Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter
It’s fascinating that copyright issues have kept Jason Vorhees off the big screen longer than naming a fourth film “The Final Chapter” did. When I watched the series as a kid, it was in the build-up to the sixth film, so it was inevitable more were on the way. Did audiences honestly believe this franchise would end after four films? Regardless, I have a hard time imagining anyone would have guessed where the series would go after restarting the next year.
I haven’t seen “The Final Chapter” since one viewing as a kid. What I always remembered, though, was how this was the beginning of a trilogy wherein a “final survivor” kept returning to fight Jason. Here Tommy Jarvis is just a kid, probably as young as I was when I watched it, and even if I wasn’t necessarily one to recognize much in terms of craft, that Tommy came back in “The New Beginning” and “Jason Lives” definitely had an impact on me as I wrote my own “fan fic” on the franchise, pictured below.
This fourth film in the definitive slasher franchise of the 1980s follows the standard formula that the movies had in place from the 1980 original- people go up to Crystal Lake, death by Vorhees. This is the third film to center on Jason, and the second with him in his hockey mask, and he’s as unrelenting as he’s ever been. Horny morgue attendants, frustrated nurses, comely co-eds, or hitchhiking hipped- it doesn’t matter to Jason. You have to admire the lack of discernment that goes into Jason’s methodology in this one.
Henry Manfredini’s music is as important to this franchise as John Williams’s is to “Star Wars.” He knows how to hold a tension chord as well as anyone, even if we can kind of figure out the MO of the filmmakers. He gives this film a pulse in a way that director Joseph Zito isn’t really capable of. That’s not to say that he does a bad job with this film; he just follows screenwriter Barney Cohen’s story to every predictable place it goes.
Tommy Jarvis is fascinated by makeup and creature effects- I wonder if that is part of how the filmmakers were able to get Tom Savini back to do the makeup effects for this one. Played by Corey Feldman, Tommy is very much a kid- we first see him with an alien mask on playing video games- and it’s interesting to see how resourceful he can be throughout the film, which is important to understanding how he can survive Jason in the end.
The teens, if you can call them that, that spend their time getting off, and getting offed, are perfunctory characters to say the least- only Crispin Glover gives his character some personality. The ways in which they die lack much of the imagination we get in other chapters in the series, but there is tension built at the film’s best moments. It’s interesting that one character in the film, Rob Dier, is actually a relative of one of Jason’s victims in “Part 2” considering what would happen to Tommy throughout the series.
“The Final Chapter” would have been a Hell of a way for this series to go out. It’s brutal, filled with gratuitous nudity, and gives us a protagonist who’s actually well suited to face off with Jason…even if he is just a kid. Who knew he’d become a fixture in the franchise going forward…at least for a couple of movies.
