Friday the 13th Part 4: The Final Chapter (1984)
In the climactic confrontation of Friday the 13th Part 3, Chris Higgins buried an axe in the right side of Jason Voorhees' skull. Following a next-morning chase that's revealed to be nothing more than a nightmare, the final shot of Jason is of his body lying lifelessly in the barn, the axe still protruding from his skull. If this were intended as the final chapter of a trilogy, it would have made for a definitive conclusion. But where would the fun have been in that? Jason, after securing his official wardrobe, in particular the goaltender mask stolen from Shelly Finkelstein, had already established himself as a horror icon, and there's too much money to be gained from the boatloads of teenagers who come flocking to the theater on Friday nights to witness the beheadings, impalements, and eviscerations of their fellow onscreen teenagers.
At six future sequels, a crossover with the equally iconic Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, a remake, and now an impending prequel series premiering October 15 on Peacock, the fourth installment in the Friday the 13th franchise clearly doesn't represent the Final Chapter, but thanks to the masterfully macabre makeup effects of returning legend Tom Savini, a star-launching performance from a 12-year-old Corey Feldman, a surprising investment in character development, and a ferocious physical performance from Ted White, it stands as the best of the first three sequels and the scariest of the official "Jason movies."
On the night after the massacre on Higgins Haven which left seven vacationing teenagers and three troublemaking, plot-device bikers dead, the seemingly deceased body of mass murderer Jason Voorhees (Ted White) is taken by paramedics to the morgue, where he reanimates, murders a pair of on-again, off-again lovers, and escapes, making his way back to his hunting ground of Camp Crystal Lake. Luckily for Jason, a sextet of fresh meat is on their way to a rental house for the weekend, consisting of Doug Bell (Peter Barton), his girlfriend, Sara Parkington (Barbara Howard), Paul Guthrie (Alan Hayes), his girlfriend, Samantha Lane (Judie Aronson), and single Pringle best friends Jimmy Mortimer (Crispin Glover) and Ted Cooper (Lawrence Monoson). The house of future victims expands to an octet with the arrival of a pair of twins Tina and Terri Moore (Camilla and Carey More).
Living next door is the Jarvis family of four: mother Tracy (Joan Freeman), her teenage daughter, Trish (Kimberly Beck), preteen son, Tommy (Corey Feldman), and dog, Gordon. By the end of the night, as is par for the course in a dead teenager movie, the vast majority of teenagers will, in fact, turn up dead, and this time, contrary to the rules of surviving a horror film as established by Randy Meeks, virginity does not equate to a security blanket.
The plot of Friday the 13th Part 4: The Final Chapter, written by Barney Cohen and directed by Joseph Zito (who three years earlier directed the teen slasher, The Prowler), picks up precisely where its predecessor left off, recapping the events of the last three episodes in a brilliantly edited and scored montage in which each disparate shot bleeds seamlessly into the next. For example, archival footage of Jason stabbing Vickie in Friday the 13th Part 2 is followed by Jason rising from the floor and Ginny screamingly running away. Cohen blends the stereotypical teen-slasher framework -- a group of sexually active, carefree, party-going teenagers vacationing in a rental home -- with a lighthearted portrait of a wholesome, all-American family, counterbalancing the raunchiness of youth with the heart and maturity of a family adjusting to a recent parental separation.
Cohen and Zito examine the affectionate, tight-knit dynamic between the Jarvis family without sprinting toward the bloodshed awaiting the vacationers next door. Every morning at six, Tracy and Trish enjoy a mother-daughter hike through the woods. The trio eats dinner together as a family. When unsatisfied with the tuna salad they're settling on, Tracy and Trish envelop Tommy in a "Jarvis sandwich," and you can tell this is something they do ritually. Refreshingly, Tommy and Trish share an intimate bond, subverting the typical big-sister, little-brother dynamic that dictates they must hate each other. I love the way Tommy and Trish hold each other when pursued by Jason, adding a layer of familial heart to the chases and assaults. Tracy and her unseen husband are in the process of a separation, and while it's never dwelled on or used as the source of dramatic outbursts or simmering resentment from the siblings, Trish casually but sincerely expresses her hope for reconciliation between her parents.
On the surface, the octet of vacationing teenagers are fun and exuberant, their only crime being that they engage in the obligatory dead-teenager debauchery that ultimately makes them dead teenagers: they drink beer, skinny-dip in the lake, and most "sinfully" of all, fragment into bedrooms or the shower to partake in premarital sex. However, more so than in the previous trifecta of episodes, Cohen applies layers to these characters that subvert our initial impressions, prompt a degree of sympathy, and distinguish them from one another. These teens demonstrate a conscience, insecurities, and general decency that make them relatable and endearing.
For a short time, Paul considers cheating on Samantha with Tina, allowing her to jump into his arms in front of Sam and obliging her request for a slow dance set to romantic music. After seeing the hurt his clueless attempt at being a nice guy has caused Sam, Paul pulls away during their dance, insisting that he "can't do this," and runs after his true love, stripping down to his underwear and swimming into an ice-cold lake to surprise her as she waits in an inflatable raft. Ted is the obnoxious, overconfident douchebag who derives joy and humor from his best friend's recent breakup with "BJ Betty," teasingly referring to him as a "dead fuck" long after Jimmy earnestly asks him to stop calling him that. (Portentously enough, by the end of the night, that insult proves an accurate moniker for them both.) From the start, Ted postures as a self-assured, sexually successful stud with the ability to effortlessly lay any girl he sets his sights on. However, by the end of the night, he's ironically the only man in the sextet not getting sex, proving he isn't nearly as desirable as he deludes himself into thinking. When Tina, the girl he makes his conquest, abandons him for Paul, an already-taken man, Monoson sympathetically conveys the sting of unambiguous rejection and jealousy. Similar to Ned Rubenstein from the original, Ted's juvenile sense of humor (putting his hand in his pants and protruding it from his zipper) and cheerful disposition are unveiled as a veneer for repressed loneliness and insecurity.
As for the Moore sisters, Tina and Terri are identical in appearance, but polar opposites in personality. Tina is promiscuous, selfish, and callous, rejecting Ted's admittedly aggressive advances, slow-dancing with Paul in front of him, despite clocking his jealousy, throwing herself at Paul in front of his girlfriend, and finally hooking up with Jimmy because he's the only man left. By contrast, Terri is mature and self-respecting, pursuing none of the men, available or otherwise, and gesturing to leave the party and begin their bike-ride home at the approach of a rainstorm.
Reeling from his breakup, Jimmy is admittedly horny, as evinced by him burying his face in his hands and literally groaning, "God, I'm horny," and easily manipulated into feeling insecure about his sexual performance. In his first major role one year prior to the exaggeratedly put-upon George McFly in Back to the Future, Crispin Glover plays Jimmy as unhinged, petulant, and creepily vibrant, dancing in the style of what Chris Griffin from Family Guy would liken to an unattended fire hose, set to the incongruously high-energy rock music of "Love Is a Lie" by Lion, beaming and laughing with childlike self-satisfaction when his sexual "greatness" is validated. Glover's eyes are mournful and his line readings, especially his protests against Ted's relentless mockery, are tinged with a whine.
The immediate infatuation between Trish and Rob Dier (E. Erich Anderson), a hitchhiker who remains tight-lipped about his intentions, is endearing, adult, and natural, expressed through smiles, an open-ended invitation for visits, and a gentlemanly peck on the cheek. (Although Trish takes a risk by divulging to this stranger that Tommy usually leaves the front door unlocked and inviting him to let himself in at any time.) It's later revealed that Rob is the older brother of former Jason victim Sandra, who was speared with her boyfriend, Jeff, in Part 2, and his determination to locate and kill Jason imbues The Final Chapter with added vengeance-fueled momentum while positioning him as the false hero.
Tommy Jarvis is a preteen stand-in for makeup artist Tom Savini, a computer video gamer who designs and wears masks of scary-looking creatures. Like Crispin Glover, this movie was the first major role for Corey Feldman, who, like his character, was 12 years old during filming. Two years before he would officially declare his Hollywood star and define his career as the rambunctious and performatively macho yet insecure and vulnerable Teddy Duchamp in Stand by Me, Feldman originated the role of the first person to successfully kill the typically invulnerable Jason Voorhees, consequently becoming his archnemesis over the next two sequels (technically one, since his adversary in A New Beginning is revealed to be a grief-stricken paramedic in a hockey mask).
Feldman is a natural and irreplaceable revelation: mature, exuberant, feisty, and self-possessed. He isn't your typical insufferable and cloyingly adorable 12-year-old. Tommy is so used to interacting mainly with his mother and older sister that when a bunch of rowdy teens move in next door, particularly nubile women, he becomes like a little boy experiencing his first stroll through a candy store. Even though he's a child, Tommy is developing a burgeoning sexual attraction and excitement to the opposite sex, typified by a cute scene in which Tommy's sleep is thwarted by the sight of a topless Sam and Paul making out across the street. Feldman bounces up and down in his bed, stifling his ecstatic screams in a pillow.
In a subversion of the previous chapters' formula that positions the female lead as the hero and, with the possible exception of Part 2, final one standing, Tommy emerges as the real hero of The Final Chapter and the first final boy of the Friday the 13th franchise. Feldman traces his evolution from an excitable, video-gaming little brother to a smart, quick-thinking, resourceful, and ingenious warrior driven by a primal instinct to defend himself and his sister. Taking a psychological, more so than physical, approach to defeating Jason, Tommy shaves his head, leaving patches of hair to resemble his adversary at the age of his supposed drowning, and manipulates Jason into backing off from Trish through a hypnotic, repetitive whisper and intensely focused, unblinking eyes. As the final girl of the equation, Kimberly Beck exhibits charm, natural beauty, and a ferocious protectiveness over her younger brother, whacking Jason repeatedly in the neck with a hammer until he lets go of Tommy, smashing a TV over his head when he breaks through their bedroom door, swinging a machete at him while hissing the badass threat, "You son of a bitch. I'm gonna give you something to remember us by."
Unfortunately, Beck is required by the script to make a couple inexplicably stupid decisions. After Trish leaves home to search for her mother in the rainstorm, she suddenly decides to take refuge in someone else's empty tent. A defense could be argued that she's trying to avoid the rain, but it comes across more as a contrivance to reunite with Rob. Her most glaring and laughable moment of poor judgment is when she chooses to smash a chair through a kitchen window and crawl through it rather than run out the front door, which would entail her to simply step over Tina's corpse, or backdoor, to which Jimmy's corpse is crucified. She needlessly creates the loudest, most elaborate, and physically restrictive escape option. And when her attempt to kill Jason doesn't pan out, Trish is suddenly stripped of her pluck and reduced to a damsel in distress, screaming helplessly at the top of her lungs, smacking his masked face and kicking at him to no effect.
In the style of Gerald Feil's cinematography in Part 3, cinematographer Joao Fernandes swathes Jason in shadows to accent his aura of supernaturalism, unpredictability, and omnipresence. He also achieves a great deal of mileage out of concluding his nighttime massacre in a thunderstorm, increasing the characters' vulnerability and disorientation. As Terri prepares to mount her bike, Fernandes moves his camera past her toward the exterior wall of the renal home, against which a flash of lightning illuminates a shadow plunging a spear into her back. Moments later, following a shot of a woman in a stag film screaming for help, Terri's corpse is thrown against the wall with the handle of the spear protruding from her bloodied back. Up until Doug's shower kill, Jason's appearances are depicted in glimpses, filmed from behind his head, the side of his hockey mask faintly visible, or in knee-level shots displaying his black shoes and gray cargo pants as he approaches an unsuspecting hitchhiker (Bonnie Hellman) or stealthily observes his targets in the woods.
The nighttime rainstorm cleverly and cleanly kills the power lines, plunging the characters in darkness. Every light refuses to turn on. As characters wander through an unlit home or storage unit, only the dot of a flashlight can penetrate the darkness. The lake becomes enveloped in an ethereal blue mist, at one point serving as the memorable backdrop for Paul's death when his body is elevated above water via a harpoon to the groin. The only instance in which the shadowy lighting obscures onscreen action is during Rob's murder, which is so bathed in blackness as to render it visually unintelligible, diluting the impact of what should be the most shocking, subversive, and upsetting death.
As Paul swims out to reunite with his scorned girlfriend, a POV shot inches toward the inflatable raft, building dreadful anticipation for his discovery of her corpse lying within. A shadow slinks across a tent behind Trish, who's sitting alone inside, facing the opposite direction. When Jason stabs Ted in the back of the head with a kitchen knife through the screen of a film projector, Fernandes puts the focus on the victim's stunned expression, eyes wide and mouth agape. He slowly slides down, leaving a trail of blood to contrast with the clean whiteness of the screen. Fernandes favors close-ups to highlight or threaten moments of violence, including that of a mortuary cabinet door cracking open to portend Jason's impending escape therefrom.
Editors Joel Goodman and Daniel Loewenthal present a cascade of gruesome images long enough to insert them in our minds before cutting away with intentional, visceral abruptness. For the murder of Nurse Robbie Morgan (Lisa Freeman, her character clearly named after Robbi Morgan, who played Annie in the original), they cut from a close-up of a scalpel piercing her stomach to a medium shot of Jason torturously dragging the scalpel downward to disembowel her to a close-up of Robbie's face, squealing in agony, before transitioning to a jarringly peaceful scene of a mother and daughter jogging through the morning woods. The most visually repulsive kill is reserved for the unnamed hitchhiker who doesn't even get to utter a single line (or swallow her first bite of a banana) before Jason grabs the top of her hair and impales her through the throat with a knife. A facial close-up shows blood intermingling with the liquified remains of the banana as it dribbles out of her mouth and onto her chin. To emphasize her unimaginable agony, Goodman and Loewenthal cut to a close-up of her hand crushing the banana and squeezing it out of its peel.
When Jason slams a corkscrew into Jimmy's hand, rooting it to the counter, the editors cut from a close-up of his impaled, gushing hand to a reaction shot of his anguished face to a close-up of a cleaver lodged in his forehead. After Axel (Bruce Mahler) spills a drop of coffee on his shirt, he leans forward to set his mug down, then when he leans back in his chair, Jason slashes his throat with a hacksaw and twists his head completely backward. These jaw-droppingly ingenious kills are executed in rapid cuts to instill shock without having to linger on the gore and risk a teen-prohibiting NC-17 rating from the MPAA.
Goodman and Loewenthal, out of apparent respect for mothers, leave Tracy Jarvis' death off-screen. Searching for her family outside in the rain, Tracy looks to her left and lets out a gasp of horror, and the editors abruptly cut to Trish and Tommy driving home. Jason's hand bursts through a shower door and slams Doug's head against the tile wall, crushing his skull. The editors insert knee-level shots of Doug's legs flailing, blood dripping on his feet, followed by our first momentary close-up of Jason's mask, the two red chevrons on either side having faded into near-invisibility. Fernandes pans his camera slowly across a trail of blood on the bathroom floor, pausing at a pair of suspended feet. Goodman and Loewenthal cut to a reaction shot of Trish screaming in horror before cutting to a shot/reverse shot of Doug's corpse, nailed to the wall by the neck.
Ditching the upbeat, dance-appropriate disco theme he co-wrote with Michael Zager for Part 3, Manfredini composes a more traditionally frightening orchestral score whose strains are as predatory as Jason himself while evocative of John Williams' legendary theme for Jaws. As in Spielberg's movie, Manfredini's score accompanies Jason's surprise appearances and forewarns his nearby presence. His screechy strings, however, are overused past the point of appropriateness after Sam playfully emerges from the lake and pulls Sara into the water. Why is Zito musically telling us to be scared after showing us that Sam is alive and merely playing a jump-scare prank on her best friend?
As the final actor to portray the most relatively human incarnation of Jason Voorhees, before Jason Lives would reanimate him as an amalgamation of Frankenstein's monster and a Romero-esque zombie, Ted White delivers the greatest physical performance out of the original quartet. He wears the hockey mask better than Richard Brooker; it looks smaller around his head, which, for whatever reason, makes him look scarier. White lacks the hunched shoulders that made Brooker appear slightly more vulnerable, playing Jason as a cross between a mortal man and omnipresent boogeyman. His movements are stealthy, predatory, fast, and furious. Like his predecessor and unlike Michael Myers, White's Jason doesn't walk slowly but surely toward his targets, he sprints. Without warning, he crashes through a window and wraps his arms around Tommy, nearly refusing to let go. He hurls a hammer at a wall, just short of Trish's head. He changes from stillness, lying unconscious on the floor, to suddenly awakening and snatching an ankle. With Trish in front of him and Tommy behind, Jason takes a moment to properly consider who he should pursue first. White adopts the ferocity and relentlessness of a pit bull, halting his chase when Trish stops running, waiting a beat to stare at her, to observe and perhaps smell her fear. Only this pit bull resumes the chase without waiting for his target to continue running.
After sitting out the last two installments, makeup maestro Tom Savini makes his triumphant return to the Friday franchise, demonstrating that he's lost none of his technique in the four years since the original movie. How poetic that the man who visually brought Jason to life, creating his original look for Ari Lehman, is the same man who will depict his death in delectably gory detail. In creating Jason's deformed face, which is concealed behind the mask until seconds before receiving his fatal blows, Savini remains true to the appearances of Lehman and Brooker while taking into account Jason's recent axe wound: enlarged, alien-like cranium, dirty brown complexion, wrinkled skin, a lower lip bent slightly to the right, dried blood around the slit on the left side of his head, jagged teeth protruding from his mouth, a normal-looking left eye and a right one that looks like a glass eye.
The injuries inflicted on Jason are brutal. A machete splits his hand in half between the pinky and ring finger and the first three. In depicting Jason's death, Savini pulls zero punches. Tommy slams a machete into the side of Jason's skull, digging into his eye. He topples forward onto the floor, causing the machete to slowly slice through his face and split his head apart. As his face descends, the blade remains upright. It's a gnarly sendoff for one of the authoritative slasher icons of the 1980s, and had this climax marked the actual final chapter in Jason's book, it would have snuffed him out on a high flame. However, the passage of 40 years has proven the subtitle to be profoundly disingenuous. Whether the producers genuinely changed their minds about slashing goodbye to their cash cow or they knew from the beginning that this wasn't going to be the final chapter and deliberately used the subtitle as a marketing ploy to entice audiences back to the theater, I neither know nor care.
The final freeze-frame close-up of Tommy gazing icily into the camera suggests a bold new direction for the franchise, positing that violence and trauma can beget greater violence. While the hockey-masked, machete-wielding behemoth may finally be in the grave, a younger monster may be gearing up to take his place. This may be Jason's final chapter, but there's always room for a new beginning.
7.1/10
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