Well it wouldn't be the first time. In fact, the series already did it once itself.
In my favorite entry of the series so far, Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, one of the jokes -- yes, this series had finally started figuring out how to be funny -- was that a young camper, who couldn't be more than ten, falls asleep with Sartre's No Exit open on her chest. That's the actual play where that quotation originates.
But although the series may not be making an explicit nod to Sartre in Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, the use of the word "hell" in the title gives me an avenue to do so -- and I wonder if they weren't also hip to what they were doing.
You see, in Jason Goes to Hell, the movie is not really about Jason, or not the visual incarnation of the Jason we usually expect. In Jason Goes to Hell, Jason literally is "other people."
Before I talk about that, let me just say that this is now my second favorite film in the series, though not to the level of Part VI. The second best movie only means it gets an actual recommendation, albeit a marginal one: three stars on Letterboxd. And it's truly different from the other movies, as I sort of expected it to be -- though not at all in the way I expected.
When I heard that title, and figured by the ninth movie they had given up any semblance of taking themselves seriously, I imagined this movie might literally be a trip through Hell for Jason. He'd be in a typical rocky red environment with pools of lava and random bursts of flame, and he'd be slitting through the throats of all-time jerks in world history, maybe even doing battle with the devil in the final act.
The fact that this movie doesn't literally have anything to do with Hell -- until, perhaps, the final shot or two -- just makes me wonder all the more about the intentionality of the Sartre allusion.
See, we only get to see Jason with his usual mask for about three minutes in the first ten minutes of this movie, which leads to the most intentionally comical scene in the whole series thus far.
We've got what we think is our typical horny teenager opening, with a woman disrobing for a bath and eventually running through the woods for her life. But this is no hapless, unwitting victim. It turns out she was a plant, to set a trap for the world's most famous aspiring hockey player. And once he does spring, she does a professional gymnastic roll out of the scene, having done her bit. Now it's time for the others to do theirs. And these others are about 20 military men with guns who were all in hiding around this spot where Jason gets baited. How they knew that was exactly where he would appear is pretty unclear, though you won't want to complain about that given the reward of what happens.
And what happens is that they open fire en masse, riddling Jason with bullets, then blowing the ever-loving shit out of him with a grenade.
It's hilarious. There's no way it was meant to be taken with a straight face. And that pleases me considerably. The movie hasn't succeeded in being funny since Part VI, but now it's done it again.
The men celebrate. In fact, the world celebrates. And this is the first time, I think, that it is acknowledged a) what Jason's actual body count is, and b) how that translates to worldwide fame.
Even when he went to Manhattan in the last episode, there was no sense of any of the bystanders saying, or even thinking, "Hey, that's Jason Voorhees!" They just look on stupidly and shake their head: "Another Tuesday night in New York."
But when someone is responsible for 83 deaths -- that's the number given by a newscaster in the reporting of the likely actual death of Jason Voorhees -- you better bet the world knows about him. All the serial killers we know by name didn't even get halfway to that count.
The detonation leads to an autopsy of the strewn body parts that used to be Jason Voorhees, which is also kind of hilarious, because the cause of death should be pretty obvious. But I think the police can't believe they actually have a certified Jason Voorhees corpse, or what's left of it, and in another funny bit, one forensic specialist gets the chance to say what he wants to say to this corpse responsible for so many deaths. The short diatribe of insults is funny, dripping with schadenfreude, but of course, these will be this man's last words.
See, the other coroner performing the autopsy has just been mesmerized by Jason's suddenly beating heart, and taken a bite out of it, at which point, little bits of Jason from around the room have flown into his body, completing with vapor trails of magical lasery light. This man -- known character actor Richard Gant -- is now the reincarnated Jason, only he's still performing the usual Jason mayhem in his own body.
Jason's soul/spirit/whatever get passed around between carriers in this movie, and the way it's transferred is through a long, grotesque worm-like object emanating from each throat, which you would not be blamed for mistaking for a blackened tongue. That's just some of the really quite good makeup and other practical effects, which are also essentially making their debut in the series. See, that's one of the things that's been so shoddy about this series -- it has barely even required anything good in terms of gore effects. Well, that all changes with this movie, where we also gets some good bits like partial beheadings and melting faces.
Want to know what else is in this movie? A split diopter shot! I know, I was as surprised as you are. That's when two extreme depths of a shot are in focus at the same time due to a trick that's performed on the lens to split it. I thought only really ambitious directors involved in pretty distinct properties would use one of these shots, but apparently, director Adam Marcus (who?) is up to the task. And it looks really good!
I wonder if the passage of four years, from 1989 to 1993, was enough to sort of consider this a reboot of the series, even though such a thing did not really exist back then. (Heck, your average person might not even know what rebooting a computer was in 1993.) Nowadays, series are always trying to inject new life with new creative talents bringing new perspectives to the material, but this series had so rarely done that, it genuinely surprised me when they did with this one.
The story itself is also pretty interesting. Although there's a bit of disappointment from seeing "Jason" not in his classical form, but in the bodies of other actors who aren't wearing masks, that's more than balanced out by this film's conceit. And it's not a great conceit necessarily, but at least it's something, and it reminded me a bit of all the family stuff in the Halloween series.
We learn that the only way to really kill Jason dead is for him to be killed by a blood relative. Because why not, this is also the only way he can be fully revived. So you can bet there's one of each in this movie, a blood relative who can revive him (Erin Gray, in an early role) and one who can kill him if given the chance. I did enjoy this because it felt like good effort in the right direction, especially since they seemed genuinely interested in wrapping up the series at this point.
Oh and if there were not enough interesting things going on in this movie, we even get a mercery played with a lot of fun and gusto by Steven Williams. He specializes in tracking down serial killers and has a grand old time interacting with the other characters with a devilish glint in his eye as he circles his prey. There's a great scene in a jail cell where he breaks the main guy's fingers one at a time as a price for getting information about Jason. I don't totally get the function of this scene because this guy is supposed to be a hero, sort of, but he's the sort of hero who's not above breaking the fingers of a good character just for sport.
Anyway, the whole thing moves along quickly and of course we do get a proper Jason again by the end.
And I guess I'm spoiling this movie, so if you don't want to know what happens at the very end, you should avert your eyes now.
Actual Hell finally comes into the movie at the very end, when Jason is finally delivered the fatal -- really, permanently fatal, we swear -- blow by said blood relative, resulting in more shooting lasers from the sky, the kind of thing that tells you something outside the ordinary is really happening. Oh there's also a magic dagger. Why not? To let us know that he's really, truly, we swear, permanently dead, arms emerge from the ground and pull him down to Hell. That's it for Jason. All that's left is the hockey mask left slightly submerged in the dust.
But of course it can't really be it. They knew it even at the time they made this movie. The last thing we see is Jason's mask pulled under the ground by ... Freddy Krueger's claw!
I thought this was great, but now that I've gone back to the franchise page on Wikipedia, I'm confused. The next movie in the series is not Freddy vs. Jason. It's actually 2002's Jason X, which I plan to watch later on today. But both most have been in the works simultaneously because Freddy vs. Jason -- the final film of this series, which I will watch at some point before Halloween night during what figures to be a busy week with at least two nights out -- came only a year after that, in 2003.
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