"Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter" movie review by Ben Kenber

I was in the second grade when this movie came out back in 1984. It was also one of the few movies in this endless series to actually open on Friday the 13th. Looking back, it was interesting to see a lot of 8 and 9 years old get excited about a movie that had absolutely no business seeing at that age. Whether the adults liked it or not, these movies did play a part be it big or small in our young lives. They were to my generation what the “Saw” movies are to today’s generation of kids. The sight of bloody violence on the big screen (as opposed to real life) is still exciting to many, and this has been the case for longer than any of us really realize. Still, it would be several more years before I actually bothered to see it, and on television with all the good parts taken out no less.

I got to see this one recently at the New Beverly Cinema as part of the “Tommy Jarvis Trilogy” of the Friday the 13th franchise. This trilogy is comprised of Part IV: The Final Chapter, Part V: A New Beginning, and Part VI: Jason Lives. When the title “The Final Chapter” was thrust at us on the big screen, you can imagine the uncontainable laughter that erupted from the audience. I’m sure Paramount Pictures really believed that this would be the very last one… that is, until they saw the box office grosses.

We have seen Jason killed off so many times over the years, but it’s important to note that when he got a nice big ax to the head in Part 3-D, that was the first time in the series that Jason was actually “killed off.” In the very first movie, it was Jason’s mother swinging a rusty machete at teenagers who remind her not only of her baby boy, but of the body she used to have. Jason didn’t appear in that one until the very end when he gave us one of the biggest jumps out of your seat moments in movie history. Jason wasn’t even killed off in Part II. Sure, he got his ass kicked, but it was not a fatal blow for he was slowly grabbing his machete while our virginal heroes walked away. When Part III came along, it was assumed that Jason finally met his maker. That is, until Paramount saw that they made $36 million off a movie with a budget of $2.5 million.

When Part IV starts, the police have arrived at the scene of the crime and Jason (wearing the hockey mask that was first introduced to him in Part III) is being covered up and shipped off to to the morgue undergo an autopsy. When he arrives at the hospital, Jason is dropped off in the care of the biggest slob of a doctor/coroner, Axel (Bruce Mahler). Seeing slobber all over his burrito like a dog, watching women in skin tight spandex clothing doing aerobics (with the volume on mute no less), I wonder what would make this man think that he could be a god to women. Axel does ends up making out with Nurse Morgan (Lisa Freeman) regardless of the fact that she is utterly repulsed by him. Of course, if common sense was used by the characters in this movie, then this would be no longer than 30 minutes. Who wants to see a slasher film that short?! These two get murdered (big surprise), and Jason somehow makes it pass security with his hockey mask on, and he goes right back to Crystal Lake.

Well, he ends up going next door to Crystal Lake actually as he drops in on a mother and her two kids who have rented the adjacent house next door to a bunch of teens who are out and about to have a fun time. By that, I mean drinking lots of beer, smoking lots of pot, watching vintage porno movies, having as much premarital sex as humanly possible, and some mandatory skinny dipping. You know, your normal weekend in Los Angeles. You know what happens next; Jason comes in to do his Benihana act on everybody like a drunk with power landlord who never hesitates to evict tenants who haven’t paid in months.

The “Friday the 13th” movies have routinely featured actors who you never really hear from again after you see them in these cinematic spectaculars. However, Part IV features two actors who are still working today, Corey Feldman and Crispin Glover. We get to see Corey as a pre-teen with all those drug addiction years ahead of him (he’s clean now, good for him), and he plays the young Tommy Jarvis who has a passion for making masks of all kind. Crispin Glover plays Jimmy, a man who has had no real luck with women. Throughout the movie, he gets woman advice from Ted (Lawrence Monoson) who seems to know everything about them. Guess who gets laid first. No, it’s not who you think…or maybe it is.

Of course, the one thing we do look forward to in these movies are the kills. Jason definitely gets some nasty cuts in they were most likely even more nasty until the MPAA came in and said:

“Uh, no I don’t think so.”

One of the classic moments in this film features a guy getting it right in the groin. Oh to be in a theater when this scene was displayed on the silver screen. It’s one of the few times where you can see a whole audience of men grab their crotches, thankful that it was not them who suddenly got turned into falsetto singers. There is a nice shower scene as well which ends with Jason doing his Norman Bates routine. It’s not as suspenseful as the original “Psycho,” but it sure as hell is a lot bloodier!

Much has been said over the years of how sexist towards women these movies are. Granted, there are some women (with very toned bodies no less) who are treated like sex objects with magnificent bodies to display, and who are out to seduce whatever men who end up locked in their sights. But at the same time, most of these movies feature women as being the bravest and most heroic of the bunch. They’re the ones who find the courage (even after they compete with Jaime Lee Curtis for the “Scream Queen” title) to defeat Jason after all others have failed (because they were busy making out or doing drugs). Why do critics keep forgetting that it’s usually a lone woman who is left alive after all this bloody carnage has reached its inevitable end?

Actually, I wonder why men don’t get more offended than women do at these movies. Most men in these slasher flicks are lucky if they makes it out alive before the end credits, and it’s usually thanks to the women they team up with. Men in these movies are usually portrayed as sexually challenged or socially inept. They come off as being ever so desperate to get laid like most men are, and they come off as profoundly idiotic. Some of them think they are born Casanovas, but their egos are quickly crushed, and they are brought down to earth eventually to realize that they are more likely to be teased by the ladies and fall for it. You think women have it bad in these films? Look at how the men are treated. They are treated like they think more about Mr. Happy more than anything else. Now even while most men do, there is always that one man in the bunch who is so unlucky with women that he has better things to worry about, such as surviving and killing Mr. Voorhees with that one good shot.

Why don’t men protest these movies the way women do? I tell ya, it’s bad enough having to go through puberty when you are also dealing with a mass murderer wearing a hockey mask. It’s not only the hormones that are jumping up all over the place, there’s also body parts of all kinds flying about in the air, not to mention all the blood that makes a mess of everything. Think of all the house painting and new wallpaper the homeowners will need to get once they get ready to rent out the house again!

It’s a kick to see such a young Corey Feldman here. To see him before he sadly felt into a nasty drug addiction (which he has since overcome) and before he did “The Goonies” and “The Lost Boys” does feel a little strange as we are so used to him as an older guy, and he does show promise in this sequel. Seeing him jumping up and down in his bed when he sees one of the women next door undress brings back a lot of memories. Just don’t ask me to tell you which ones, ha, ha, ha! Corey is actually pretty good here as he goes from innocent naïve young boy to a seriously disturbed boy as a result of witnessing Jason’s rampage. I also admired how fast he was in shaving off his hair so he could look like Jason as a boy, and he managed to do all this in record time while Jason was waving that rusty machete at his big sister. Give me another actor who could have made that seem somewhat believable, I dare ya!

Crispin Glover is also a big kick to watch in this movie, and I’m not sure he’s changed all that much since. We get to see him here before he hit it big as George McFly in “Back To The Future,” and before he got all those bizarre panic attacks about doing the sequels which he ended up dropping out of. Hopefully I’m not giving too much away, but he does score with the women in this one, and this had one audience member yelling out:

“YOU GO MCFLY!!”

You also gotta dig Glover’s nice spastic dance which more or less predated the break dancing era. No one dances like Crispin does, and no one else dies like he does in this movie. Could he be as strange as the characters he plays? Maybe so, but these days he seems to be using it to good effect. That voice of his never changes, but he has come a long way since his infamous David Letterman interview.

This “Friday The 13th” sequel is also notable as it is the last one Tom Savini did the makeup effects for. Having worked on many different horror films of the immensely gory kind like “Dawn Of The Dead” (the original) and “Maniac” among others, his work has a realism to it that is as uncomfortable as it is brutally effective. This is even more so when you look at the rest of the sequels in this series where the kills look utterly fake and are played for laughs more than anything else. Apparently, Savini based a lot of makeup work on what he saw as a combat photographer and soldier in Vietnam, so there is an authenticity to his work that many have to give him credit for. Whatever you think about Savini’s work, there’s no doubt that he is brilliant at what he does, and that other makeup artists have to work twice as hard to even come close to outdoing his bloody accomplishments.

The director for this particular sequel was Joseph Zito, and he has also directed such amazing B-movie classics like “Missing In Action,” “Invasion U.S.A.,” and “Red Scorpion.” Zito is one of those workmen like directors who gets the job done and gives the audience what they want. Other than that, his style of directing doesn’t really have any distinguishing characteristics to it. It takes a lot of movies produced by Cannon Pictures to keep a director like this working because he sure hasn’t done anything else outside of that. One of the last movies he directed was “Delta Force One: The Lost Patrol.” But if Zito really enjoys what he does, then I guess it shouldn’t matter too much what other people think of him.

Playing the immortal (whether you like it or not) Jason Voorhees in “The Final Chapter” is Ted White, but you almost wouldn’t know it since he had his name taken off the credits. Ted was selected for the role because he is a big guy (6’ 4” were talking), and he said that only did this movie because he needed the money. I’m sure that a “Friday The 13th” movie is not something you want to put at the top of your resume, especially when you’re playing a character whose face is hidden behind a hockey mask. But Ted, for what it’s worth, your Jason was one of the best and certainly one of the most threatening in this never ending series. From what I heard, you were not at all happy about working on this one, but please don’t think that this movie was a waste of your time. Remember, you could have been in “Jason X.”

And of course, you have Harry Manfredini’s music score which involves the endless wailing of woodwind instruments with the occasional trumpets and tubas blasting away at the climax of this endeavor. I wonder if there is any video of Harry conducting these scores with his orchestra. That would be a kick to see how he goes about conducting, let alone writing the score. I can see him telling the violinists to play all over the place, and that it won’t matter if it sounds off key as long as its really creepy sounding.

Look, no one is ever gonna mistake any of the “Friday the 13th” movies for great cinema, but nobody goes in expecting that either. “The Final Chapter” certainly wasn’t that, especially when you look into Tommy Jarvis’ eyes in the final moment (“The Omen,” eat your heart out). While this sequel is certainly dated stylistically, it actually holds up better than many of the others. This really was the last of this series that set out to be truly scary, and the series (for better and for worse) went downhill into comedy and pathetically ridiculous storylines. Even if it got a lot of the predictable hatred from film critics when it came out, it is nowhere as bad as some of the later entries, let alone many of the even cheaper knock offs it inspired in its path of success. It even looks much better when you compare to any movie over Part VI. I don’t really love these movies, but I do love watching them whenever they are on, especially when you’re watching it with an audience or a group of friends just so you can analyze how stupid the characters are.

“Friday The 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter” is a movie people will enjoy more than they ever care to admit. Call it a guilty pleasure if you will, but it is an entertaining one even if it “rots your brain” like others love to say. Any guy who tells you they hate these movies has got to be lying to a certain extent, especially when they are just going out the door to see the new “Saw” sequel. They’ll say it’s different, but c’mon! Who is you trying to fool?

**½ out of ****