It’s another Friday the 13th week folks! It’s time to celebrate a series of films that defined horror for a generation of weirdos such as myself. These films had it all, bad acting, bloody and ridiculous murders, boobs and most importantly other boobs. We will be celebrating all of these movies today as a show of respect to their contribution to the horror genre. These films were tailor made for the 1980’s slasher films and were all made with the purely artistic intention of making all the money while spending none to make them.
In 1989 Paramount decided that they were leaving the Jason Voorhees business after the critical and financial failure that was Jason Takes Manhattan. Four years later in comes New Line Cinema, a company that had been having great financial success all throughout the 1980’s promoting their own series of slasher flicks, A Nightmare on Elm Street. So Jason fans had a lot of hope that this company would know how to refresh the Friday franchise and keep it entertaining through the next millennia. There is absolutely no way that this new company would fall into the gimmicky traps that Paramount had fallen into right? So we start the New Line Cinema version of the Friday the 13th series out with a title that has Final in it…again.
Release Date: August 13, 1993
Budget: 3 Million
Box Office: 15.9 Million
Back story and Plot: When last we left our favorite hockey mask wearing psychopath he was chained to the bottom of Crystal Lake…again. They decide to skip over how he got out this time and just have him show up to murder a undercover FBI agent with terrible hair extensions as she gets in the shower. This turns out to be an elaborate ruse by the FBI and in the first 5 minutes of the movie Jason is completely blown up by a damn bomb after being shot 2000 times. So now we have a Jason movie with no Jason in it. Good start New Line.
From there Jason’s heart is eaten by the coroner that is examining his body and the plot goes further off the rails. Now Jason’s “evil” can take over others and he can possess their bodies. So now Jason is a damn shape shifting demon somehow. We find out that the only way Jason could get his original unkillable (virtually) body back is by taking over the body of a relative.
Jason has a sister, a niece and a grand niece we new nothing about, isn’t that a helpful plot device? It turns out to not help this movie all that much. The only person besides Jason to know about this is Bounty hunter Creighton Duke. Luckily Duke also shows up with the only weapon that can kill Jason, a dagger than can only kill him if used by a Voorhees relative. There is also a plot line that involves Jason’s niece and her dating a scumbag trash news reporter but i’ll be honest after finding out that Jason is an immortal shape shifting Uncle and brother (that somehow knew this…he has never been portrayed as the smart type) I was running out of patience for more ridiculous plot points.
Jason gets his body back in the end (yep, he actually slid into his dead sisters vagina) and we finally have our final battle, a battle which brings our actual screen time for the REAL Jason up to about 5 minutes. Again, this is a Jason movie and the first thing New Line does with the character is take him out of the movie.
Survivor Girl: Jessica Kimble ( Steven and the baby)
Shockingly someone who has Voorhees blood in them doesn’t show much in the way of survival skills. It helps that she had help from multiple sources to make it as far as she did.
How’d she survive?
The dagger. While Jason was kicking the living shit out of Steven, she snuck up behind him and stabbed him in the chest. This released a bunch of souls from Jason that he had been collecting somehow (never mentioned before or since…wow) and he was taken beneath the ground by some demon things. To cap it off Freddy Krueger’s glove popped up and stole his mask at the end. Luckily that story would be coming soon enough right? Nope wait like 10 more YEARS.
BEST CHARACTER IN THIS MOVIE? Creighton Duke
I would watch a movie that was nothing but him reading the phone book before I would ever intentionally watch this movie again. He was pretty damn cool and other than being killed by a bear hug, was pretty bad ass.
An Idiot’s Opinion: I would completely blame New Line for this but I can’t. Sean Cunningham who directed the first movie and co-produced or produced the first few of these had control of this and screwed the pooch big time. He chose a couple guys in their very early 20’s to write and direct a new vision for Jason with his only real input being to get the hockey mask out of the movie. THE HOCKEY MASK WAS WHAT PEOPLE LIKED. He got back into making these movies so he could own the Jason name again and did it strictly for money and not to continue the story that he originally helped tell. They even took Kane Hodder, who was a big part of making the last couple of these semi-tolerable and cut his screen time down to almost nil. To sum up my feelings, watch something else. Part 6 was good.
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