I try and do a couple of these every time there’s a Friday the 13th. Here’s the list so far:
Friday the 13th
Friday the 13th Part 2
Friday the 13th Part 3 – in 3D!
Friday the 13th Part 4: The Final Chapter
Friday the 13th Part 5: A New Beginning
Friday the 13th Part 6: Jason Lives!
Friday the 13th Part 7: The New Blood
Friday the 13th Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan
Friday the 13th: Jason X
Freddy vs Jason
Friday the 13th (2009)
This is it, though – I’ve finally run out of Friday the 13th films! Jason Goes to Hell is the last one I haven’t done a review of, so you can rest easy knowing there’s one less thing to be afraid of the next time a Friday the 13th rolls around. (Unless they release a new one – you never know.)
If you don’t have time to go through all the reviews you can read my ranking of all the Friday the 13th films here, and the SAW community ranking here.
The Medium
Thanks to the largesse of Screenager liquidsoap89, I have the Shout! Factory Blu-ray set of all the Friday the 13th movies. It’s a damn good set, and all the movies look better than they ever have previously (especially if you grew up on grainy VHS copies, like I did). Jason Goes to Hell has a bevy of extras, including commentary tracks, interviews and deleted footage.
There are currently no free or subscription streaming options, but both 7 and 8 can be rented or purchased on Amazon, AppleTV, Microsoft and Fandango.
The Movie
You know, I think there’s a universe where this isn’t a Friday the 13th movie, and it’s become a cult hit. Body hopping serial killer with a magic bloodline and a character like Creighton Duke hunting him? Those crazy folks at the diner? The gore and nudity? Yeah, this is someone’s favorite horror movie in another timeline.
But not this one.
Things start off promisingly enough – a return to the classic formula: a woman heads to Crystal Lake (no longer Forest Green, I see) alone. Not a particularly bright person, you might think – I mean, at this point the place has got to be pretty famous. Still – this is a Friday the 13th movie and this kinda thing is to be expected. Sure enough, Jason shows up, looking none the worse for wear since being melted in a New York sewer. He attacks, she flees, he follows – right into an FBI ambush. Nice try FBI guys! It’s going to take more than bullets to take down…
Oh. Rocket launcher. Yeah, that uh, that seems to do the trick.
In some ways this is a genius move. First time director Adam Marcus upends your expectations and, seemingly, kills the main antagonist off in the first 10 minutes! That’s Scream level subversion there, and I think I was expecting Jason to regenerate or something, looking like jigsaw puzzle monster. He’s a supernatural slasher and was resurrected by lightning at one point. Anything’s possible, right?
But that’s not what happens, and if you’re a Jason fan then almost everything that occurs after that intro is going to piss you off. And it pissed me off for a long time. This time around, though, I decided to watch it as if it WASN’T a Jason movie. As if it was, instead, a riff on a bunch of different horror movies. This increased my enjoyment tremendously.
Because Jason Goes to Hell is quite fun, shorn of those expectations. If you look at it as a pastiche of Friday the 13th, Halloween (stealing the whole “family” aspect), the Evil Dead (there’s the real Necronomicon in one scene, suggesting that maybe Jason is a deadite of some kind), and The Hidden. There’s also a crate from a “Carpenter” expedition to Antarctica in one shot and the dagger was SUPPOSED to be the Kandarian dagger from Evil Dead.
As a movie by a lover of horror movies, Goes to Hell succeeds in being fun, weird and trashy. If you like gore, there’s plenty of that (on the unrated version, anyway). That whole eating the heart scene, the poor woman who gets cut in half by a road sign, whatever the hell that thing is that crawls out of the reporters neck. The movie gets some points for imaginative squick, for sure. There’s plenty of action with a shootout in a diner and the final confrontation. (I’ve always kinda liked those giant hands that come out of the ground.) The characters aren’t deep, but they aren’t shallow teenagers meant only to die. They have lives and problems that are a little more relatable.
Except Duke (Steven Williams). He definitely has problems, though.
I appreciate the complete chutzpa the film has, to take a well established series and just throw everything about it out the window. To make things up out of whole cloth. There’s a Voorhees family now? And a Voorhees house that’s not the shack from Part 2? And Jason’s a body-jumping slug? And there’s a mystical bloodline? And this crazy cowboy guy who trades finger breaking for information? And the nebbishy guy with the letter jacket is the hero?
I’m not going into the plot because it’s kind of a mess. Such a weird, nonsensical mess. I remember that the first time I watched the film I didn’t even care when Freddy’s gloved hand appears at the end, I was so confused and pissed about the new ‘mythology’ crap. Apparently, there was a much longer version of the film – over two hours – which might have made more sense. I’m not saying it would be better, but I’d still be interested in seeing a “director’s cut” of the film.
The Bottom Line
I still don’t like Jason Goes to Hell as a Friday the 13th movie. I understand the motivation after 8 of these films to want to shake things up. To try and make something different. Unfortunately, the filmmakers went too far and forgot why fans went to these movies in the first place. I think Jason X was far more successful in doing something different, but still giving fans a recognizable Friday the 13th movie. All that being said, if you can watch it on its own merits, it’s an enjoyable – if weird – low budget horror film. It’s not some undiscovered masterpiece, but it’s gory, funny in spots, and has enough twists and turns to keep you interested. It’s way better than I gave it credit for. It just sucks as a Jason movie.