Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter is the ironically named fourth chapter in the series, and stars Kimberly Beck, Corey Feldman, Crispin Glover, E. Erich Anderson, Joan Freeman, Ted White, Barbara Howard, and Judie Aronson.
You ever leave a sauce on the stove too long and it goes past "reduction" to "unpleasant paste?" That's kinda where we are in the Friday the 13th series. Here, we have a brand new group of meat teens heading towards Crystal Lake, more specifically a house they've rented(?) to party n' fuck in, which is nearby to the Jarvis family: divorced mom Tracy (Freeman), her teenage daughter Trish (Beck), and her 12-year-old son Tommy (Feldman). The teens are largely forgettable, except for Jimmy, and that's just because he's played by Crispin Glover and Glover's weirdness is on display.
The kids have their party, they all die, Jason (Ted White, uncredited apparently because director Joseph Zito was such an amazing dick to his cast) kills Tracy offscreen, and we get the Final Girl Tango throughout the last few scenes. Tommy lives, too, and he's actually the one that "kills" Jason with a machete, after making himself up to look like young Jason in order to confuse him. Into the mix we get a dude called Rob (Anderson) who's the brother of Sandra (Marta Kober's character from Part II) and here to avenge his sister. He falls short, natch.
The movies get more formulaic as they go, and you can tell, I think, that everyone involved with this movie just wanted Jason to be dead and this franchise to end...but it's the fourth in a series of ten-ish, so we're not near done yet. The decline is apparent in a few ways. I mentioned in the write-ups for the first and second installments that it's not obvious who the Final Girl is because the story takes its time and establishes the characters. Here, it's pretty obvious that Trish is our Final Girl (although there's a bit of a fake-out, as Sara (Howard) is explicitly a virgin, and horror movie lore says that should make her the Final Girl. She does bang her boyfriend (Peter Barton) in the shower, though, and gets killed shortly thereafter, so there's that).
The body count rises quite a bit in this movie, the kills are more graphic and more elaborate, the nudity is plentiful and gratuitous, but the whole thing just feels weirdly by-the-numbers. And yeah, I know it's a Friday the 13th movie, and this was mid-80s when slasher movies were thick on the ground and starting to lose their footing, but all of that just makes it odd to me that the series not only continued after this but did so for so damn long.
My Grade: D-
Rewatch Value: Low
Next up: Friday the 13th: A New Beginning
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