By the time Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter hit theaters on April 13, 1984, the whole slasher horror craze was entering its great downfall. Critics hated them and the big names refused to acknowledge their existence except to condemn and degrade them. At the time, most of them had been filmed in Canada as a tax shelter. Or in the case of Student Bodies, a slasher parody, it was filmed in Texas with a lot of no-name cast and crew to bypass a loophole during the 1980s actors strike.
Paramount Pictures, which helped feed the beast by distributing the first Friday the 13th along with My Bloody Valentine, was ready to get out of the slasher business. But they could’ve just left Jason Vorhees lying on the ground in the doorway of a barn with an axe blade in the top of his head. Using the short-lived popularity of 3-D, the third movie which had a funky disco dance version play over the opening credits, had turned a nice profit of $36.7 million against a meager $2.2 million budget. This was an improvement over the second’s $22 million box office total.
So, if there is a bigger beast than a serial killer who can’t be killed, it’s greed. In hopes of ending the franchise once and for all, a fourth movie was greenlit. With the same minor budget, it would assemble a bunch of whats-their-name actors to give Jason a send-off. Even more impressive, Tom Savini, who had done the make-up and effects on the first movie, was returning to help end it all once and for all.
Director Joseph Zito had been known for his low-budget horror movies, most notably The Prowler. Picking up exactly where the third movie left off, the movie opens with a helicopter flying overhead as emergency responders are spread out all over the farm place where the events of the previous movie mostly took place. An ambulance has arrived to take the presumed body of Jason Vorhees to the morgue. For a slasher movie like this, it’s an impressive opening considering most slashers try to have the least amount of cast as possible.
And the scene goes from loud to quiet as everyone leaves giving the place both a feeling of peace as you hear the night insects trill but also terror when you realize what happened there. The ambulance driver and his female assistant take the body to the hospital where there are bereaved family members talking with law enforcement. A morgue worker, Axel Burns (Bruce Mahler), acts all nonchalant as he fills out the paperwork and creeps out the ambulance crew implying necrophilia with one of the female dead women.
Axel is a pervert and he tries to get into the pants of Morgan (Lisa Freeman), a nurse. It should be noted that audiences had already seen Mahler as the clumsy absent-minded Douglas Fackler in the first Police Academy movie. He would go on to repeat the role in three of the sequels. He was also known for being on the cast of Fridays and had a recurring role as Rabbi Glickman on Seinfeld.
Well, you don’t have to be a genius to guess that Jason isn’t dead and he comes alive and kills Axel and Morgan. Yet, somehow, he manages to leave the hospital which would’ve been crawling with law enforcement and media at this time. Anyway, yadda-yadda-yadda, Jason goes back to Crystal Lake, which I’m guess is a very huge lake because no one has apparently heard of the two mass killings that have happened nearby. The second, third and fourth movie all seem to take place all within the same time frame of a week. I mean, there’s been a couple of dozen people killed within a week near a lake. I don’t think I would want to spend any time there.
But here comes a whole new group of young teenagers. Most notably with them is the shy, gullible Jimmy Mortimer (Crispin Glover of all people in one of his earliest roles) and the sleazy jokester Ted Cooper (Lawrence Monoson) who played the unlucky guy in The Last American Virgin. The other people are the generic potential victims. There’s jocky Paul Guthrie (Alan Hayes) and his girlfriend, Samantha Lane (Judie Aronson), whose whole purpose is to get jealous and mad so she can go skinny dipping for some gratuitous nudity. Then, there’s the preppy Doug Bell (Peter Barton) and his sweet, virginial girlfriend, Sara Parkington (Barbara Howard). What’s funny is Barton and Howard would go on to appear in popular TV dramas. Barton was most famous for The Young and the Restless and Howard was on Falcon Crest. Now, Howard is a psychotherapist.
They are staying at a two story house near the lake. Their neighbors are Mrs. Jarvis (Joan Freeman) and her children, Trish (Kimberly Beck) and Tommy (Corey Feldman). Later they all meet some twins, Tina and Terry Moore (Camillia and Carey More). But when Trish and Tommy are returning from town, they meet a hiker, Rob Dier (E. Erich Anderson) who is camping nearby. But Trish discovers Rob is the older brother of Sandra Dier from the second movie. Sandra was one of the counselors-in-training killed by Jason at Packanack Lodge, a summer camp that was set to open. The area is not far from Camp Crystal Lake where Pamela Voorhees had gone on a murder spree five years prior.
I like this link as it doesn’t just make it feel more like standalone sequels which would become more common in the later sequels, especially when they were being handled by New Line Cinema. There’s almost a sense that the second, third and fourth movie feel more like a trilogy. Also, slashers from the early 1980s all had a distinctive look that just didn’t work in later movies. I guess it was the fashion as well as the cheap look of the production.
However, there’s a lot of good camera techniques here such as Jason killing a character off-screen but we see the shadow during a lightning strike. And another character sees Jason off-screen but their fate is never really shown, even though we know what’s happened. It should be noted that this is the only Friday the 13th movie to be set in the year it was released. As I mentioned earlier, the second and third movie released in 1981 and 1982 were set in 1984. The first movie is set in 1979 but released in 1980.
The sequels after this were all set in the future as well. The fifth movie is set in 1989 but released in 1985. And the sixth, seventh and eighth movies were all set in the early 1990s. The less said about the “Jason Trilogy” as its called is the better. Apparently, Paramount still held the title rights to Friday the 13th and only allowed New Line the use of Jason Vorhees. Reportedly, Tommy Jarvis was supposed to appear in Freddy vs. Jason with Jason Bateman being considered. But this was changed because that movie was such a mess with its troubled production.
That’s not to say that Final Chapter went smooth as molasses. Veteran character actor and stuntman Ted White was hired to play Jason. However, he wasn’t too happy with how inexperienced and inconsiderate Zito was on the set. Filming took place in the Topanga Canyon area of southern California from October 1983 to January 1984. During a scene where Aronson had to film a night-time skinny dip, the water was near freezing. And Zito refused to allow her to get out of raft she was on in between takes. Aronson developed hypothermia. This enraged White, who became like Papa Bear to the younger actors.
White who was 58 at the time had been stunt doubles for Clark Gable and John Wayne. Yet he was angry with some of the dangerous stunts the younger actors had to do. White also requested a crash pad for Barton as Jason slams into Doug while he’s in the shower. Reportedly despite the precautions, Barton’s nose was actually broken and he had to seek medical help. White and Zito butted heads over the course of the movie that he had his name taken off the credits calling the movie, “a piece of shit.” Later, White would change his opinion of the movie and embrace the fandom.
White also said Feldman was acting bratty calling him the “meanest goddamn kid” he ever dealt with. Feldman later defended his behavior saying that Zito was made the production shoot unpleasant for him and that his mother, Sheila, was at the peak of her exploitative and abusive ways. She has defended the accusations but he got emancipated from his parents two years later at the age of 15. During the climax where Tommy has to repeatedly strike Jason’s body with a machete, there were two sandbags on the floor for Feldman to hit. Feldman later said he imagined those sandbags were his parents and Zito.
Because of Feldman’s behavior, White and Zito actually worked out a way to get a true look of terror out of the young actor. Jason is supposed to jump through a window to grab Tommy, but White waited and Zito left the camera running that Feldman would think White missed his mark. This would catch Feldman off guard, so his scream was authentic. Despite their differences, White later complimented Feldman on his abilities as a child actor.
The production also hit another problem when Monoson actually decided to get drunk and smoke cannabis because his character does the same on screen. Unfortunately, Monoson got so bad, it was hard to concentrate on filming. However, despite all the problems during filming, the movie went on to be a huge success, earning $33 million. However, it was supposed to be the end. Frank Mancuso Jr., son of Frank Mancuso Sr., who was the CEO of Paramount at the time, said he felt no one had respected him in Hollywood as the backlash against slashers was growing. The younger Mancuso had been a producer on all the sequels at Paramount with the exception of the eighth one.
But greed is a harder monster to kill than Jason, Freddy Krueger, Pinhead and Michael Myers combined. The movie only has a 21 percent score on RottenTomatoes.com from 33 critics. However, the fan score is more positive at 51 percent with another user rating score of 6/10 on http://www.imdb.com. The movie’s plot might be bad as we just sit through another group of people being killed.
I also find it hard to believe that the Jarvis family lives so close to the lake and hasn’t heard anything about Pamela Vorhees, “Camp Blood” or the two dozen people killed nearby within the past week. The geography of Crystal Lake has always been brought into question like Springfield on The Simpsons. The eighth movie implies that it’s connected to a river that flows into one of the Mid-Atlantic States and thus the Atlantic Ocean. In Freddy vs. Jason, it’s actually not far from Springwood, Ohio, the main setting of most of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, even though it’s obvious in the first movie, the lake is in New Jersey.
Of course debating geography with a film franchise where someone can survive so many deaths is an exercise in futility. It’s a shame though the fourth movie suffers the stigmata from so many other movies of this era. In many ways, 1984 was the last good year for decent slashers. This was also the year of the first Nightmare on Elm Street and the highly controversial but still good Silent Night, Deadly Night.
It was a good year all around. Not only did Americans see Ghostbusters and Gremlins at the box office. But the first Children of the Corn, Toxic Avenger and Terminator movies were released. Night of the Comet, C.H.U.D., Dreamscape and The Company of Wolves were also released along with highly-acclaimed thrillers like Blood Simple., Body Double and Tightrope.
In the end, if anything else, it introduced us to the manic mind that is Crispin Glover. He’d only been in a couple of movies prior to this as well as some TV work, but his crazy dance and his anxiety over Jimmy’s dating life would become synonymous with his acting. Glover’s style both on-screen and off (such as his bizarre 1987 appearance on Late Night with David Letterman) is seen being sprouting out here.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 