Friday 13 July 2018

Thank God It's Friday The 13th: Friday the 13th Part 4: The Final Chapter!!!

Yes, this is the one with Crispin Glover's dance.






Ebin.


Following his unsuccessful effort to hide out in a barn with no one bothering him (and the resulting massacre), Jason is shipped off to a nearby hospital. Little does anyone suspect that the axe wound he received to the head has done nothing, and he's only sleeping. So without further ado (or any ado to begin with), Jason wakes up in the hospital and murders a nurse and her boyfriend who spends his shifts watching exercise videos in a storeroom. Furtive wanking in the 80s was a more patrician affair.


Kino.


Well, true to form, another shipment of teenagers is on its way to a holiday house by Crystal Lake. Since Parts 2-4 each take place on subsequent days, we may assume a fresh batch is dispatched daily. This group runs into a pair of twins, a mysterious hunter, and Corey Feldman (Pizza Gate) and family. Feldman's character, Tommy Jarvis, is an expert horror movie costume and prop maker, which is impressive for like an eight-year-old kid or whatever.

As the cast set about teening up the house, we track Jason's progress back to the lake. Presumably he's heading back in the direction of his shack, which leads him directly through a banana-eating hitchhiker who wants to go to Canada. Friday the 13th movies are filled with these kind of random casualties whose schtick prompts questions that will never be answered. I wonder if in an alternative universe this character made it to Canada. What would she have done? Would the mounties have taken to her banana-eating ways? Did she dream of Canada as a little girl? Would she have wound up getting killed by Mary Lou at Hamilton High? Petition Paramount Pictures to release a statement.



Minor characters I'd unironically watch a whole movie about. What ever happened to those?


So Jason gets lost and winds up at the Jarvis residence and neighbouring holiday house, where he sets about killing everyone because why not? This is the exact point in the series where Jason ceases to have any motive whatsoever and just takes to killing everyone he meets on general principle.

The teenagers watch old porno reels from the 1910s or some shit (who doesn't remember doing this as a teenager?) but meanwhile Tommy and his sister look for their mom, who's gone missing (killed by Jason, obviously). They run into the hunter, who reveals his true purpose in coming out to the woods...he's hunting Jason!!! No, I wasn't very surprised either. It turns out he's the brother of a character who Jason speared in Part 2, and he's out for revenge. You're led to believe this guy is going to be important to the final denouement, but for some reason he's killed off when he goes down into a dark basement looking for Jason, taking a small pocket knife after handing his great big fucking machete to the Final Girl. This goes about as well as you might imagine, although he's kind enough to alert Final Girl by yelling "he's killing me! He's killing me!", which probably wasn't meant to be hilarious, but was.


This is the face you make at the end of a long chain of poor decisions.


The other bit of random craziness that makes you do a double take is when the family dog becomes an hero by leaping through a window for no reason. If we believe Kane Hodder's famous assertion that Jason doesn't kill dogs, this was all for nothing, making it even funnier.


Someone scripted a doggo suicide, someone trained a doggo to leap through a pane of stunt glass, someone backlit it and someone shot it happening, but nobody asked why.


Finally Tommy Jarvis has enough of Jason's shit, and devises a perfectly sensible plan to defeat him: he cuts off all his hair and pretends to be Jason as a child. This confuses Jason, and I don't blame him, because it confused the heck out of me too. This gives Final Girl enough of a distraction for her to whack the mask off Jason's head, and as we all know, when the mask comes off, it can't be long before the J-man takes a fall (Freddy could have benefitted from this knowledge, but it's too late now). Then Tommy goes apeshit and hacks Jason up, screaming "Die! Die! Die!", with a final, classic Friday the 13th fade to white.


This is the first thing pedos see when they enter Hell.


The ending strongly hints that Tommy has gone bugshit insane and is going to become the next killer. Is that what happens in Friday the 13th Part 5: A New Beginning??? From the title, it seems pretty much 100% certain that it will. But then, this one was called The Final Chapter, and look how that turned out.

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