year-old special effects wiz Tommy (pretty obvious where the inspiration for his character came from!) who gets the best of Jason in the end by using some good old child psychology on him a la Friday the 13th Part 2. Our heroine is chirpy blonde bombshell Trish (Kimberly Beck, who you may remember from the 1976 revenge flick Massacre at Central High and who gives a very affecting performance here). Joseph Zito, who helmed the equally brutal 1981 slasher film The Prowler (which also features show-stopping effects from Tom Savini), provides crisp, solid direction that imbues the film with a stylish sense of gloom and savagery.
Ted White is one of the series' most popular and menacing Jasons, the last to show any real semblance to a human being (Dick Wieand in Part 5 doesn't count), and he plays the part with true, dedicated fierceness. White supposedly even went so far to stay in character and elicit the appropriate reactions of fear from the other actors as to isolate himself from the rest of the cast and crew during filming! And
though he reportedly hated playing the part and isn't exactly proud of it today, it's hard to deny that whatever Method procedure he applied to get the part just right worked. Jason is always a man of few words, but he does do some creepy grunting and even some inhuman hollering in this one whilst doing his deadly business.
There's a memorable double kill in the moonlit Crystal Lake, which begins with the lovely (and very naked) Judie Aronson as Samantha getting run through with a machete by Jason while lounging in a rubber raft and wraps up with libidinous boyfriend Paul (Alan Hayes) getting a harpoon projectile shot in between his legs after finding Sam's corpse in the raft and trying to swim hectically to shore. Crispin Glover's Jimmy gets his hand caught in an electric corkscrew and his face split apart with Jason's meat cleaver in what is probably THE definitive death scene of the whole film. There's even a fat, banana-munching hitchhiker (Bonnie Hellman) who doesn't impress Jason with her improved eating habits and gets a hole punched through her throat with his razor butcher knife. The gore is definitely more plentiful in The Final Chapter than any single one of the first three, and rather than keep the kills mostly off-screen, it uses fleeting images of extreme gore without lingeringon it -- which is obviously how the producers got it past the MPAA.
Through the use of some off-center editing and a peppering of old-fashioned "false alarms", the film gives Jason the illusion of being everywhere and nowhere at once. One minute he's killing Jimmy in the kitchen; a second later he's outside the houseatop the porch bursting through a bedroom window at a victim; then an instant later he's inside the house again in the living room behind a film projector screen getting ready to sharpen his knife on stoned Ted, et cetera. It's an attempt by the filmmakers to keep the audience on the edge of its seat that obviously isn't as galvanizing or unpredictable today as it was in 1984, but is still effective.
Jason does indeed get his dues in the end when Tommy -- after slicing him in the head with his own machete -- goes all out wacko and pummels Jason's not-quite-lifeless body with repeated blows from the sharp weapon. Apparently this attack debilitated Jason enough that he only appears as a ghost in the next installmen, the aptly titled A New Beginning, but it doesn't keep him down for long, as two short years
after this one he literally rises from the grave for more ultra-violent mayhem. The Final Chapter made 32 million at the box office, so Paramount clearly wasn't going to let a good thing go. However, none of the sequels following this one made nearly as much at the cinema, so this one marks the end of the four-year period when Friday the 13th was the king (or queen, as in Part 1) of horror films.
As the highest IMDB-rated film in the series after Parts 1 and 2, Friday the 13th - The Final Chapter deserves its status as a first-rate Jason film. I give it a well-earned 8.5 of 10.
Ted White is one of the series' most popular and menacing Jasons, the last to show any real semblance to a human being (Dick Wieand in Part 5 doesn't count), and he plays the part with true, dedicated fierceness. White supposedly even went so far to stay in character and elicit the appropriate reactions of fear from the other actors as to isolate himself from the rest of the cast and crew during filming! And
though he reportedly hated playing the part and isn't exactly proud of it today, it's hard to deny that whatever Method procedure he applied to get the part just right worked. Jason is always a man of few words, but he does do some creepy grunting and even some inhuman hollering in this one whilst doing his deadly business.
There's a memorable double kill in the moonlit Crystal Lake, which begins with the lovely (and very naked) Judie Aronson as Samantha getting run through with a machete by Jason while lounging in a rubber raft and wraps up with libidinous boyfriend Paul (Alan Hayes) getting a harpoon projectile shot in between his legs after finding Sam's corpse in the raft and trying to swim hectically to shore. Crispin Glover's Jimmy gets his hand caught in an electric corkscrew and his face split apart with Jason's meat cleaver in what is probably THE definitive death scene of the whole film. There's even a fat, banana-munching hitchhiker (Bonnie Hellman) who doesn't impress Jason with her improved eating habits and gets a hole punched through her throat with his razor butcher knife. The gore is definitely more plentiful in The Final Chapter than any single one of the first three, and rather than keep the kills mostly off-screen, it uses fleeting images of extreme gore without lingeringon it -- which is obviously how the producers got it past the MPAA.
Through the use of some off-center editing and a peppering of old-fashioned "false alarms", the film gives Jason the illusion of being everywhere and nowhere at once. One minute he's killing Jimmy in the kitchen; a second later he's outside the houseatop the porch bursting through a bedroom window at a victim; then an instant later he's inside the house again in the living room behind a film projector screen getting ready to sharpen his knife on stoned Ted, et cetera. It's an attempt by the filmmakers to keep the audience on the edge of its seat that obviously isn't as galvanizing or unpredictable today as it was in 1984, but is still effective.
Jason does indeed get his dues in the end when Tommy -- after slicing him in the head with his own machete -- goes all out wacko and pummels Jason's not-quite-lifeless body with repeated blows from the sharp weapon. Apparently this attack debilitated Jason enough that he only appears as a ghost in the next installmen, the aptly titled A New Beginning, but it doesn't keep him down for long, as two short years
after this one he literally rises from the grave for more ultra-violent mayhem. The Final Chapter made 32 million at the box office, so Paramount clearly wasn't going to let a good thing go. However, none of the sequels following this one made nearly as much at the cinema, so this one marks the end of the four-year period when Friday the 13th was the king (or queen, as in Part 1) of horror films.
As the highest IMDB-rated film in the series after Parts 1 and 2, Friday the 13th - The Final Chapter deserves its status as a first-rate Jason film. I give it a well-earned 8.5 of 10.