Friday the 13th Part 9: Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday *** (1993, John D LeMay, Kari Keegan, Kane Hodder) – Classic Movie Review 1816

Co-storywriter/director Adam Marcus’s 1993 slasher horror sequel is Friday the 13th Part 9 in all but name. It ticks off all the boxes for the horror fans with a high body count, good-looking teenagers, the ideal Jason Voorhees, and plenty of gore and violence.

Steven Williams stars as Creighton Duke, who hunts serial killers for a living and knows masked killer Jason Voorhees (Kane Hodder) well, the dark secrets in his soul and the horrifying truth behind his invincibility. Now he must try to stop the evil that is Jason to protect yet another innocent life, innocent apart from wanting to be enjoying some fun sex, that is, which always must be punished by death in Friday the 13th.

In an unexpected sci-fi twist, the secret of hockey-masked serial killer Jason’s evil is revealed to have supernatural origins. So the last remaining member of the Voorhees family must stop him before he becomes immortal and therefore unstoppable.

Jay Huguely and Dean Lorey’s screenplay renews the stale clichés of the genre with a knowing tongue-in-cheek attitude to the series (‘we’re going to Camp Crystal Lake to smoke dope, have premarital sex and get slaughtered’) and to other horror movies, while the gruesome special effects and visual are up to the mark. Also, with Hodder as the stunt coordinator, there is impressive stunt work and director Marcus injects a useful bit of poisonous atmosphere and slick visual style.

John D LeMay, Kari Keegan, Erin Gray, Alison Smith, Billy Green Bush and Rusty Schwimmer also star.

The British censored version cuts out a particularly gory special effects scene with a teenager slashed in two bits while enjoying sex.

Signs that its popularity was finally waning are showing in that it went straight to video in GB, though it still took $16million in US cinemas on a $2.5million cost. Obviously this is intended to be the final battle to end Jason’s reign of terror forever. But hopes that it actually will be The Final Friday as advertised are dimmed by the recollection of The Final Chapter being followed by A New Beginning, and indeed the series duly continues with Jason X in 2001 and the reboot of Friday the 13th in 2009.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1816

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