Jason Goes To Hell (Adam Marcus, 1993) Review

Find more horror reviews here.

“I don't think so.” What does an audience want from a Friday the 13^th movie? Not too much, for we're not a particularly demanding bunch when it comes to the machete-wielding franchise – Jason Voorhees in his iconic hockey mask hacking up some campers with style and verve will do nicely, thank you: real meat and potatoes stuff. It shouldn't be difficult to not fuck that up, right? … Right?!...

Click “READ MORE” below to continue the review and see more screenshots…

“In my professional opinion – this guy's deader than shit.” In the impressive opening minutes of Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday, a beautiful woman (Julie Michaels, Road House) heads to an isolated cabin near Crystal Lake for some relaxation and sexy shower time (naturally) – but wouldn't you know it, mysterious noises are popping off and the lights keep crapping out. All of a sudden, as these things tend to go, Jason fucking Voorhees appears with his gleaming machete and a lob-on to do some slicing and dicing! Darting into the woods alone and scared (and in nothing but a bath towel), the scene is suddenly doused in floodlights as a swarm of gun-toting FBI agents burst from the bushes and trees to riddle the hockey-masked killer with a barrage of bullets before a mortar round blasts him to smithereens.

The movie, directed by Adam Marcus (co-writer of 2013's fun-but-flawed Texas Chainsaw 3D), gets off to an invigorated start for a debut outing under the roof of New Line Cinema (after Paramount had had their fill with eight servings), playing with the preconceptions and expectations of the slasher fanbase. The gloomy cabin-in-the-woods set-up, the hottie taking a shower, the bathroom mirror and door slam fake-outs – it's all clichéd and very familiar territory, but then we're thrown into a whole new ball game with a jolt. And then an unusual sight – Jason on the morgue slab, splintered into charred pieces of dead flesh – as a coroner (Richard Gant, Deadwood) examines the remains for the record. But then the heart, oozing black fluid, begins to beat again, hypnotically even, and the coroner grabs it up and ravenously consumes it – at which point Jason's life force transfers into this new and decidedly not exploded body.

“How ya doin', ya fat-ass maggoty blown-up fuck?” It makes for a bold and daring start, but it sews the seeds of the film's downfall, as the audience is left having to make-do with the spirit of Jason Voorhees merely possessing a series of unlucky meat puppets, his true visage glimpsed for only a few brief moments throughout the whole fucking movie until, quite literally, the last five minutes. There are a few fans of the franchise out there who genuinely adore the ninth entry in the series for it's out-of-left-field subversion and surprise, but the bulk of the audience are either severely disappointed with the movie or downright despise it.

“There's only one way to put an end to that Devil … and they don't know the way.” As a huge fan of the Friday the 13^th franchise, I have watched almost all of the films in the series at least four times each (many more than that for numerous instalments), and yet Jason Goes To Hell was the one sequel that I had only watched one single time because, upon that first viewing in my formative years, I fucking hated it. But here's where it gets complicated – despite that single, solitary, and very very lonely viewing on a scruffy VHS rental copy – the movie made a considerably lasting impression. So how does it sit with me a quarter of a century later?

After the big splash of the film's opening, things quickly unravel into a tangled web of underdeveloped characters and mangled lore (JGTH ignores the previous seven sequels). A tabloid crime show called American Case File, hosted by Robert Campbell (Steven Culp, Bosch), sets the scene in the bloody aftermath of Jason's supposed demise, as serial killer hunter Creighton Duke (Steven Williams, The X-Files) lays out the groundwork for the bizarre supernatural underpinning of what makes Jason the unstoppable killing machine that he is. From his cowboy get-up, fondness for breaking fingers, and luridly strange dialogue, Creighton Duke is one of those very memorable elements of JGTH – but also one of the over-stuffed cast list that is underserved by the bloated, ripped-up, and stitched-back-together nature of the project.

With the body-hopping essence of Jason Voorhees on a collision course with Crystal Lake – which is prematurely celebrating his demise with two-for-one burger patties (in the shape of hockey masks) – we're introduced to a slew of characters. There's simultaneously too-old-and-too-young college guy Steven (John D. LeMay, Friday the 13^th: The Series), his indeterminately older ex-girlfriend Jessica Kimble (Kari Keegan) – with whom he has an infant child that he has never met – and her youthful mother Diana Kimble (Erin Gray, Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century) – at first you think she is Steven's girlfriend!

**Deep breath** – plus there's Sheriff Landis (Billy Green Bush, Critters) who does little more than get the wrong end of the stick and date Diana, here today and gone today Officer Josh (Andrew Bloch), plus another cop who's pals with Steven, coarse diner owner Joey B (Rusty Schwimmer, The Belko Experiment) and her diminutive lover Shelby (Leslie Jordan, American Horror Story) as well as her gun-twirling son … **gasps** … is that everyone? No, wait, there's also kick arse baby sitter and waitress Vicki (Allison Smith). There's even a dog called Tango! Suffice it to say, this movie is over-stuffed to the point of bursting at the seams with soap opera backstories and inter-relationships.

“You know what we're going for here: twisted secrets of the Voorhees house revealed!” Despite brazenly ignoring every sequel that preceded it, JGTH nonetheless leans on those films, what with Jason having survived drowning in Crystal Lake and becoming a supernatural being (as he did in Friday the 13^th Part VI: Jason Lives) – however, all this body-swapping gubbins is purely its own. The set-up and rules of the monster (in this entry) may be pretty daft, but they're at least laid out distinctly and followed closely. Jason cannot stay in a host body for long because his inherent evil decays the host quickly, and so he needs to be reborn, but that can only happen through a blood relative: Diana for instance, or her daughter or grandchild. There's a clear imperative for Jason, one that holds a deeper layer of personal stakes than usual, and it remains a good reason to slay through some cannon fodder.

It makes for a sizeable departure from the established lore, general tone of the franchise, and the nature of Jason Voorhees, which is simultaneously brave and ill-advised. By 1993 slasher flicks had become played-out and stale, and had clearly entered the stage where mucking around and even outright mockery begin to take precedence. The slasher movie had been lampooned beforehand, even in its relative infancy – such as 1981's Student Bodies, which somewhat flew under the radar and still remains something of a minor cult hit swept aside by the franchise tides that roiled according to the wake of Jason, Freddy, Michael et al – but by the early 1990s it was mainstream to play it goofball.

As a result, Jason Goes To Hell possesses a curious tone, boasting pre-Scream self-awareness (e.g. Steven's line to the hitch hikers about the plans for their camping trip) and an ill-fitting 1990s Grunge-lite cynicism that is shoved into what was a much more simple and innocent 1980s franchise. This dissonant tone would be pursued more aggressively in 2001's Jason X, in which the drowned-boy-turned-undead-killer from Crystal Lake would infamously wind-up where many franchises have gone to die: space.

“Fuck that – I got a gun!” The weight of its myriad plot lines and backstories inevitably tangle Jason Goes To Hell in an inescapable quagmire. There are good ideas scattered about the unfocused chaos, but they suffer from sloppy writing, hack-and-slash editing-down, or just the sheer amount of story that hangs around the film's neck like a ten tonne ball and chain. The baby, for instance, is an entirely surplus-to-requirements character and complication; the same goes for Sheriff Landis, because his two junior officers do all the heavy-lifting for any cop-related activities in the plot. Indeed, more widely speaking, the film is forever in search of a lead protagonist: Steven? Jessica? Creighton? All these characters are competing for attention and each are left with little more than scraps.

Further ideas, such as Robert stealing a body from the morgue to plant in the Voorhees house (perpetrated off-screen) for a television special (while also dating Jason's blood relative Jessica), are teased and then immediately abandoned. Did he ever need to be dating Jessica to concoct this plan, which only comes about through sheer coincidental circumstance anyway? With so many moving parts, unnecessary clutter and neglected possibilities threaten to choke the life out of the movie.

And yet, despite the utter shambles that JGTH is, there are undoubtedly many memorable things about it that lingered in my mind even after that single viewing experience many years ago. In addition to the previously mentioned opening (and Creighton Duke), there's the “homoerotic shaving” scene, the impressive way in which Jason is dispatched, and then the gore. Created by genre legends KNB FX, the ninth entry in the franchise saw a decided up-tick in the crimson quotient after the horrendous hacking that parts seven and eight suffered at the grubby hands of the MPAA. There was an R-rated version that was toned-down in numerous ways, but – for a change in the franchise's history – an Unrated version was released on the video rental market, thus preserving the splashing about of nudity and some quite gooey kills.

The breakdown of a host body, from which Jason's spirit has departed for pastures new, brings to mind the resurrection of Frank in Hellraiser, while Jason's black blood oozes and spatters from bullet wounds, heads get crushed, jaws get punched inwards, and happy campers are ripped asunder. Similarly good is the cinematography by Bill Dill, particularly when it comes to dark scenes with mood lighting – moon-dappled woods, for instance, or the battle in the diner that combines slow motion, silhouettes, and hero shots for a remarkably well-made and kinetic sequence.

There are also genre nods to The Evil Dead series – the Necronomicon and Kandarian dagger quite specifically – which tickle horror nerd memberberries, but they nonetheless jolt the viewer out of the movie. The one nod that did work best, however, was the closing teaser of Freddy's knife-fingered glove grabbing Jason's max, setting up Freddy vs Jason, which would long-gestate until 2003 and box office success. That one shot alone, and what it promised, was perhaps the most memorable thing about the entire movie for horror hounds at large.

“Nobody's gonna touch that fuckin' ray of sunshine!” The film is, without a doubt, a messy piece of movie making, and tales from the production explain some of the reasons why it ended up being such a sloppy entry in the franchise. While fledgling director Adam Marcus was a fan of the series, he complied with producer Sean S. Cunningham's bizarre insistence to 'get rid of that fucking mask' – dispensing with one of the key things that fans want to see on-screen in a Friday the 13^th movie: Jason himself, and not a series of body swaps! There does seem to have been a strange air of embarrassment, reluctance, and even resentment behind the helter-skelter production of Jason Goes To Hell, which posted the second-worst box office takings of the franchise after the missed opportunity of the previous film (Friday the 13^th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan).

Following a rushed scripting period – never a good thing – the movie went on to endure considerable re-shoots and behind-the-scenes tensions between Marcus and Kari Keegan, who outright quit acting a few years later because of poor experiences like the one she had on this movie. Cunningham was even reported to have had to take over the reigns and finish the last couple of days of production, while entire subplots were torn out and left on the cutting room floor: Creighton Duke's backstory, for instance, is non-existent save for a confusing “Remember me?” reference that alludes to nothing more than thin air.

There were, however, some uncredited re-writes in pre-production that helped improve upon the original screenplay by Jay Huguely, Adam Marcus, and Dean Lorey (Creature Commandos), as Lewis Abernathy and Leslie Bohem provided additional material and polishing. Abernathy, in particular, gave the film it's best sequence: the knowingly manipulative and genuinely well-executed opening, which plays upon genre expectations only to successfully pull the rug out from under viewers' feet to climax with the decimation of Jason Voorhees – but it's an explosive sequence which the rest of the movie hopelessly struggles to live up to.

So, all these years later, what's my take away? Well, I can no longer say that I 'fucking hate' the movie, and I have now found some value in Jason Goes To Hell … but … it is still undeniably the bottom of the barrel for the franchise. Even though my initially warm opinion of Jason X has cooled over the years (the relentless quipping dialogue and poorly-aged CGI do it no favours in the long run), that ropey, space-bound instalment in the series still manages to perch itself well above this audacious but quite misguided 'Final Friday'. And, to be fair, 'Jason in Space' worked a whole heck of a lot better than, say, the fourth entries in both the Critters and Leprechaun franchises. Even the quite controversial and sleazy Friday the 13^th Part V: A New Beginning has plenty going for it, but JGTH is no lost gem that was misunderstood only to be reappraised decades later – William Friedkin's Sorcerer it absolutely is not! – but, compared to my reactionary and wholly derogatory teenage opinion, the film has managed to shake off a fraction of the hate … but don't expect much more than that going forward.