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.

★★

Friday the 13th, Part III (1982)

... aka: Friday the 13th Part 3
... aka: Friday the 13th Part 3: 3-D
... aka: Meurtres en 3 dimensions (Murder in 3 Dimensions)
... aka: Week-end di terrore (Weekend of Terror)

Directed by:
Steve Miner

After FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980) became an unexpectedly huge hit and FRIDAY THE 13TH PART II (1981) did well enough the following year (though it grossed only around half of the original), Paramount originally planned to end the series right here. And they very well may have seeing how the studio generally hated these movies and the critical scorn they received for releasing them... had this not done so remarkably well in theaters. Friday III almost managed to match the box office of the first, raking in over 36 million dollars domestically. It was the second highest-grossing horror film of the year behind only Poltergeist, easily outperformed other franchise sequels like Halloween III and Amityville II, made nearly three times more money than Carpenter's heavily-promoted and much more expensive THE THING (1982) and ultimately ended up becoming the highest grossing of the entire original run of Paramount sequels despite the fact it opened in fewer theaters than any of the others. Boosting its figures considerably was the astute decision to release this entry with a special gimmick. Noting that 3D, which had been dead for quite some time until the early 80s, managed to turn an otherwise truly awful Italian / Spanish western called Comin' At Ya! (1981) into a box office success the previous year, the producers invested a large chunk of money developing a special 3D process for this film. In fact, more money was spent on the 3D cameras and lens and then equipping theaters with the ability to actually play the film in 3D than what it cost to produce the film itself! Friday III is also noteworthy as the very first 3D film to ever receive a wide theatrical release.

This entry also establishes two other staples of the long-running series. First, this is the start of Jason as an indestructible killing machine i.e. something not quite human. It's strongly suggested in the original that his emergence from the lake at the very end is merely a delusion in the mind of the traumatized sole survivor. Part II proposes the theory that his drowning in the lake was merely a local legend and he's been living in the woods undetected all that time. Jason is essentially portrayed there as a big, disfigured backwoods psycho who can withstand some bodily trauma though appears to be mortal. Here, however, Jason not only is up and running virtually unscathed after receiving lots of damage in the previous entry, but is mangled beyond what any normal human could withstand yet survives. His reemergence in the morgue at the beginning of Part 4 would finally solidify Jason as being a virtually indestructible, zombie-like killer. But. most notably, this is the entry where Jason receives his trademark hockey mask, which he dons in every sequel from here on out.

Things open with a five minute recap of the previous film (though ignoring its final few scenes) as Ginny (Amy Steel) runs into Jason's shack, finds his mother's severed head and then sinks a machete into Jason's shoulder. However, he manages to survive and it's off to redder pastures. As news reports of the previous slaughter play out on TV, Jason kills a slob general store owner with a cleaver to the chest then sinks a knitting needle into the back of his wife's head. We then meet our principle fodder. There's the cute but uptight Chris (Dana Kimmell), who is returning to the Crystal Lake area for the first time since she was as a teenager, Chris's pregnant best friend Debbie (Tracie Savage), Debbie's boyfriend Andy (Jeffrey Rogers), Andy's insecure, horror-obsessed prankster roommate Shelly (Larry Zerner), Shelly's way-out-of-his-league blind date Vera (Catherine Parks) and stoners Chili (Rachel Howard) and Chuck (David Katims). After having to eat a bag of weed when they think the cops are going to pull them over, catching sight of paramedics hauling body bags out of the general store and running into a crazy bum (David Wiley) who warns them of impending doom, they finally arrive at Higgins Haven for a relaxing (a-hem!) weekend vacation.

Already waiting for them there is Chris' former boyfriend Rick (Paul Kratka), who'd like to rekindle things except for the fact Chris is a wee bit frigid from being attacked in the woods by Jason (Richard Brooker) several years earlier. Some series fans seem to have an issue with this story angle for several reasons. First, seeing how this attack has prevented Chris from being intimate with her on-and-off boyfriend, we're to assume this attack was sexual in nature. Second, Chris passes out during the attack yet Jason lets her live. While neither of those concepts fit Jason's usual m.o. of slaughtering everyone on sight, we need to remember this was made at an early stage in the series and before things became almost comically formulaic. Personally, I found this a bit more interesting than the two previous films, which presented us with a heroine confronting Jason by sheer coincidence. In contrast, the lead here consciously returns to the scene of her assault specifically to try to overcome a past trauma so she can move on with her life. After all of her friends are killed and her would-be beau (who seems less interested in her than he is getting into her pants) fails to protect her, she's forced to confront her attacker all on her own.

Many series fans seem to prefer the previous entry over this one, but not me. The characters are a little less cardboard, a little more likable and have a little more personality and definition to them. I especially enjoyed the dynamic between the Shelly and Vera characters that develops over the course of the film. Next, there's a bit more humor, wittier dialogue and a slightly campier and more free-spirited vibe to the whole thing, which makes it more fun on a re-watch. Finally, this delivers a higher body count than either of the previous movies and there are a wider variety of kills. As an added bonus, the best ones weren't even stolen from Mario Bava's A BAY OF BLOOD (1971)! The most memorable bit is when a guy walking on his hands is split down the middle with a machete. We also get a stabbing from underneath a hammock (a nod to Kevin Bacon's death in the original), a head squeezed until the eyeball pops out (which admittedly probably looks a lot better in the original 3D presentation!), a hand lopped off, a neck slashing, an electrocution and killings with pitchforks, a wrench, a red hot fire poker and a harpoon gun.

Even though Kimmell does a fair amount of shrieking and running around, her character is also surprisingly aggressive at times and wily enough to try to ambush and trick Jason at various points. She also has no issue going right after him with whatever weapons are available to her! She topples a bookcase over onto his head, stabs him repeatedly, hits him over the head with a piece of firewood and a shovel, hangs him and, finally, plants an axe in his skull. The last 20 minutes are basically a prolonged chase scene, but fairly well done and suspenseful all the same.

Prior to appearing in this, Zerner wasn't an actor at all and was discovered on a street corner by the writers so the fact he contributes one of the more endearing performances is a surprise. Parks, a former Miss Florida and first runner-up in the 1977 Miss America Pageant, is very appealing and I'm surprised she didn't have much of a film career after this. But it was Savage, a former child actress (and regular on the very first season of Little House on the Prairie), who would go on to become the most recognizable face. After appearing in this, she completed her degree at the University of Michigan, began doing local TV news and then went on to become an Emmy-winning reporter and newscaster out of Los Angeles covering such high profile events as the Oklahoma City bombing and the O.J. Simpson and Heidi Fleiss trials. She also provides the sole flash of flesh here during a shower scene.

Part III was made by the same director / producer (Frank Mancuso Jr.) team as the previous entry and also has another familiar Harry Manfredini score, which is spruced up a bit with a disco-tinged (!) opening and closing theme song. The Make-Up Effects Lab did the fx this time out while Martin Kitrosser, script supervisor on the first two films, co-wrote the screenplay with wife Carol Watson, which was then re-written by Petru Popescu. The cabin and barn sets, and even the lake, were built specifically for this film and were later reused for the slasher TWISTED NIGHTMARE (1988).

★★1/2