Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)

... aka: Friday the 13th, Part 4
... aka: Friday the 13th, Part IV: The Final Chapter

Directed by:
Joseph Zito

FRIDAY THE 13TH PART III (1982) was a huge financial success and made nearly as much as the original thanks in part to the added attraction of 3D. Producers then had to scramble to come up with another gimmick that could somehow surpass that of blood, shattered glass, yo-yo's and errant eyeballs leaping out at moviegoers. Unfortunately, the best they could come up with was knowingly taking a concept that's extremely popular with audiences and then threatening said audience with pulling the plug on that very thing they love. This is it for Jason! This will be the last time you'll be able to see him on the big screen! Better rush out now and get your tickets to this monumental event! Titling this "The Final Chapter" is now something horror fans chuckle about seeing how there were still eight more of these things to come over the next few decades.

Despite repeatedly announcing this one would be the last (which they'd already done with entry #3), of course Paramount wasn't going to just abandon a lucrative franchise until it stopped making them money. It all boils down to the almighty dollar at the end of the day and these things just kept drawing huge crowds, critics and moralists be damned. The Final Chapter had the widest release yet for a Friday film, was the #1 box office draw the week of its debut, had a then-record setting 11+ million dollar opening weekend for Paramount and made 33 million domestically in total on a budget of 2.6 million, which makes it the third highest-grossing of the original eight Paramount films. Clearly, this series wasn't even close to reaching its expiration date just yet.

Drafted to direct this time out was Joseph Zito, who had previous experience in the genre having already made Bloodrage (1980) and the slasher THE PROWLER (1981), and he brought along cinematographer João Fernandes, who'd shot Zito's other films and, probably unbeknownst to the producers at the time, otherwise mostly hardcore porn up to that point using a variety of aliases. Frank Mancuso Jr. and his production team were back and Harry Manfredini did the score once again. The biggest draw, however, would be make-up fx man Tom Savini, who had also previously worked with Zito (on the aforementioned Prowler) and gladly returned to the series as it gave him a chance to finally kill off the character he had created four years earlier. Or so he thought!

Due to the success of the previous films, some bigger names than usual and more promising up-and-coming young stars were brought on board. Former child actress and familiar TV presence Kimberly Beck was cast as female lead Trish Jarvis, while Corey Feldman, who'd just wrapped Gremlins (which went on to become one of the highest-grossing films of 1984) was cast as her younger brother, Tommy. Among the "teen" victims are Peter Barton (The Powers of Matthew Star), Lawrence Monoson (The Last American Virgin) and, most notably, the always-weird Crispin Glover and his stilted line delivery. Brought in to don the hockey mask and swing the machete was veteran Hollywood stuntman Ted White, who'd previously doubled for such stars as John Wayne and Clark Gable... and was nearing 60 years old at the time! In the Crystal Lake Memories documentary, White doesn't have very nice things to say about either the director or Feldman, whom he referred to as a "mean little devil" and added, "I couldn't stand him." White refused to receive screen credit as a result and later turned down offers to play Jason in the fifth and sixth entries in the series.

Final starts out with a flurry of clips from previous entries as a sort-of "greatest hits" up to this point. We're then taken to the scene of Jason's last massacre as Higgins Haven, where the bodies of the victims and you-know-who (with an axe planted firmly in head) are being rounded up by police and paramedics. Jason's "dead" body is shipped off to a morgue, where he quickly springs to life. He slaughters a coroner (Bruce Mahler) and a nurse (Lisa Freeman) and then high tails it back to his stomping grounds to resume his old ways, starting with stabbing a rotund hitchhiker through the throat while she eats a banana. Living at Crystal Lake now are divorced single mom Mrs. Jarvis (Joan Freeman), her teen daughter Trish and younger son Tommy, who's sort of a mini-Savini prodigy whose favorite pastime is making latex monster masks.

Renting the house next door is an unfortunate group of mostly-annoying and unlikable young folks that includes Glover's geeky Jimmy, Monoson's cocky and obnoxious Teddy, Barton's nice guy Doug, the shy, sweet and virginal Sara (Barbara Howard) and couple Samantha (Judie Aronson) and Paul (Alan Hayes). Four guys and only two girls? Seems a little lopsided, eh? Well never fear, Tina (Camilla More) and Terri (Carey More), a couple of free-spirited identical twin British bicyclists, soon come to the rescue. A party including beer, pot, sex, stag films, terrible dancing (thanks Crispin) and lots and lots of death follows.

While the dialogue is incredibly insipid this go-around and seldom funny (I didn't find the scenes between Monoson and Glover and their "dead fuck" back-and-forth banter amusing at all like some viewers apparently do) and this somehow manages to have even less of a plot than the first three, it does at least deliver on the carnage with plenty of bloodshed, a high body count (the largest up until this point in the series) and a wide variety of kills. For your money you get a hacksaw throat slicing followed by a nifty little head twist, a scalpel gutting, a knife through the neck, a machete through the stomach, a harpoon to the crotch, a corkscrew hand stabbing, a cleaver to the face, an axe to the chest, a head crushed against shower tile, a machete slowly sliding down a head through the eye socket and a great stunt where someone is thrown out of a window and lands on top of a car. This also has more nudity than the three previous films combined.

The cast includes Erich Anderson as Rob, a guy hanging out in the woods trying to avenge the death of his sister and simultaneously throwing the series' timeline completely out of whack, Paul Lukather (Dinosaurus!) as a doctor, and Tom Everett (PRISON), Wayne Grace and Larry Buchanan and S.F. Brownrigg film regular Gene Ross as cops. Kevin Yagher was a member of the make-up effects team.

There were a few cuts made to the film to appease the MPAA which included snips to the hacksaw, scalpel and impaled-while-on-an-inflatable-raft murders. An alternate ending dream sequence where Trish finds her mother dead in a bathtub was filmed but not used. While that footage is included as an extra on the DVD, there's no surviving audio for it. This remains one of the most popular, and highest rated, films in the entire series, though not one of my personal favorites due mostly to not liking the characters or dialogue all that much. Savini's work is worth watching, though.

★★

Poor White Trash Part II (1974)

... aka: Death is a Family Affair
... aka: Poor White Trash
... aka: Poor White Trash II
... aka: Scum of the Earth

Directed by:
S.F. Brownrigg

In 1956, Peter Graves starred in a swampland drama called Bayou, which ended up tanking in theaters... that is until 1961 when M.A. Ripps got his hands on it and then re-released it under the new title Poor White Trash in 1961. What's in a title? A lot it seems, as the new moniker turned what was a bomb into a moneymaking workhorse that played Southern drive-ins for years as a second feature. Nearly two decades later the same marketing technique was applied to S.F. Brownrigg's Scum of the Earth. While "Scum" is a great title on its own, it was already used for a 1963 Herschell Gordon Lewis flick about a nude photography racket and didn't quite pack 'em in on that name alone. To boost ticket sales for the 1976 reissue (and perhaps trick people into either watching it a second time or assuming it was a follow-up to the first), it was given the new title of Poor White Trash Part II and ended up on Variety's list of top-grossing films of the year. The film also retained that same title when it finally appeared on VHS and is pretty much solely known by the Trash title these days.

Soon after arriving at her vacation cabin, newlywed Helen Fraser (Norma Moore) finds her husband Paul (Joel Colodner) dead with an axe buried in his chest. Someone has also stolen their car keys so she's forced to flee into the woods. The first person she comes across is slovenly drunk Odis Pickett (Gene Ross), who claims he doesn't know anything about the murder and puts her mind at ease by informing her "I ain't killed nobody... lately." Having no other choice, Helen follows Odis back to his shack, thinking she'll be able to call the police. (As if they have a phone; they don't even have running water!) When she gets there, she meets the rest of the Pickett clan: Odis' very pregnant wife Emmy (Ann Stafford), his hateful / slutty daughter Sarah (Camilla Carr) and his incredibly dumb son Bo (Charlie Dell), who talks kind of like Forrest Gump. Tensions are already high in the family for a variety of reasons and things get even worse when they discover the same psycho who killed Paul is lurking around outside. Perhaps it's even someone in the Pickett clan.

This has all of the necessary ingredients for a good hillbilly horror flick: grubby rednecks in overalls spouting terrible grammar ("Looky here what I done brung home for supper!"), filthy living conditions, incest, moonshine drunk directly from mason jars, rape, possum for din din and a series of bloody murders including a neck pierced on an iron fence, a barbed wire strangling and a gunshot to the eyeball. If the director has one notable strength compared to his contemporaries, it's the ability to get good performances from his actors. He did it with his previous film DON'T LOOK IN THE BASEMENT (1973) and he's done it again here with a solid group of performers all well-cast in their roles. But what really puts this a notch above similar efforts is the low key and somewhat eerie backwoods atmosphere, achieved in part by no budget minimalism and lack of location change, and the attention paid to characters. Quite a tasteless and tactless group we have here!

The Odis character is an immensely unlikable brute who guzzles 'shine the entire time and constantly berates his kids and poor knocked-up wife; justifying his eventual rape of Helen by telling his old lady that he "don't want to poke an old blowed-up balloon like you." I would call the daughter character a 5 dollar whore except she only charges 1 dollar and spreads her legs for all the local guys for pocket change so she can buy things like lipstick and glamour magazines. However, she's tight enough with her pa to give it to him for free! The son is a slow-speaking half-wit who mostly elicits feelings of annoyance from the family. The big surprise in the cast is the unknown Stafford as Emmy the wife; a dumb but goodhearted door mat who was traded off to Odis by her own father to relieve a debt and who eventually becomes a bit motherly toward Norma. Stafford provides a perfect counter-balance to the over-the-top antics of the rest of the family and creates a surprisingly warm character.

On the down side, there's not really much of a plot, the music score is a little inappropriate / annoying at times and the surprise twist at the end is clumsily executed, but it's all entertaining enough and has that wonderfully grubby backwoods regional feel to it that Hollywood horror films frequently try and almost always fail to capture.

It's now been over 30 years since this received its first and, I believe, only American VHS release courtesy of Magnum Entertainment. It also received an 80s video release in the UK on the Intervision label as just Poor White Trash (minus the II). In 2006, Grindhouse Releasing acquired the rights and, in 2009, told Bloody Disgusting they were working on a special edition DVD. It wouldn't be until 2014 that they unveiled some of the extras. Now here it is 2018, nearly a decade after the initial announcement, and it's still "coming soon."

★★1/2