Review: Friday The 13th - The Final Chapter
I’ll admit going into the F13 films I was a little worried that I was in for a day of bad, cheesy movies. Well I was half right, they are cheesy but I’m having fun with them and with the exception of the boring second entry they’ve just kept getting better and better. Final Chapter (HA) is not only one of the best F13 films I’ve seen but it’s got everything a good slasher films needs and it makes them work brilliantly.
Set just a day after the last film, Jason is, guess what, not dead and yet again he returns to Crystal Lake to kill a group of horny teens. Fair played the teens are staying at a rental house and there is news that Jason is dead so being there doesn’t seem so stupid. There are two stories in this instalment, the first being the Jarvis family of young boy Tommy, older sister Trisha and their mother. They are neighbours to the rental house which is housed by a group of teens who incorporate the second. The two stories interweave at some points but for the most part they stay separate, the entire second act of the film is solely based on the teens getting slaughtered while the last act follows Tommy and Trisha trying to escape Jason. The way the film ends I’m guessing the film-makers wanted to go somewhere with Tommy but we didn’t spent enough time with him and the sudden change is, well, too sudden. There was another character that had a relation to one of Jason’s victims from the second film but it was a minor character then and it’s a minor character now and there really isn’t much about them worth mentioning.
The acting’s good for what’s considered, Tommy is a cute wee kid and his reaction to amount of exposed flesh is pretty funny. His sister Trisha defied my expectations and turned out to be a strong, if slightly emotional character who risked her own life to save Tommy’s, however he does the same for her and it made for a good sibling relationship between the two. The teens, well they were teens, they were just in the film in order to be slaughtered. They all did was expected on them, they got stoned, they danced, badly, they got naked, a LOT of nakedness in this film and they had sex and then Jason punished their sinful ways. A few of the teens you’re built up to like which makes their deaths all the more surprising because you expect at least one of them to survive.
Jason was pissed in this film, his kills were brutal and brilliant. The entire second act of this film is Jason picking off the teens one-by-one and Christ does he take them out, he’s throwing cleavers into faces, he’s stabbing heads through projector screens, he’s shoving a handful of broken glass into your face.
He’s throwing a motherfuckin axe through a motherfuckin door into your motherfuckin chest.
Hell the son-of-a-bitch went through a door at one point, fuck handles, I’m Jason bitch. This ‘take-no-prisoners’ attitude makes this version of Jason one of my favourite so far, dude rocked the shit.
I have complained about the amount of waiting time between seeing the teens and Jason’s arrival for other films but here we aren’t waiting as long and once the murders start they don’t let up until the end.
The Final Chapter (still ridiculous) was a great addition to the franchise with some brutal kills, great slasher moments and the most bad-ass Jason yet.
8/10