• Friday the 13th/Friday the 13th Part 2 (page 1)
• Friday the 13th Part 3/Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (page 2)
• Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning/Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (page 3)
• Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood/Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (page 4)
• Killer Extras (page 5)

Friday the 13^th Part III has a lighter, goofier tone than its predecessors. Jason is still, of course, going around killing teenagers (or rather teenagers-at-heart), but the film almost seems to have forgotten all about him. According to the Internet Movie Database, this is the only film in the series where his name is never mentioned (save for within clips from Friday the 13^th Part 2); I know that it sounds awfully pointless to complain that the film views Jason as nothing more than a killing machine, but in contrast to the previous films in the series, this becomes a valid criticism. Friday the 13^th Part III short-changes us the Jason mythology--and that is an almost unthinkable offense. A review at DVD VERDICT complains about the overuse of POV shots in the film; I honestly cannot remember seeing very many POV shots, except of course when stuff is thrown into the screen to exploit the film's original 3-D photography. (Which I cannot imagine is remotely effective: whenever an object is pushed in front of the lens, the background goes completely out of focus.) Jason's presence is typically handled through the victims' point-of-view, and it doesn't seem to work as well. In addition to this, the "ki ki ki ch ch ch" sound effects appear to be missing. These effects were, of course, meant to draw us into the schizophrenic mind of Jason/Mother. The omission of these elements sends a clear message: this isn't as much Jason's show any more.

The film doesn't get off to a very good start. The prologue is simply a reprise of the ending of Friday the 13^th Part 2. They try to tie things in a little by showing the last survivor being taken away on a broadcast of the evening news, but we realize that it's all highly unnecessary and they are just trying to pad the running time. The opening sequence has the titles zooming towards us. It looks very cheap, and a disco synthesizer score--which is admittedly pretty groovy but is still a disco synthesizer score--compounds the effect. Have they given up all pretense of being serious?

Jason's first two victims are a grocery-store proprietor who regularly sneaks snacks from his own shop from his domineering wife. He also sneaks pet animals, like snakes and rabbits. The wife, her hair wrapped around curlers, looks younger than she should be. The message, I think, may be that these characters should have been killed by Jason years ago when they were still horny teenagers. I can't imagine that the two characters still have sex. The wife suppresses her husband's appetite for food, saying that the doctor told him he shouldn't eat so much. She refuses pleasure for pleasure's sake, pawning off accountability on an unchallenged, nearly unknowable authority. Her religiosity is in a sense not really a fully developed sense of morality, and following that she lacks a fully developed sense of spirituality or humanity. This goes back to my original observation that the victims in the Friday the 13^th films do not die because some sort of karmic force is punishing them for their heedless hedonism, but because they do not have lives that are worth protecting. It depresses me to imagine the victims of Friday the 13^th not dying, growing up to become the storeowner and his wife and mistakenly thinking that they have grown past their sex-and-pot teenage years instead of simply trading off for a different kind of vapid idiocy.

I suppose that all of this is not entirely without value in a Friday the 13^th film, but it's my duty to report that these characters add up to more padding and unwanted silliness. The "rest of the film" involves six teens-at-heart and two hippies for a vacation out in the woods. This is the first film where they aren't camp counsellors, and a brief study of the other films shows that Jason has killed fewer camp counsellors than he has regular joes. The most interesting character is Shelly, a chubby loser with a "Jewfro." He plays lots of practical jokes where he pretends that he has been murdered, or he sneaks up on his friends dressed as a homicidal maniac. He wants to fit in with everyone else, and hopefully get some from a blind date with whom his roommate set him up. Shelly's presence isn't entirely unwelcome. He doesn't have the cookie-cutter appearance of the other characters, who I found to be highly indistinguishable, and this alienation is used to score a very specific thematic resonance. One of Shelly's pranks incorporates the use of a goalie's hockey mask. This mask turns out to be, you guessed it, taken from him by Jason and has now become Jason's trademark. The next seven films in the series feature the hockey mask in their poster art; Jason wears it throughout the rest of the series, natch. In a film where the characters can't even be bothered to utter his name, it's curious that Jason adopts this little memento of one of his kills to be his trademark throughout the rest of his life (and thereafter).

The outcast Shelly has used the mask for a dual purpose: to hide his hated appearance, and to incorporate himself into the lives of the people he feels exist outside of him. We can imagine that the mask serves a similar purpose for Jason. I remarked in my review of Friday the 13^th Part 2 that the killings lean towards the sexual through the use of piercing weapons. While I believe that the purpose of this was mostly to produce a more pleasingly misogynistic murder and nihilistic tone, the parallel with Shelly seems to suggest that the Jason killings may be an attempt towards intimacy. Given that Shelly could be a reference to Mary Shelley, and Shelly is arguably to Jason as Mary Shelley is to Frankenstein (that is, the author), perhaps these murders are the only way the creature can communicate with the rest of the world. We imagine that Jason has been without his mother for so long that these murders represent the extent to which he is able to maintain contact with her. Or perhaps he acts out of compulsion and frustration. The only way that any of these characters could possibly recognize him in any extent is if he is out to kill them. Recognition, rather than vengeance, may be what both Jason and Mother had been wanting all along. In that same vein, both Shelly and Jason force the characters to face the sort of ugliness in their being that everyone else wants to ignore. Shelly almost revels in his gawkiness as Jason revels in his lunking monstrosity, an admittedly invaluable aspect that reflects well on Friday the 13^th Part III's contribution to the series.

There is an interesting added subtext to the meaning of Jason and thematically why he is killing. The heroine mentions that she ran away from home after her mother hit her. She was sleeping in the woods when Jason attacked her. She woke up in the hospital. Her parents never mentioned anything about what happened ever again. Her attack by Jason is then meant to parallel the attack by her parents, each entity trying to restrain her freedom as an adult through physical means. Similarly, these entities have their very existence denied by most of the rest of the characters. This may be one of the first times a character in a Friday the 13^th film is given enough of a background for their encounter with Jason to amount to something substantial. At the end of the film, she tries to hang Jason on a makeshift noose. In order to free himself of the rope, he lifts his mask and slips through. She sees his face and recognizes him as her attacker. We are then to believe she has something invested in defeating Jason: not only is she fighting for her life, she is fighting the threat that her domineering parents have put onto her. She is liberating herself as an adult and as a woman. I fear that this aspect is not completely effective. The relationship seems to be grossly underdeveloped, as we are not given very much insight as to just what being an adult means to her, or really why her mother slapped her. It's curious that the filmmakers tried it at all.

In the where-are-they-now department, the actor who played Shelly, Larry Zerner, now works at Kirsch and Mitchell practicing entertainment law! Meanwhile, actress Tracie Savage ("Debbie" in the film) is an Emmy-award winning news anchor for Channel 4 News in Los Angeles. She was the chief field reporter for the O.J. Simpson trial! This was interesting to me because Savage seems especially bad in this film, even according to Friday the 13^th standards. Debbie is the only female who has sex in the film (and almost shows some nudity in so doing and in taking a hot shower afterwards), but although she calls the encounter "the best one yet," she doesn't seem at all winded or exhausted from the experience. Or maybe (slaps forehead), that's the entire point. It's hard to adequately judge the acting in these films because the actors are never really given characters to play or things to do. But Savage makes you realize how much better other Friday the 13^th veterans were in actually portraying the aftermath of an allegedly earth-shattering orgasm.

Debbie claims she is pregnant, but Savage seems to almost forget this in her portrayal. Seriously though, I think that this may be the entire point. After sex, her boyfriend offers to get her a beer. She agrees but then later decides she doesn't want one. I suspect that the character actually forgot that she was pregnant, but then suddenly remembered while pontificating on it a little. Debbie does not seem to possess any sort of fear or excitement about being pregnant. She treats it very stunningly in an entirely nonchalant manner. When she is murdered, we are not shocked because of the humanity that the pregnancy has lent her character, but because of the lack of humanity the pregnancy has lent her character. It could be said that Jason is just cutting to the chase. What chance could that kid have to develop beyond Friday the 13^th victim when the environment into which he/she is born in is so hollow and soulless?

The hippies in the film blend in pretty well with the other characters, although I don't recall an adequate explanation of their existence. They look old enough to have attended Woodstock. Early in the film, smoke comes pouring out of the gang's van. They run to it thinking it's on fire, but of course it's just those wacky hippies breathing in a bong. Yuk yuk! More stoner humour follows shortly thereafter when the cops are driving behind them, sirens blazing. Thinking they've been had, they try to eat their stash. It turns out that the cops are just going to the scene of a gruesome slaying; the gang collectively "awww"s when they realize they ate all that pot for nothing while simultaneously betraying relief that they weren't caught. The facile irony behind the idea that this killer that they are shrugging off can do more harm than some officers looking for a pot bust, nonetheless suggests an air of superiority towards the shallow priorities of its victims. They have an extremely limited perspective towards the world, and view the police as an institution that serves no other purpose but to spoil their party.

The filmmakers introduce a biker gang in the film that teases Shelly and his date when they're buying groceries at the town market. Shelly accidentally knocks down their motorcycles pulling out of the lot, and so one of the gangsters breaks his window. This pushes Shelly over the edge, motivating him to turn around and smash their motorcycles for good. When this same scene was played in the Mystery Science Theater non-classic Girl in Gold Boots, it was to help establish, to some degree, the protagonist's lawlessness and fearlessness. That is very much the point in Friday the 13^th Part III, I think: Shelly doesn't look nearly as much of a wimp when he runs over the motorcycle, and doing so greatly softens his date's view of him. Outside of character exposition, the scene didn't serve much of a point in Girl with Gold Boots, as it is never mentioned again. In Friday the 13^th Part III, it's folded into the plot. The gang needs revenge for the crime, and so they siphon out the gas from their victims' car and intend to burn down their barn, I think. A car without gas proves to be a menace when you are trying to get away from a crazed slasher.

The costumes of Friday the 13^th Part III's biker gang are so heavily contrived that the gang seems to become a knowingly artificial construction. They are all in leather and have skulls silk-screened onto their shirts. One biker is seen constantly smoking a cigarette. When he is murdered, he gasps and the cigarette falls from his lips soaked in blood. This kill is almost complemented by the one where the stoner hippy is electrocuted and fumes rise from his corpse. His girlfriend is killed with a hot poker, and again, more fumes. They died, unfortunately, literally smoking. Gags like this are more at home in a Mel Brooks-/Keenan Ivory Wayans-like parody. I am not entirely without affection for the distance and hatred for their targets that those filmmakers find through their sarcastic satire. But the Friday the 13^th films are a more delicate species, one where the distance seems more subtle and direct and I think more poignant. I better prefer an in-joke like where the surviving character falls asleep in a canoe, just like the last two actresses in the last two films, and gets attacked by not young Jason, not older Jason, but by Jason's sweater-clad mother, who should be headless. That scene manages to work on its own level and on a higher one, unlike those other two.

Still, the smoking gags used in the film are still funnier and more subtle than most of Brooks and Wayans' jokes, even if they are of the same breed. While I think that Friday the 13^th Part III is one of the lesser Friday the 13^th films, it doesn't stray too far off the beaten path. As different as the film is, it manages to remain very much the same. In a way, I would like to recommend it as a guilty pleasure for Friday fans, if you can detect what I mean without interpreting that statement as doublespeak. I think it's quite telling that for as many people who feel that this is one of the least, there are as many who feel it's one of the best. It probably depends mostly on why you are watching a Friday the 13^th movie in the first place.The kills in Friday the 13^th Part III, including the ones I have mentioned, are among the more memorable in the series. There are a few more gag murders. Jason squeezes one victim's head until his eyeball pops out towards the camera, and the effect is amusing, if obviously fake. One character is walking on his hands when Jason slices him down the middle with his machete. One of the of the most disturbing murders is the execution of Shelly's date: Shelly had just scared her, and told her that he has to pull pranks on her, because otherwise nobody would like him. She tells him that he's wrong and she does like him. He goes away, and she sighs. She picks up his wallet and looks through it, seeing a picture of him and his mother. She smiles; Shelly really is an OK guy. She then accidentally drops his wallet into the water (an obvious sexual symbol) she's wading in. While fishing for it, she sees a guy with a hockey mask. She assumes this is Shelly, but on a second glance realizes that it's a stranger. Abruptly the stranger raises a spear gun and fires one into her eye socket.

What is so interesting about the scene is that a real relationship was developing here. We half want these two to get together. Jason doesn't allow them that sort of relief, because he doesn't give a damn. The more you care about these characters, the more absurd you realize the idea of caring for them is. Why make plans, why look or think of love, when you exist for no other reason than to be gutted like an animal. This girl's entire existence doesn't have much more value than that of a used tissue. The thought is frightening and sort of tragic. And that is basically the backbone of the Friday the 13^th experience.-Alex Jackson

DVD SPECS: 2.32:1 (16x9); English mono, French mono; CC; English, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; 95 minutes

At the time it was made, I suppose that the filmmakers were thinking--or at least wanted us to think that they were thinking--that this would be the very last Friday the 13^th movie in the entire series. They seem to have gone all out with it, ramping-up the quality despite a budget significantly decreased from that of Friday the 13^th Part III. For what it's worth, The Final Chapter's cinematographer Joao Fernandes had a lot more experience under his belt than either Barry Abrams (Friday the 13^th), Peter Stein (Friday the 13^th Part 2), or Gerald Feil (Friday the 13^th Part III) did. I think it shows; compared to the first three entries in the series, Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter looks slicker, more like a "Hollywood" venture. In regards to the photography, it's plausible to cast doubt upon the professionalism of Fernandes: many of the pictures he lensed were porno films or close satellites of porno films. He did Fantasy with Gerard Damiano and shot movies with titles like The Spy Who Came, It's Not My Body, and Little Girl...Big Tease, about which little other information can be obtained.

While I'm not very familiar (hell, not at all familiar) with '70s pornography, it's fairly well-known that they were made like other independent films. You know, with an actual cinematographer and stuff. And Damiano's films are said to be some of the most respectable of the period. (The recent SIGHT AND SOUND poll shows one critic declaring The Devil in Miss Jones one of the ten greatest films ever made.) The point is that Fernandes shot real films, and lots of them. I realize that we can again argue this assumption not only through my never being exposed to Fernandes' work, but by virtue that the inferior Friday the 13^th Part III was shot by Gerald Feil, who worked under Peter Brook on the original Lord of the Flies.

We may have less difficulty attributing the superior feeling of Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter to director Joseph Zito. Zito didn't make very many films, but the quality of his direction is better articulated through the film itself than by any assumed experience he had beforehand. His approach is decidedly removed from Sean Cunningham's underhanded mysticism or Steve Miner's sly humour; Jason is seriously harsh in this film. He doesn't just kill his victims, he tears them apart.

Lots of glass panes get smashed in Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter. If you aren't (and even if you are) hip to the Friday the 13^th groove, it gets awfully repetitive and derisively silly. Whereas I began to think maybe this was symbolic of stolen virginity, I soon came upon a more coherent and more viable explanation: the glass is simply the breath of life in Jason's victims. He smashes it thoroughly, violently, and loudly. It is evidence of his awesome strength and the determinism of the violence he commits. I remember acknowledging that the killings in Steve Miner's Friday the 13^th Part 2 were done by piercing weapons, sexualizing them. In Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter, Jason doesn't have piercing weapons. He has knives, in particular a machete. He doesn't use them to slice or chop, mind you, but to stab. The visual is likewise of the flesh being penetrated, again simulating the sex act. Much more disturbingly, however, pain seems to be the leitmotif of the murders. These people really suffer.

Jason murders a sexy nurse and a guy taking a shower in part by fairly slowly pushing their skulls in. A hitchhiker gets one through the neck while she is eating a banana (the banana is squeezed, then plops off). One guy is crucified across a doorway and casually pulled down later by Jason, tearing his hands like clay. While there is one cutting death (one with lots of documentation from horror fan websites), it's with a hacksaw to the neck. Imagine getting cut in the neck with a hacksaw--not a machete or an axe, but a hacksaw. If you don't cringe, you're either already dead or one of those sick fucks who has actually seen the full Guinea Pig series. These people die profoundly long deaths, and Jason is able to enjoy and accentuate their suffering. In earlier entries, a cut is made in the body and the victims bleed to death. In Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter, Jason holds onto the weapon as the victim flops around. This makes the sexualization of the violence much, much more disturbing. The killings obtain a sadistic kink. Not only is the violence in the film more extreme, but so is the T&A.

There is much more nudity in this instalment, although no actual sex. The absence of any actual on-screen sex leads us to better accept a certain theory about the Friday the 13^th series that I'll get to later. One of the attractive things about the nudity and sex is how utterly unashamed the girls are. There was one skinny-dipping scene in Friday the 13^th Part 2, but it was late at night when nobody was supposed to see. In Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter, everyone goes skinny-dipping in broad daylight. Later, a girl takes a dip in the lake expecting her boyfriend to run in after her. He does, and we see him stripping down before joining her. Which brings us to another point, that these Friday the 13^th films have often been accused of misogyny for showing lots of women getting naked and getting killed. True, they lean that way, but we sure do see our share of bare-assed guys. And there is one sequence I find especially interesting: a couple is taking a shower, making out. She gets out and tells her lover that she'll be waiting for him. While he finishes, Jason comes to get him. Thinking it's his friend Teddy, whose previous boasts of sexual prowess were found to be grossly overstated, the showering guy makes a crack about dropping his soap and invites Teddy to jump in. Even if the character is joking, we have a fairly good case for projecting that he and Teddy are having sex. Or if they are not having sex, the stage is set to view the character in a homosexual context. Jason kills him, again in a bit of painful sexualized violence. We have here then a guy who, after making a jestful pass at another guy while taking a shower, is murdered. The famous shower scene in Psycho was of Janet Leigh receiving a "rape by steel" from Norman Bates, who can only let out his sexual frustrations through murder. Similarly in his murder of the showering guy, as is the case with all the women he has murdered, Jason's killing is in effect a "rape by steel."

What is fascinating about this scene is not so much that it levels the playing field (there is still that sexual violence against women), but as there is sexual violence against men, men are thus turned into victims and sexual targets for destruction. The sex in Friday the 13^th films has more often than not existed between people in relationships. This is not the case in Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter, in which random pairings happen left and right. Carrying the Larry Zerner torch from Friday the 13^th Part III, Crispin Glover's Jimmy actually gets some from a hottie he had just met that evening. Teddy, the target of that "dropped the soap" crack, has explained to Jimmy that Jimmy's girlfriend dumped him because he was a "dead fuck." This is a running gag throughout the film, and what plot exists generally revolves around whether or not Jimmy will be able to redeem himself.

Well, he does, natch. When he asks his lover if he was any good, she smiles and rubs against him moaning, "I think you were incredible." After handing Teddy a pair of stolen panties as evidence of his conquest, Jimmy is murdered. This of course does not seem nearly half as cruel as Part III's execution of Zerner, who remained a virgin and undesirable loser all the way up to the end. It's nice, I guess, that Jimmy regains his sexual prowess. Nonetheless, I must acknowledge that that term "dead fuck" has secondary meanings which are impossible to deny or ignore. Being dead and "fucking" make up the only two traits that are needed for Jimmy and for that matter the majority of the characters. I was going to write that the murdered hitchhiker exists only to be murdered, and that she is entirely peripheral to the plot. As I've written again and again, though, there is no plot, only periphery. None of these people exist for any other reason than to be murdered.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has been read as a pro-vegetarian film. The meat eaters in that film learn what it's like to be at the other end of the fork. ("They just shoot a bullet in their head, and then retract it. It's just BOOM-shht-BOOM-shht." "Franklin, I like meat, please change the subject!") The idea is that they, and the audience, are treated like animals and we have to acknowledge what we do to animals in order to eat by vicariously experiencing their slaughter. Now, quite a few of the animals we eat do not naturally procreate. We have bred them in a manner where they would not be able to survive without us. Whereas at one point, cows, turkeys, and whatnot existed for their own sake, they are now at a point where they exist only to be killed and eaten. This is the life of the Friday the 13^th character. Whereas in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre we identify or are meant to identify with the characters, we stand above them in Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter. We look at them objectively, not personally. Jason is not cannibalistic, of course. Also, he is not hunting these characters down; there is no sport. It's more like their murders are a foregone conclusion, an excuse to work out the muscles in his arm, and amuse himself. The film suggests that Jason is exacting revenge against those who have murdered his mother and caused him so much pain--but that doesn't seem to accurately explain the nature of the film's killings, as it would put Jason on an equal plane with his victims. It's very clear here that he is superior to them.

In the best movie monster tradition, we have further evidence of Jason being a product of the subconscious, doing that which the conscious entity cannot. Corey Feldman's Tommy Jarvis is a disturbed little kid. There is a strong implication that Jason is an extension of his subconscious. He sees his horny teenage neighbours getting dressed and is visibly highly excited. The Jason character could then be Tommy's way of "having sex with them." Tommy makes masks, and invites a teenage boy (on whom he has a sort of boy/male adult figure-type crush) to his room to see them, whereupon he plays a bunch of little jokes with his masks. This seems to further the idea that the murders themselves are a form of communication between Jason (as Tommy) and the other characters. Tommy is the one who finally defeats Jason. He sets the stage by first shaving his head and dressing like young Jason. When Jason sees this he is visibly confused. After he gruesomely puts one through Jason's eye socket, Tommy embraces his sister only to notice that Jason's fingers are still twitching. Upon seeing this, Tommy flies into a rage and heavily hacks Jason to pieces. He is vicious and crazed at this point. Although the film appears to be saying that Tommy is now becoming Jason, Tommy supports the popular theory of Jason punishing people for having sex and of the virgin surviving until the end because he/she is most like the killer and has remained a child. This theory is illustrated rather brilliantly in Manny Coto's Dr. Giggles, but until now seemed difficult to properly ascribe to the Friday the 13^th films. None of the characters until Tommy Jarvis had a whole lot to them. They are better as victims, empty vessels to be valued solely because they exist as sexual beings. Either way, I suppose that this is more or less a chicken/egg type of argument.

Corey Feldman and Crispin Glover were not exactly stars when Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter was released. Respectively, The Goonies and Gremlins and Back to the Future were just around the corner. Both Feldman and Glover were experienced child stars, however, and considerably more visible than many of their Friday the 13^th brethren. (I believe I would argue that Kevin Bacon in the original Friday the 13^th remains the series' most famous veteran.) The presence of both actors nonetheless helps transform the film into a true oddity. Glover takes great pains to be an eccentric in his career. He wrote and directed a mostly unreleased film called What Is It? where the entire cast was afflicted with Down's Syndrome, and has since published the occasional book of poetry. Most famously he showed up dressed like his character from River's Edge on "Late Night with David Letterman". Apparently staying in character, he threw a swift kick at Letterman, missing his head by inches and causing them to cut to commercial. You've convinced us, Crispin: you're entirely out of your gourd.

Glover does the best work of any Friday the 13^th actor up to this point. I was actually curious about what was going to happen to him. Nonetheless, one has suspicions regarding the sincerity of his performance, as one must. The only time Glover slips that trademark weirdness through is in his now-infamous dancing scene. He passionately, sincerely, and forcibly jerks around in a contra-rhythm to the music. It's embarrassing and delightful to watch. Glover looks and sounds a helluva lot like David Lynch in this film. He conveys a Lynchian "Jimmy Stewart from Mars" vibe he would tap into again in Neil LaBute's bizarre and disturbingly pat Nurse Betty. This is Glover "acting normal," seeping into the woodwork of an irrelevant Jason victim while maintaining all the properties of a Crispin Glover. He's a bouillon cube adding salty flavour to the formula.

Corey Feldman's role as Tommy Jarvis is of course highly significant, and I didn't like his performance as much. But Feldman is a real oddity. We don't tend to treat his career like a piece of performance art, but perhaps we should. His latter years include a sequel to Rock 'n' Roll High School called Rock 'n' Roll High School Forever (when I was younger, I believed that Rock 'n' Roll High School Forever was the best movie ever made) and Meatballs 4. Not to mention Stepmonster, Bordello of Blood, and the occasional appearance on "Son of the Beach". Feldman, too, has more or less taken a Generation X-like stance of irony over the films of his hated childhood. His hipster/geek persona is then cannibalized and turned into crap that knows and celebrates its crappiness. Feldman seems to loathe himself something awful. His presence in ludicrous pop fantasies like The Lost Boys, The Goonies, and Gremlins automatically obtain a knowing "train wreck" effect due to all that has followed. The accumulated impact of Feldman as Tommy Jarvis takes the best qualities of both Miner and Cunningham's work, turning the Friday the 13^th film into something of a ludicrous pop fantasy. What Feldman's Tommy does is nuts and insanely over-the-top, but it's the sort of nuts and insanely over-the-top that Feldman's presence can only accentuate.

Together the heightened sex and violence, the professional approach, and the possibly unintentional strength of Corey Feldman and Crispin Glover add up to a film that rewards Friday the 13^th fans for sticking it out. Is Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter a great movie? Is it a masterpiece? Oh boy, that's a tough question, but it's one that we must finally ask, as this is probably as good a Friday the 13^th film as we can get without them ceasing to be Friday the 13^th films. The Final Chapter is far from perfect as a self-contained piece, and unfortunately that is how I feel we must view movies. I'd prefer to simply say that the Friday the 13^th experience is one of the greatest of all cinematic experiences, with The Final Chapter serving as one of its high points. If you only bother to see one Friday the 13^th film, you'll want to make this one it.

Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter begins with a highlight reel of Jason's killings edited into a brutal montage. We see pretty much every murder he's committed thus far. For the unconverted this may seem tasteless and cheap. For the converted, we see it for what it is: a celebration of our beloved mass murderer's life and afterlife on this, the final Friday. Fortunately for us, Jason would come back for four or five more sequels, going all the way to outer space. It almost brings a tear to my eye.-Alex Jackson

DVD SPECS: 1.75:1 (16x9); English mono, French mono; CC; English, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; 91 minutes