Director: Adam Marcus
Cast: John D. LeMay, Kari Keegan, Erin Gray, Allison Smith
Have I Seen it Before: Never. It’s definitely one of those horror movie posters that captures the imagination of a kid who didn’t know any better. Did Jason Voorhees (Kane Hodder) always have some kind of weird snake demon living behind his hockey mask? Why haven’t the films been more about the snake demon this whole time?
I guess that’s a pretty good poster, if there’s more mystery on display there than anywhere else in the film.
Did I Like It: Knowing that the fanbase of the series views this film with a great degree of suspicion, I had to catch myself before expecting something great, or even above average from the ninth in the series.
While the Friday the 13th series started as a cheap, calculated knockoff of the Halloween franchise, something simultaneously interesting and depressing happened as the series progressed. As its classier ancestor almost immediately weighed itself down in a glut of mythology and continuity, eschewing whatever made it unnerving in the first place, the purveyors of the semi-annual outings with Jason Voorhees were content to just give the people that would pay money to see a Friday the 13th movie exactly what they want. Pre-marital sex, and chopping. Continuity is meaningless. At one point I think Corey Feldman was meant to play the Jamie Lee Curtis of the series, but it never took. Jason could die in all sorts of pretty conclusive manners, and the next film isn’t even going to address what might have happened. I think any number of films began with him at the bottom of Crystal Lake several times over the course of these films, but I honestly don’t remember a single ending of a film that involved him being thrown in that lake.
And as this film opens up, things appear to be still on the the “who gives a shit” track. While Friday the 13th: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) ends with hockey man melting in the nightly rush of toxic waste pumped under Times Square, he’s back to his whole self here. No explanations needed, offered, or particularly wanted.
But then things fly off the tracks. Jason isn’t Jason, he’s the evil that lives within him. That evil can be reborn fully with the help of a blood relative, or it can be destroyed forever with the help of that blood relative…
Now where have I heard that before?
Does he got to hell? Is this truly the final Friday? You can guess the answers to that with some accuracy. I’m just disappointed the snake demon thing is only arguably part of the film.