Wopsploitation: "Friday the 13th:The Final Chapter"(1984)d/Joseph Zito

Let's see,where the fuck were we...which brings us to the fourth installment of the wildly popular Friday the 13th series,which was billed as the final movie(yeah,if you bought that for even a New York minute you're greener than Carl Spackler's Kentucky bluegrass/Maui Wowie hybrid)and with a stellar b-cast and FX goremeister Tom Savini called in to finish off the monstrous mongoloid murderer he helped to create,stands as many genre fans favorite of the lot.I know,as someone who had made the trek to the theater for every film thus far,I was willing to let the shoddy bygone of Part 3 in 3D be just that,giddy at the possibilities as I awaited the theatrical release.And if this were still 1984,and you asked me which Friday was my favourite,I'd have told you,"The original,AND the Final Chapter" with the same bold snobbishness you've come to know and love.The problem is,it ain't exactly 1984 anymore,and I'm not that same teenager who walked around with visions of Savini-crafted head explosions dancing in my head.Sure,I still enjoy watching tonight's entry on occasion,especially since the recent special edition was weighed down with tasty extras that included all the rushes of Terrible Tommy's uncut kills,something I would have snuffed out a few unfortunate bastards for a glimpse of back in the golden era.Maybe I'm just being a dick(what else is new)about it,but besides the glorious effects and some of the cast(one nutbag in particular),the whole production is pretty wafer-thin.Not that I'm expecting Exorcist-level chills from the third sequel to a series that was shallow to begin with,but other than the aforementioned highlights,this is pretty standard(translation:average)stuff indeed.Even as such,it stands as one of the better entries in the series,for sure.And compared to parts V,VII,and Jason Takes Manhattan(THE worst of the lot by a country mile),this movie might as well be the friggin' Godfather Part II.

"Sit and spin,Jenny Craig!" rhetorts the tubby ride-thumber(Bonnie Hellman).
One day removed from the chaos of the events that would come to be known as "Friday the 13th Pt.3 in 3D",paramedics and law enforcement officers are trying to tidy up the crime scene of unsightly corpses at Higgins Haven,one of which happens to be the hydrocephallic harbinger of hockey masked hate,Jason Voorhees himself,dead from a barn lynching and a right good whack upside the headpiece with an axe.At the Wessex Morgue,Axel and Morgan,the resident doctor and nurse,find out the hard way that he,in fact,isn't.One surgical saw throat slash/head twist and eight point buck-level gutting later,our resident rambunctious retard is making his way back to Crystal Lake.It's a good thing nobody's planning a decadent weekend of drugs,sex,and partying there.Oh wait.Six teenagers have rented a house for the weekend on Crystal Lake.Probably not the best idea in the world by now,but who can argue with the folly of youth.They pass a chubby banana-munching hitchhiker who gets throat-skewered with a knife after flipping them the bird for not picking her up.Upon arrival they meet Trish(Beck)and Tommy Jarvis(Feldman),who live next to the rental house.Tommy is a bespectacled young horror fanatic who enjoys showing off monster masks and animatronic heads that he's made for lack of a normal social life or father figure.Methinks it's a different Tommy altogether doing the showing off,but I digress.The group also befriends a pair of oversexed twins,Tina and Terri(what's with all the T's,man),and before long a skinnydipapalooza ensues at Crystal Point.The Jarvis's car beaks down,but the siblings are helped by a mysterious hiker named Rob,who's kind of tentative about his being in the area.Let's see,that's Paul,Sam,Sarah,Doug,Ted,Jimmy,Trish,Tommy,Rob,Tina and Terri.How many of these names would you bet on still breathing oxygen by the final reel?Yeah,me neither.

Jimmy(Crispin Glover):From a dead fuck to fuckin' dead with one chop.
Sam(Aronson),apparently unfulfilled by the afternoon's nudity,goes midnight skinnydipping and gets impaled through a raft.Her boyfriend Paul goes out to join her,getting his Moby Dick harpooned in the process.Terri leaves the party prematurely,earning her a spear in the back.Jimmy(Glover),the "dead fuck",dances like a spaz,bottoms out in Tina,and gets a corkscrew rammed into his mitt,and his grill bissected horizontally by a meatcleaver.Tina gets chucked two stories out an upstairs window.Ted(Monoson),a cocky fuck whose annoying personality("Wanna give Teddy a kiss?"repeatedly,while holding a Teddy bear)even rivals Shelly from Part Three,gets stoned and watches antique stag movies before getting knifed through a projection screen in the back of the dome.Doug and Sarah share a shower-based aquafuck before Doug gets his face smooshed against the wet tiles by a vengefully retard strong hand.Sarah gets an axe-thrown-through-the-front-door-and-buried-into-her-sternum.Jason should have tried out for the Hayward lumberjack competition in Wisconsin.Meanwhile at the Jarvis residence,Trish and Tommy find their muddah missing,so they enlist the help of Rob,who,in a revenge-laden twist that'd make the Shaw Brothers blush,reveals that he's the brother of Sandra from Part Two on a manhunt for Jason,once again.While Jason is introducing Rob to the Grim Reaper,Tommy does a slapdash makeup job on himself based on Rob's newspaper clippings to resemble twelve year old Jason who drowned in the lake because...okay,I have no fucking idea myself.The hellspawn in a hockey mask terrorizes the boy and his sister,and in a boffo finale gets his head half-hemisected by his own machete,then hacked into haggis when the boy notices movement in the downed waterhead.Trish hugs Tommy,while he visits her later at the hospital,and the boy gives a disturbed look directly to the camera which ends in a telling freeze.You know,I'll bet this wasn't the last Friday the 13th movie afterall!

Sam(Judie Aronson)displayed her hams,gams,and clam as she swam.Now she's damned.
For those keeping score,my favorite piece of screen decoration this time around is Judie Aronson,who also worked in Weird Science,American Ninja,and more recently,Hannibal.She still looks pretty good,too.Director Zito,whose prior work included genre fave,The Prowler,went on to direct longstanding viral internet joke Chuck Norris in Invasion USA and Missing in Action,his most successful movie.Corey Feldman has enjoyed a long career in b-movies when he's not haunting horror conventions across the country(and throwing dead hotel room parties,so the story goes).The always uber-bizarre Glover has been touring his self-produced headscratcher of a trilogy,where his co-stars are usually retarded,in blackface,or a Shirley Temple doll in nazi getup.Crispin Hellion Glover,what are we to do with you.Peter Barton went on to a recurring role in housewife tele-crack,Young and the Restless.Last American Virgin Lawrence Monoson is still highly active in television to this day.In closing,the effects are peerless for their time(especially uncut),there are some memorable performances by some of the cast,and that's enough to make this one of the better unlucky Fridays you could sit down to watch.The Final Chapter dances spastically around the living room to a scale rating of two wops.