Friday the 13th Perfected the Jason Movie in The Final Chapter

“An immoral and reprehensible piece of trash that pulled more tickets on its opening weekend than any other so far in 1984.” That’s how the imminent critic Roger Ebert introduced his and co-host Gene Siskel’s review of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter on their show At the Movies. While Ebert’s right about the film’s box office draw, and may even be right about the film’s moral content, he was wrong when he said, “The fourth Friday the 13th movie is just a cynical retread of the first three.”

If Ebert means that The Final Chapter is about Jason Voorhees killing teens at Camp Crystal Lake then, yeah, it is a retread. The Final Chapter doesn’t break any of the confines of the slasher. It takes about 15 minutes for Jason (Ted White) to claim his first victim, running a bone saw across the neck of a skeevy mortician (Bruce Mahler). Two-thirds of the cast consists of actors in their mid-20s and early 30s playing teens, all of whom have no character development beyond “wants to have sex.”

And yet, The Final Chapter executes these tropes with incredible efficiency and an idiosyncratic mix of inventiveness and weirdness. It is the apotheosis of what a Jason movie can and should be, and it’s one that slasher filmmakers chase still.

A New Season At Camp Crystal Lake

About half the plot of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter does feel like a retread of previous movies. At the start of the film, Jason recovers from his apparent death in the third movie and makes his way to Camp Crystal Lake where he finds a bunch of teens ready to party.

However, director Joseph Zito and screenwriter Barney Cohen, working from a story credited to Bruce Hidemi Sakow, changes things with two additions. One is the arrival of Rob (E. Erich Anderson), whose sister died at Jason’s hand in the previous movie; so now he hunts Jason for revenge. The other notable addition is that of the Jarvis family, who consist of a single mom (Joan Freeman) and her kids Trish (Kimberly Beck) and Tommy (Corey Feldman). The Jarvis’ move next door and represent a wholesome, loving family, something alien to most slashers.

Furthermore, The Final Chapter makes the teen scenes work by focusing on two characters in the social periphery, the braggart Teddy (Lawrence Monoson) and sad-sack Jimmy (Crispin Glover). On the page, the duo doesn’t have the most compelling arc. Teddy berates Jimmy for his lack of sexual magnetism, yet it is Jimmy who gets a girl’s attention. But Monoson plays Teddy as irredeemably obnoxious, and Glover plays Jimmy as such a weirdo that their characters become compelling.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in the scene in which Tina (Camilla More) takes Jimmy upstairs to bed. Glover brings real vulnerability to his performance, whether it’s laughing with embarrassment when the bed collapses under Jimmy and Tina, or the way he asks Tina if she was satisfied by his performance. Zito periodically cuts away from Jimmy and Tina back to Teddy downstairs, who cackles at the silent nudie films he found. The fact that the scene ends with the disgusting, but unsurprising for an ’80s movie, moment in which Jimmy presents Tina’s underwear to Teddy a a trophy only underscores how much Glover and Monoson bring to their characters, adding flavor to otherwise stock characters.

These aspects don’t diverge from slasher movie tropes. But they do give them enough flavor and style to make them memorable, much more so than an actual cynical retread ever would.

He’s Killing Me!

While it’s nice that The Final Chapter has interesting characters, they are still people in a slasher movie. Therefore they only exist to get killed. Yet The Final Chapter excels on that end as well, giving some of the genre’s best all-time kills.

Sometimes they’re relatively simple slaughters that are nevertheless executed in a unique way. Jimmy meets his end right after presenting Tina’s underwear to Teddy and going to the kitchen to pour a celebratory drink. “Hey Ted, where the hell’s the corkscrew?” Jimmy whines in Glover’s idiosyncratic cadence. He gets his answer when Jason slams the corkscrew into his hand, pinning him for the final kill.

Jimmy’s partner Tina goes out in equally notable fashion. When Jimmy goes downstairs to brag, Tina looks out the window to check on her twin sister Terri (Carey More). Wiping off the fog that has accumulated on the window as a storm rages outside, Tina sees Terri’s bike, right where it was before her sister declared she was leaving. Confused, Tina moves her head closer to the window, only to be grabbed by Jason. A cut to outside the house reveals Jason hanging from a gable and pulling Tina outward for one of his most spectacular defenestrations.

The dummy standing in for Tina looks ridiculous as it’s launched into the air. But most of the effects in The Final Chapter are fantastic, thanks to the involvement of special effects legend Tom Savini. The man responsible for stomach-churning moments in Dawn of the Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Savini worked on the first Friday the 13th movie where he designed iconic sequences, such as Kevin Bacon‘s death via arrow through the back of the neck. When he heard that studio Paramount planned to kill Jason, Savini returned to the franchise so he could give a proper ending to the character he helped popularize.

Some of the kills play like Savini’s greatest hits, as when Jason puts a knife through the neck of a hitchhiker or impales a skinny dipper in a raft. But Savini pulls out all of the stops for Jason’s final scene, in which he attacks Trish in the Jarvis house. Trish gets some good shots in, sinking a hammer’s claw into Jason’s neck and cleaving his hands with a machete, the latter of which gives Savini a chance to show off when Jason examines his split hand.

But the best part occurs when Tommy, a special effects master and stand-in for Savini, makes himself up like the young Jason to distract the killer. Jason’s attention averted, Trish knocks off the vintage Detroit Red Wings hockey mask that the killer had worn since midway through Part III, revealing an incredible grotesque face. Even better, Trish attacks Jason with a machete, finally making him fall face first on the blade. We watch as Jason’s head slides down the upturned blade, his other eye wiggling in surprise.

Even if some of The Final Chapter‘s kills were diminished by censors (especially the moment that Jason squishes the head of a man enjoying a post-coital shower), this kill scene is glorious, perfectly designed and executed.

Jason Lives!

Yes, Jason died at the end of The Final Chapter, seemingly for good. But the movie did so well at the box office that Paramount had to bring them back. 1985’s The New Blood tried to recreate the whodunnit nature of the first movie, this time with a teenage Tommy Jarvis at the center, only to resurrect Jason as a zombie for the sixth entry, Jason Lives!

Friday the 13th Part VI and all the entries that followed moved farther away from the standard slasher formula. Part VI is a comedic Frankenstein riff, filled with self-aware jokes. Part VII pits Jason against a Carrie stand-in, while Part VII sends Jason to the big city (well, a boat headed to Vancouver, anyway). Even the 2009 remake, while the most traditional slasher of the bunch, tries to streamline the story in a way that feels too slick and overstuffed.

From the perspective of the last two-thirds of the franchise, Ebert might have a point. The Final Chapter does stick closer to the first three movies than any of the films that followed it. But it does so at such a level of excellence, with such unexpected flair and style, there was no way the franchise would remain the same. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter isn’t a reinvention of the franchise, but it isn’t a retread. It’s a perfecting of the formula, setting the standard that all other slashers aspire to reach.