Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (

1984

)

The Friday the 13th series is an interesting one because almost none of the iconic elements of the series were present for the first installment. The iconic murderer, Jason, didn’t even turn up until Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) and didn’t get his iconic hockey mask until Friday the 13th Part III (1982) having to make do with an old sack in the meantime. Yet even after Friday the 13th Part III (1982), there was still something missing. Jason was obviously just a big psycho with a bigger knife and a downright massive mommy-complex. He was certainly incredibly tough, but there’s nothing superhuman about his endurance (except for perhaps the way he seems to instantly recover from grievous injuries in between movies with no medical treatment). When he’s hit he feels pain, and he can quite easily be knocked out of incapacitated, though he tends to recover faster than he has any right to. It was plain throughout Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) and Friday the 13th Part III (1982) that Jason was just a man and not the undead revenant that he would transform into in later entries in the series. However, after Friday the 13th Part III (1982) ended with Jason getting a machete to the brain, he could no longer be brought back for subsequent sequels without resorting to a supernatural explanation. 

The Friday the 13th series had always teased supernatural elements, starting with the ending of the first film that had an undead Jason (then still a drowned little boy) leap out of the water and attack the first film’s final girl, Alice. The scene was repeated at the end of Friday the 13th Part III (1982) only with Jason’s dead mom standing in for the little zombie boy. However, in both these sequences, the appearance of the monsters is written off as a bad dream of the sole survivor. However, here the plot demands that Jason be pronounced dead by medical professionals before waking up and cutting a bloody swath through a mob of hapless teenage douchebags and bimbos. There really aren’t a lot of mundane explanations for this other than. Maybe Jason has an unnaturally thick skull, but even then you have to accept that the medical examiners are so hopelessly inept that they can't even read a pulse. At this point, magic becomes a more believable explanation than anything else.

Of course, the series was not yet ready to dive headlong into the realm of the supernatural. The prevailing wisdom in the 1970s and 1980s was that supernatural horror was little more than a relic from the distant past. All those vampires, ghouls, werewolves, and assorted undead abominations were the domain of old Universal Horror movies from the 40s and their stodgy imitators at Hammer. The general movement of horror films since the 1950s had been a shift towards more and more realism; from the plausible if highly unlikely aliens in The Thing from Another World (1951) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) to more mundane threats like a psycho with a knife. However, by 1984 this general thrust was about to be reversed. The year signaled the high-water mark for horror’s devotion to non-supernatural monsters. First with Jason returning from what must have been a mortal wound and then with a new monster emerging in the form of Freddy Kruger who targeting his victims by magically appearing in their dreams. Before the end of the decade, even Michael Myers had been re-imagined with a supernatural origin story. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter was the first tentative step in this direction, and though it is not a brilliant movie in its own right, it’s pretty damn fun. Indeed, if pressed I'd have to choose today's film as my favorite in the series thus far, due, in no small part, to the fact that the final chapter has given up on actually scaring its audience and instead embraced its campy formulaic appeal.

To catch anyone up to speed if they missed the last three films there's a highlight reel of the previous entries overlaid with the campfire story from Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) which fills you in on the crucial details like Jason exists and he kills people. Personally, I think this is a bit superfluous but it's a hell of a lot snappier than the introductions to the previous two films (Friday the 13th Part III (1982) in particular) so who am I to complain? From there the film proper begins where the last one ended with the authorities collecting Jason's body from the barn, pronouncing him dead, and driving him to the morgue. Once the hospital quiets down and Jason's “corpse” is left alone he promptly reanimates and murders the horny mortician and the nurse he was trying to screw. From there he presumably stomps off into the woods to find some more hapless young people to eviscerate.

Not far from the site of his previous two massacres, there is a family consisting of one recently divorced Mom, an older sister named Trish Javis, and her little brother, Tommy Javis. Of special note is Tommy since he's the first time that the series has devoted any significant screen time to an actual child. Like most movie kids he's an annoying little shit, made doubly so here by the fact that it becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly that the film isn't going to have to stones to kill him off. Oddly enough for an R-rated movie loaded to the brim with tits and blood he seems to represent the audience more than anyone else, as he is a horror movie fanatic that makes his own professional quality masks and a randy little pervert that hoots and hollers while peeping on a woman changing. In addition to the Jarvis household, there's also a young man named Rob Dier camping out in the woods nearby. Dier, by the way, is armed to the teeth (he's got a rifle, a machete, and a knife). He says that he's hunting bear, but really he's after Jason and expects the killer to go back to his old tricks now that he's returned from the dead. 

In addition to the characters that actually matter, there's also a carload of rowdy teens renting out the cabin next to the Jarvis household who serve no other purpose in the film beyond giving us some nude women to leer at and some warm bodies for Jason to eviscerate. We have Paul and his girlfriend Sam (who puts out) along with Doug and his girl Sara (who does not). Tagging along with the two couples is a pair of single guys, annoying douchebag ladies-man Ted and nerd Jim who is so incapable of pleasing a woman that he has earned the moniker “Dead Fuck.” As soon as they arrive they meet a pair of identical twin sisters named Tina and Terri (Jesus do we have enough characters with names that start with T yet?). After a “getting to know you” skinny dip session the teens head back to the cabin to drink, hook-up, and watch silent era dirty movies. From there it's only a matter of time before Jason starts to pick them off one by one.

First up is Sam, who gets upset when Paul tries to screw one of the twins and storms off in a huff to go skinny dipping again. It's certainly not the way I'd respond to infidelity, but then again I'm not a bimbo in a cheap horror movie sequel. Not long after leaving she gets gutted on a rubber dingy. A bit later, Paul starts to feel guilty and goes looking for her, before getting dispatched himself. From there Jason gradually works his way through the expendable meat until we're just left with the characters who actually have a role in the plot. 

I mentioned in my review of Friday the 13th Part III (1982) that I was shocked by how prudish it was, having only one naked woman in the entire run-time and that only towards the end. This is a series whose success was built on a combination of skillful practical gore effects and copious female nudity after all. Evidentially director Joseph Zito agreed with me and seems to have his entire female cast (and the men too to be fair) constantly in a state of undress. Between skinny dipping, showering, and screwing, the film is always ready to contrive a reason for some bare skin. Zito even brings in a pair of hot, young, identical twin sisters who serve little purpose besides giving the audience another four boobs to look at. I suppose we should count ourselves lucky (or unlucky if you’re a hoary old pervert) that Zito didn’t make them kiss. As if all this isn't enough there's even a bit where Ted digs up an antique porno so we can be treated to some nude ladies from the silent era.

This is by far the most fun film in the whole damn Friday the 13th series and also the one that most fully embraces the slasher genre's cliches. As a result, it is a good deal more light-hearted than the first two installments in the series which were still trying their damnedest to inspire genuine shock and revulsion in the audience. Yet it is never as absurdly goofy as the third entry in the series, thanks mostly to the fact that it's not trying to incorporate 3D effects that were already hokey in 1954. As a result, it feels, more than any horror movie that came before it, like the arch-typical slasher film. The chief appeal here is the inventive kills (the one where the girl is murdered in silhouette is especially nice), the occasional flash of dark humor, and the comforting routine of the slasher formula. It's odd how in less than a decade a series, and indeed a genre, aimed to unnerve and horrify had instead become a sort of macabre comfort food. There would be exceptions to the rule but from here on out, slashers would get more and more mellow until they ultimately transformed into abject parodies of themselves. 

Obviously, the title of this film is a filthy lie. There would be another six movies in the main Friday the 13th series plus a cross-over with Freddy Kruger and a reboot as well. What's more, it looks like it was never even intended to be the last entry in the series, as less than a year later the sequel was released. Given the usual bureaucracy involved in film-making at the big studios, this almost certainly means that plans were drawn up and check written before Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter was in the theaters. Indeed, to cover their asses the studio used a fake title for the next Friday the 13th movie and only told the cast and crew when they had signed their contracts.