Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter

So here we are, at the end of our little journey.  I know this isn’t the end of the series, but, as I mentioned at the start of this, most of the movies after this don’t really interest me (except Jason X, which is amazing).

It should be noted that it is in this movie that the nudity really ramps up.  Pretty much every character (other than the Jarvis’) get naked.  Most of them early and often.

For the opening sequence in the movie, we see Paul (from Part 2) talking about Jason around the campfire, along with a montage of a bunch of the deaths from the previous 3 movies.  It’s a great opening.  Even without the name of The Final Chapter, the opening gives you the feeling that this would be the last movie.  But money always wins out in the end, and the series continued after this movie.

The movie shifts to show the barn from the end of Part 3.  The paramedics are loading Jason’s body into an ambulance.  They take him to the hospital and deliver him Axel, the horny morgue attendant.  But, as we already know, Jason can’t die, and Axel is his first victim.

Our characters:

Trish Jarvis: Our survivor girl.  I certainly like her better than Chris from Part 3.  She’s nice, and she likes to have fun, but she also loves her younger brother and would do anything to protect him.

Tommy Jarvis: Trish’s little brother (played by Corey Feldman).  He’s a geek who makes his own monster masks.

Mrs. Jarvis: Trish and Tommy’s mother.  She disapproves of their new neighbors and all the nudity.

Rob: He runs into Trish & Tommy when their car breaks down.  Seems like a nice guy.  They set him up as a love interest to Trish pretty quickly.  We find out a little later in the movie that his sister was Sandra, who was killed in Part 2.  As a reminder, this is how she died:

When they meet him, Rob says that he’s a hunter.  As it turns out, he’s hunting Jason.

Terri & Tina: Slutty twins.  And they ride bikes…just like the Doublemint Twins.

The rest of these characters all came into town together to stay at a cabin next door to the Jarvis’.

Jimmy: He’s an oddball (and extremely uncomfortable to watch), which is not surprising, considering he’s being played by Crispin Glover.  He has apparently just been dumped by a girl with the nickname of “BJ Betty”.  Sounds classy.  There’s a scene where he dances, and it’s the most spastic dance you have ever seen in your entire life.

The good stuff starts 35 seconds in.

Sam: Has a reputation of being a slut, a reputation she claims she picked up “in the sixth grade”.

Paul: Dating Sam.  He’s tall and he wears hats.  However, even though he wears a hat in 95% of his scenes, I couldn’t find a picture of him actually wearing a hat.  The internet can be a frustrating place sometimes.

Ted: A total turd.  I hate him completely.  There’s a long scene where he sits in the living room, gets high, and watches an old black and white stag film…and he laughs like an ass the entire time.  He also refers to himself as “Teddy Bear” on more than one occasion.

You can practically hear him braying in this picture.

Sara: A nice girl.  Cute, shy and virginal.  She’s good friends with Sam, who keeps trying to get her to be a little sluttier.

Doug: I honestly didn’t remember seeing this guy through the first 45 minutes of the movie.  He’s either not very memorable, or he just wasn’t in the movie much up to this point.  He’s dating Sara.  (Fun fact: he is played by Peter Barton, who played Jeff in Hell Night.)  I searched for 30 minutes and couldn’t find a picture of Peter Barton in this movie where he wasn’t in the shower.

The killer:

Jason Voorhees: As I mentioned in my last post, Part 3 really sets up Jason as the unstoppable killer that we know throughout the rest of the series.  We definitely see that Jason here.  He’s not fast, but he doesn’t stop.  If he gets knocked down, he gets right back up.  He’s a killing machine.

The deaths:

Axel, the horny morgue attendant.  He’s watching a women’s work-out video by himself.  Jason takes a hacksaw to his throat, then twists his head backwards.

Nurse Morgan had been getting frisky with Axel in the morgue.  She left, but Jason found her anyway.  She gets lifted off the ground, and gets a knife in her chest, then sliced down to her belly-button. 

A hitchhiker with no-name, but is lovingly referred to as “Banana Girl” by Final Girl.  She’s looking for a trip to Canada (and love, apparently).  When a car passes her by without picking her up, she flips them off, then sits down to eat a banana.  With a piece of banana in her mouth, Jason stabs her in the back of the throat.  She gurgles and dies while banana slobber runs down her chin.  It’s…not pleasant.

Sam gets mad at Paul for dancing with one of the twins, so she gets naked at night and gets into a little rubber boat on the lake.  As she lays there, waiting for Paul to come after her, Jason shows up and sticks a knife into her stomach and through her back.

Paul, feeling bad about dancing with another girl in front of his girlfriend, goes out to look for Sam.  He swims out to the boat, finds Sam dead, and frantically swims back to the dock.  He gets a spear in his crotch and is lifted off the ground as he screams.

While Tina hooks up with Jimmy, Terri decides to leave (apparently watching the aforementioned black and white stag movies with Ted isn’t the laugh-fest he seems to think it is).  She puts on a raincoat, walks outside to her bike, gets a spear through her back and is pinned to the house.

After having sex with Tina, Jimmy goes downstairs to get some wine.  He gets a corkscrew through the hand and a butcher knife in the face.

Tina puts on a shirt and walks around upstairs.  She sees that her sister’s bike is still there.  As she’s looking out the window, Jason grabs her and throws her out of the window.  She lands on top of a car.

Ted is still watching the stag film in the living room.  He walks up to the projector screen to fondle one of the actresses.  He gets a knife in the back of the head.

Doug and Sara are in the shower together.  Sara gets out to go to the bed.  Doug stays in the shower and gets his head crushed by Jason. 

Sara, wearing only a towel, goes back to the shower and finds Doug dead.  She screams and tries to run out of the house, only to get a flying ax in the chest.  Next time, you should keep your pants on.

Rob & Trish head into the cabin next door to try to find Mrs. Jarvis.  The power goes off and Rob goes into the basement to investigate.  Trish finds Doug’s body and runs through the house screaming that Jason is in the house.  Jason appears, pins Rob against a wall, and beats him to death with a hammer. 

At this point, Trish tries to get out of the house, only to have dead bodies blocking her every turn.  She finally pushes her way past a dead body blocking a door.  She runs back to her cabin, where Tommy is still waiting.  They nail the door shut, but they don’t bother with boarding up the windows (there really wouldn’t be much time for that, anyway).  Rob’s body comes flying through the window, with a hammer stuck in his head.  Jason bursts in and grabs Tommy.  Trish fights Jason off with a hammer, and he drops Tommy.  Jason chases them through the house, and they barricade themselves in Trish’s room.  Jason uses an ax to chop through the door.  Trish smashes Jason’s head with a TV, and he falls to the ground.  They try to walk past him, but he gets up and chases Trish back into the cabin next door.  She escapes by running upstairs and jumping through a window, landing on her back (it doesn’t look all that dissimilar to the way Michael Myers lands at the end of Halloween). 

She gets up and runs back to her cabin, but Jason isn’t far behind, and she fights him off with a machete.  She even manages to slice his hand down the middle.

Meanwhile, Tommy shaves his head, changes his clothes and puts make-up on his face to make himself look more like Jason at the end of Part 1 (the version that pulled Alice into the water). 

He comes downstairs as Jason is about to kill Trish.  He tries to get inside Jason’s head by repeating, “Remember, Jason.  Remember.”  Trish is able to knock off his mask while he’s distracted by Tommy, and his face looks worse than ever.  As Jason looks at Trish, Tommy takes the machete and embeds it in Jason’s face.  He falls to the floor, and the machete slides further into his face, taking part of it off.  Tommy picks up the machete, and hugs Trish.  As he looks down, he sees that Jason’s hand is moving, so he brutally hacks at Jason’s body and repeatedly screams, “Die”.  It’s in slow motion, and it’s terrific. 

The movie ends with Trish in the hospital (she messed up her shoulder in the fall).  Tommy comes in to see her.  They hug.  As the camera focuses on Tommy’s face, his eyes open and we see a crazy look in his eye. 

 

We never actually see Mrs. Jarvis die (nor do we ever see her body), but she is assumed to be dead.  At one point we see her go outside, look up at something and scream.  The camera cuts somewhere else, and we never see her again.  So I guess she died, but I’m not sure how, exactly.

Following the survivor girl:

Not much to report, really.  There was a lot of nudity/sex/drug use in this movie, but it was all taking place at the cabin next door.  We do see her play the role of the protective big sister a number of times, even if that “protection” is only to shield Tommy from the nudity of the teens next door.

Overall, I liked this movie.  Where Part 3 set up Jason for the rest of the series, I feel like this movie set up the victims for the rest of the series.  For the most part, this was an anonymous set of victims.  A couple of them had personality, but I didn’t really care about any of them.  I wanted Trish and Tommy to live, but I had no connection to the other ones.  That’s quite a difference from the previous three movies, where there were at least a handful of characters I was sad to see die.

And that brings us to the end of this run.  We were able to see the evolution of Jason…from a young child in a lake, to a sack-headed murderer, to the hockey mask-wearing killing machine that we know in future movies: we were able to see all of that throughout the course of these four movies.  I hope you all had as much fun reading these as I did writing about them.  If you haven’t watched these movies yet, I hope this inspired you to do so.

I found a couple of sites dedicated to this series that I’d urge you to check out.  They can be a lot of fun.

A list of all Friday the 13^th deaths.

Friday the 13^th wiki page.  This has characters, a timeline of events in the series, etc.

As always, we’ll end with Final Girl’s take on the deaths.