Following Jason Takes Manhattan’s complete lack of success on every conceivable level of human endeavor, Paramount sold of the rights to Friday the 13th.
Wait, it’s not that simple…It never is with film rights. Seemingly around the end of 1989, Friday rights were due to change hands anyway, reverting back to many of the original’s producers. Sean S. Cunningham wasn’t amongst these guys, not initially – nope, these “producers” were the post-production distribution types (namely, Phil Scuderi, Steve Minasian and Bob Barsamian). No matter, soon enough Friday founder Cunningham arranged to buy away the series, with his own end in mind.
Freddy vs. Jason! What, already again?! No, no, no. But ever since Paramount thought of the idea, as a means to sabotage the more vibrant Nightmare on Elm Street series (failures, Paramount instead made The New Blood), this notion wouldn’t rest. So Cunningham didn’t only regain his Friday franchise after seven sequels made without his involvement, he did so with New Line Cinema – the “House That Freddy Built.”
With Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare having “ended” the Elm Street series in 1991, it was thought that with the two super-psychos now jointly owned, a crossover wouldn’t take too much doing. For whatever possibly apocryphal reasons now lost to the mists of time, this didn’t happen with all due haste. Rather, Freddy vs. Jason is the stuff of development hell. Meanwhile, New Line set about making ad hoc supplemental sequels to each series. Wes Craven’s New Nightmare was Elm Street’s stall tactic. For Friday, they made its Freddy’s Dead equivalent, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday.
Here is New Line Cinema trying to forge a viable Friday the 13th sequel where so many had failed under the blood-suctioning guidance of Paramount’s Frank Mancuso, Sr. Also ostensibly trying to end the series at the same time – because that sucks audiences in, as The Not-Quite Final Chapter could already attest. With four years since the last entry, a best-forgotten stinkerama at that, The “Final” Friday couldn’t be merely another by-the-books Paramount-style stall tactic. It needed to be definitive, it needed to clarify and unify the jumbled chronology and plot holes from before, it needed to give Jason Voorhees his inarguably iconic outing.
Well, you can’t say they didn’t try…
In advertizing Jason Goes to Hell (for the record, New Line wasn’t allowed to use the Friday the 13th moniker) as “the creator of the first brings you the last,” they’re being a little untrue. Sean S. Cunningham didn’t create Jason Voorhees as a horror icon; under Cunningham’s guidance, Jason was just a prime mover, a long-dead child. It was only the inexplicable, senseless desperation of the Cunninghamless sequels which promoted Jason to “Slash Master,” hockey mask and all. So here we have a man who only claims creative connection to the character, who really rather abhorred the fellow. Is it any wonder Jason Goes to Hell makes an absolute travesty of its series?
The damn thing mustn’t have even been a Friday movie conceptually, but a wholly unrelated spec script they retooled. Basically, it’s a rip-off of The Hidden, a goofy ‘80s alien movie (from New Line, natch) about a body-jumping monster, starring that guy from all those David Lynch films (Kyle MacLachlan). It’s as though no one actually cares about this series…a sense of ennui which extends to director Adam Marcus, whose nonexistent movie career otherwise only boasts 2001’s Let it Snow and 2008’s Conspiracy – that’s right, Jason Goes to Hell was so damning, the man didn’t work again for nearly a decade.
But Jason Goes to Hell shall be an impenetrable muddle to approach like this. Rather, let us start as it does, and come to grok its bizarre devolution…
It’s the forest. A lone, naked, dim-witted girl takes to a cabin, and essentially runs through a slasher cliché list calculated to draw out Jason (welcome back, Kane Hodder). It’s good, gets to the core or the character (exists in the forest, wears hockey mask, murders YOU), and ignores the whole question of New York’s heaving, sumptuous torrents of toxic waste having de-aged the mongoloid some time earlier.
Then they kill Jason.
Less facetiously, an FBI sting operation nukes Jason, his body blown into countless latex parts. And his heart (which effectively resembles the series’ staying power) stops beating.
So, what? Jason goes to Hell now? And we get to spend an entire movie in those bucolic confines, witnessing untold creative horrors, while somehow a group of innocent protagonists appears to square off against a newly-damned Mr. Voorhees? Well, if Jason Takes Manhattan reneged on its title, why can’t Jason Goes To Hell? He does go to Hell (which we never see, thank you!), but not until the final minutes. Until then…
We stick with Jason’s strewn corpse (our main character) in the Federal Morgue of Youngstown, Ohio (thank you, on-screen titles). Coroner Phil (Richard Grant) does a lengthy, lengthy autopsy. Then, 15 minutes in, they absolutely have to do something! Lucky for Jason, Phil has a most peculiar case of the munchies; he lustily gobbles down Jason’s black heart, much as a vegan devours a head of lettuce. With that hearty meal, Phil is possessed by Jason…and he kills some dudes. So…this “Ultimate Jason Movie” is another basically Jasonless entry? I mean, technically it’s still Jason, but visually (where it matters in a movie) it’s just gonna be random guys in cheesy makeup. Only through mirrors will we be getting our piddling Jason sightings.
All this requires a gargantuan load of exposition, in total at least half an hour’s worth. The first mighty chunk comes from TV’s “American Case File,” an off-brand approximation of “America’s Most Wanted” or “Hard Copy” or some other early–‘90s soft journalism crap. Robert Campbell (Steven Culp, who’s gone on to do a post-Friday soap opera parody – “Desperate Housewives”) tells us what we know, if we’re following the series: Jason drowned in 1957, he didn’t drown in 1957, he grew up and started murdering people. Apparently, it’s now been twenty years since Jason started up that hobby, meaning…if we accept 2 through IV occur in 1984, Jason Goes to Hell takes place in…2004! Wowzers! (This is needed, to account for all those lost chunks of time in between sequels, though it ain’t elegant.)
Actually, Jason Goes to Hell plays on a lot of prior entry knowledge – too bad they’re entries that were never made. It’s as though New Line’s conceit was that, yes, a Friday the 13th – excuse me, Jason series has existed, only these eight forbears were under New Line’s guidance, and are totally different. Hence the introduction of bounty hunter Creighton Duke (Steven Williams, an actor with an actual career). Duke seemingly knows everything about Jason, all this metaphysical hocus-pocus with no basis in earlier entries – How Duke knows this, it’s never revealed. Knows his (new) methods, knows his (new) motives, knows the (new) way to kill him. And Williams is entertaining, the best part of the movie, which he has to be for this role to work.
Jason 3.0, a demonic soul now in place of a mere psycho-killer or zombie, “wears other bodies like folks wear suits.” And suddenly freed of his old (Paramount) shackles – where Jason was content to await, then slaughter, a rotating teenager infestation – Jason’s new motives are, well, they’re the Terminator’s motives. To kill a specific waitress! Namely Diana Kimbell (Erin Gray, of "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century" – this thing has an actual cast!). Why?
Well, Diana could tell that to us now – us, and designated hero Steven Freeman (John D. LeMay) – but it’s easier for the plot if she delays it until 11 o’clock tonight. How arbitrary!
Steven, in the meantime, shuttles some teenagers to Crystal Lake. Okay, hold up. Jason’s presumed dead now, apparently more permanently than those, oh, five or so other times he was presumed dead. Therefore, Diana’s diner serves hockey mask-shaped hamburgers. Also therefore, the teenagers wish to do Jason-baiting things (sex, drugs) in the woods in absolute safety. Phil saunters up and arbitrarily murders them, eventually, then goes on his merry way. As the lone slasher-style scene in the movie (excepting the opening), it’s no wonder this was a reshoot.
(The gore effects in the unrated version, by the way, are completely nutbars; I did not get to watch that version.)
And with Steven still driving over to Diana’s house, Phil/Jason has the leisure time to capture a guy called Josh (Andrew Bloch), purposelessly kill someone else, and put his Jason soul into Josh. Evidently, it’s an oral transference of the heart – that, or there’s no consistency in Jason 3.0’s rules (likely). As asinine as this is, it sorta makes sense when taking Jason Goes to Hell on its own. There’s some more weirdness afoot, seeing as whomever/Jason chooses to do all this in evidently the interior of Disney’s Haunted Mansion, but we’ve plenty of time still.
Okay, now it’s over to Diana’s – where even now the Jasonified Josh beats Steven to the punch. So, cutting to the chase, Josh kills Diana, buggers off despite injury, and Steven gets arrested in his stead.
Yeah, all this to get Steven’s letterman jacket-wearing middle-aged butt arrested. That’s why Diana couldn’t confide in him earlier.
Before I go on, note how totally doofy the movie is. Marcus directs with the sheen of a SyFy Original (brr!), and the whole endeavor has the gloss of something with some budget, but not enough. Too much to be tawdry, but not enough to be a real movie. And Harry Manfredini’s music, so apt in summarizing the cheesiness of “American Case File,” pervades the entire movie. We have moments where every punch (yes, Jason punches now) is accompanied with a strong, semi-electronic “Whognghhhk!” In these moments, the movie is pretty hard to take seriously on its own, let alone as a member of the wider Friday fraternity.
Things have gotten strange enough again it’s time for more exposition, courtesy of Duke. Again, lucky for this awkward plot-havin’ Friday that Duke was conveniently arrested, and celled next to Steven (Crystal Lake still practices Jim Crow laws). No matter, here’s the latest scoop on Jason: He had a sister…Laurie Strode? No! Princess Leia? No! (What an overused plot twist!) Diana? Yes! And far from killing her, Jason wanted to possess her – because these non-Voorhees bodies cannot sustain his pure Jasonness for long. Or, as Duke puts it:
“In a Voorhees was he born, through a Voorhees may he be reborn, and only by the hands of a Voorhees may he die.”
So Jason wished to re-Jasonify himself through Diana’s body, at which point he could presumably resume his old purposeless existence, murdering errant teens. (As for how Jason, former lake-drowner, came to enjoy such a predicament…we’ll get to that.) Oh well, that plan’s schtuppered now. Not so fast! Diana has a daughter, Jessica (Kari Keegan), who herself has a daughter, bastard child of Steven, and – Oh god, I’m getting another headache!...Okay, so Jason wants to kill and/or possess Jessica and/or the baby, lest either one of them destroy his heart – Yes, let’s just complicate this even more!
Again, how does Duke of all people know this?!
And with all of this exposition carrying us well already towards the climax, there is some levity. For reasons left to himself, Duke does not simply ladle out factoids for free. Nah, for every new fact, he breaks one of Steven’s fingers. I recall watching this as a child (bless my parents!), wondering if this was a common human preoccupation. Having experienced a full life free of finger-breakings since, I understand it’s all just arbitrary and weird. And don’t worry. Steven’s fingers heal in the very next scene. Um…moving on!
Steven breaks out of prison with inestimable broken-finger ease, and heads right along to – wait for it – the Old Voorhees Place.
[Record screech!]
You know, if every new detail necessitates nerdy examination, we’ll be here for ages. This makes even less sense than Jason Takes Manhattan!
So…that gothic Haunted Mansion set is where, well, not where Jason lived – maybe his Mama. It’s all explained in one of the unmade New Line Fridays which precedes this one. For a place that’s been vacant for over 20 years, it’s holding up pretty well. And inside lies the chestnut which is possibly the keystone for this entire movie…A prop from Evil Dead II. (The house is a font of old horror props. See also The Birds and Creepshow.)
Um…it’s not just that the Necronomicon is in the corner of the frame. Steven handles it, thumbs through its pages, for a minute. We are then left to imply that Jason’s demonic state was brought about via black magic, possibly by Mama Pamela Voorhees – who apparently practiced necromancy in her spare time when not murdering camp counselors in the most basic way possible. And so, before avenging her son Jason’s death (which he didn’t die from), Pamela ensured he’d come back afterwards, or something, and just kill whomever in perpetuity. Good luck trying to align all this with the first Friday the 13th!
Well, that mostly gets us up to speed with Jason Goes to Hell and its particular cosmology. Now it can simply play out. “American Case File’s” Campbell is suddenly here, in the house, telling his massive early ‘90s cellular telephone how he’s stashed Diana’s corpse here, in the house, to discover later, in the house. For TV, you know. Before we can start picking apart the illogic of this latest development, Jason-Josh bursts in, and vomits that black, turd-like heart into Campbell – who becomes honorary Jason. Josh melts away in a nice, gooey moment, like the Wicked Witch – retroactively, we realize Phil went the same way, and Campbell is due up for the same gooification – add all that up to your body count tallies, maniacs!
Campbell goes after Jessica, Steven saves her, and circumstances rapidly conspire to put us right back in Terminator territory, as Jessica is “safe” at the police station, with an unstoppable killer nearing. And Steven becomes Kyle Reese, if Kyle Reese were a nerdlinger.
For the rest of its run, Jason Goes to Hell is basically a cheapjack action movie – Jason Lives made this possible, of course, but it countered with an oh-so-standard Jason, not some heart-passing-demon-soul-having-black-magic-based-whatnot. For the most part, Jason Goes to Hell is no slasher movie at all – not an awful thing for 1993. But as a Friday flick, it gives us certain slasher conventions. Basically, everyone who ever appears on screen, apart from Steven, Jessica, and that baby, is destined to die soon. It’s kinda not fair to them, as they commit no horror movie sins, apart from being non-leads in a horror movie. And with the plotline of a supernatural thriller, Jason Goes to Hell cannot portion out its kills regularly like A New Beginning. Rather, to reach the usual ridiculous body count, here at the end we get a duo of nonsensical massacres, for our sins.
The first is at the police station. Unlike Schwarzenegger, Campbell goes in bare handed…and even more than Jason himself, ghoul-Campbell is surprisingly lethal sans weapon. Why, with a single blow he can do to a person’s face as the Kraken in Dead Man’s Chest!
Campbell then follows Steven and Jessica randomly to the diner, simply because we met a number of characters there previously, and therefore they have to die. I can’t even say how many people perish in the honest-to-goodness John Woo-style shootout which commences. First we see a diner full of patrons. Then Campbell arrives, throws a few of them – which somehow doubles for a proper death – and that’s it. Oh, and he cooks a midget in the deep fryer (!).
Also, we have Vikki – Waitress of Doom! (She dies.)
Nothing here has anything to do with the series, even tonally. My ability to process coherent thoughts shuts down during this diner sequence, so I’ll skip ahead to the expected finale – back at the Old Voorhees Place.
Circumstances conspire, as they’re wont to do, so that Jessica alone arrives here for a meeting with Duke – he rapidly runs through the entire ass-ball-headed premise to Jessica, how she’s Jason’s niece ([cough!] Halloween 4 [cough!]), and therefore she (or maybe the baby…) must kill Jason. Jessica takes this rather well. And also, she must kill Jason with this specific magic dagger! (Also, don’t feed Jason after midnight.)
You know, while we’re at it, why don’t we make the Jason-killing ceremony even more arbitrary? Like…it must be done on a Friday the Thirteenth…in this precise house…while saying “Gort Klaatu barada nikto.” Where does it end?
In a climax that boils down to, by necessity, a single stabbing, there’s still plenty of room for sudden, genuine missteps. I don’t even know how the Friday filmmakers keep finding unique ways to screw up. First of all, Jason’s inhabited some new body – a cop, at any rate. And here are two cops, each arguing for the other! Identifying Jason shouldn’t be too hard – even in another body, he remains a drooling mute retard – except they both talk. So now, nine movies in, these are grown Jason’s lines, in total…
From Part Eight: “No, Mommy, don’t let me drown.”
From Part Nine: “Freeze! Get the hell away from her, Ed!”
You can kinda see why Jason usually keeps to himself.
And then…well, the franchise sort of trips over itself, with an impromptu mid-movie reboot! The rules governing Jason are rewritten – again! – as a worm-demon-lizard-thing (and not the one from the poster) emerges from the soon-to-melt cop. Forget hearts, this is now Jason’s essence. Oh…kay…then. And with Diana’s corpse loitering downstairs, the thingus can enter her – right between the legs – and become reborn.
If this is true – if Jason just needed to kill Diana, then inhabit her anyway – why didn’t he do that at first? He had ample opportunity, until the cops took Diana’s body, then Campbell stole it from the cops, then Jason inhabited it anyway. And Jason’s reborn form – just standard old Jason, hockey mask and all – is something of a letdown after the Lovecraftian horrors Duke has promised. Though it is welcome to see Jason again in his own alleged movie.
“Remember me?” Duke asks Jason. Frankly, I doubt Jason does, as the two have never met – at least, not in any movie in our universe. Choosing not to belabor the point, Jason just kills Duke.
Then Jason – who in weakened state could bitch slap people to death – tosses Steven around for minutes on end to no effect. It’s called Lowered Monster Difficulty, and it’s a bane upon the horror genre.
Then Jessica stabs Jason in the precise manner she needed to. A dumbass lightshow drags Jason into the ground, their substitution for a proper “going to Hell,” and Steven and Jessica walk off into the sunrise – having forgotten their baby back in the haunted house!
Yes, that final shot of Kreuger’s glove was the first publicly official hint as to a potential Freddy vs. Jason. Director Marcus insists this was meant as a stupid and pointless joke – though a similar such gag ended the first Friday the 13th, and engendered a whole franchise.
Other stories I’ve related suggest otherwise, that Freddy vs. Jason was already a huge notion over at New Line. It didn’t matter by 1993, because the project was a go now. The timing was right. The Elm Streets were themselves out of steam (I’ll get to those soon), and all legal hurdles had been cleared. But Jason Goes to Hell did send Jason to hell – development hell. It took Freddy vs. Jason over a decade to materialize – itself a story for another day – meaning the franchises stagnated in the interim. No new Friday could occur before Freddy vs. Jason…or could it?
RELATED POSTS
• No. 1 Friday the 13th (1980)
• No. 2 Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)
• No. 3 Friday the 13th Part III (1982)
• No. 4 Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)
• No. 5 Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)
• No. 6 Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)
• No. 7 Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)
• No. 8 Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
• No. 10 Jason X (2002)
• No. 11 Freddy vs. Jason (2003)
• No. 12 Friday the 13th (2009)
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