At the time that it was made, I suppose that the filmmakers were really thinking, or least wanted us to think that they were thinking, that this film would be the very last Friday the 13th film in the entire series. They seem to have gone all out with it. More money seems to have been spent on it. For what it's worth, Part 4's cinematographer Joao Fernandes had shot significantly more films than Barry Abrams (Part 1), Peter Stein (Part 2) or Gerald Feil (Part 3). I think it shows. Compared to the first three in the series, Friday the 13th: Part 4 has a more professional look to it. It looks slicker, like more of a "Hollywood" venture, unlike the first Friday the 13th films. In regards to the cinematography, it's plausible that the professionalism of Fernandes can be questioned. Many of the films that Fernades lensed were porno films or close satellites of porno films. He did Fantasy with Gerard Damiano and shot films with titles like The Spy Who Came, It's Not My Body, and Little Girl...Big Tease, of which little other information can be obtained.

While I'm not very familiar (hell, not at all familiar) with '70s porno films, it's fairly well-known that they were made like other independent films. You know, with an actual cinematographer and stuff. And Damiano's films are said to be some of the better-made and respectable pictures of the period. (The recent Sight and Sound poll shows one critic putting The Devil in Miss Jones as one of the ten greatest films ever made.) The point is Fernandes shot real films, and shot lots of them. I realize that we can again argue this assumption not only through my never being exposed to Fernandes' work, but by virtue that the inferior Friday the 13th: Part 3 was shot by Gerald Feil, who worked under Peter Brook in the original Lord of the Flies. I haven't seen Lord of the Flies, but the virtue of the profile of both director and film do suggest that more talent needed to be involved.

Anyway, disregarding the probable professionalism of Fernandes, we may better be able to direct the superior feeling of Friday the 13th: Part 4 to director Joseph Zito. Zito didn't make very many films, but the qualities of his direction are better articulated through the film itself than any assumed experience he had beforehand. He has an entirely different approach to the series than Sean Cunningham's underhanded mysticism or Steve Miner's sly humor. Jason is seriously harsh in this film. He doesn't just kill his victims, he tears them apart.

Lots of glass panes get smashed in Friday the 13th: Part 4. If you aren't (and even if you are) hip to the Friday the 13th groove, it gets awfully repetitive and derisively silly. Whereas I began to think that maybe this was symbolic of stolen virginity, I soon came upon a better and more coherent and viable explanation. The glass is simply the breath of life in Jason's victims. He smashes it thoroughly, violently and loudly. It is evidence of his awesome strength and the determinism of the violence that he commits. I remember acknowledging that the killings in Steve Miner's Friday the 13th: Part 2 were done by piercing weapons, sexualizing the violence. In Friday the 13th: Part 4 Jason doesn't have piercing weapons. He has knives, in particular a machete. However he doesn't use them to slice or chop, but to stab. The visual again is of the flesh being penetrated, again simulating the sex act. Much more disturbingly, however, pain seems to be the leitmotif of the murders. These people really suffer.

Jason kills a sexy nurse and a guy taking a shower in part by fairly slowly pushing their skulls in. A hitchhiker gets one through the neck while she is eating a banana (we see the banana gets squeezed and then plop off). One guy is crucified across a doorway and is casually pushed down later by Jason, tearing his hands. While there is one cutting death, one with lots of documentation from horror fan websites, it's with a hacksaw to the neck. Imagine getting cut in the neck with a hacksaw, not a machete or ax but a hacksaw. If you don't cringe, you're either already dead or one of those sick fucks who has actually seen all of the Guinea Pig series. These people die profoundly long deaths, and Jason is able to enjoy and accentuate their suffering. In earlier entries, a cut is made in the body and the victims bleed to death. In Friday the 13th: Part 4, Jason holds onto the weapon as the victim flops around. This makes the sexualization of the violence much, much more disturbing. The killings obtain a sadistic kink. The violence in the film is not only more extreme, but so is the sex.

There is much more nudity in the film, although no actual sex. The absence of any actual on-screen sex leads us to better accept a certain theory about the Friday the 13th series that I'll get to later. One of the attractive things about the nudity and sex is how utterly unashamed the girls are. There was one skinny-dipping scene in Friday the 13th: Part 2, but it was late at night when nobody was supposed to see. In Friday the 13th: Part 4, everyone goes skinny-dipping in broad daylight. Later, a girl goes for a swim expecting her boyfriend to be running after her. He does, and we see him stripping down before joining her. Which brings us to another point. These Friday the 13th films have often been accused of misogyny for showing lots of nudity and women being murdered. True, they do lean that way. However, we do see our share of bare-assed guys. And there is one sequence in particular that I find interesting. A couple is taking a shower, making out. She gets out and tells her lover that she'll be waiting for him. While he finishes, Jason comes to get him. Thinking that it's his friend Teddy, whose previous boasts of sexual prowess were found to be grossly overstated, the showering guy makes a crack about dropping his soap and invites Teddy to jump in. Even if the character is joking, we have a fairly good case in projecting that he and Teddy are having sex. Or even if they are not having sex, the stage is set to view the character in a homosexual context. Jason kills him, again in a bit of painful sexualized violence. We have here then a guy, who makes a jestful pass at another guy, taking a shower and being murdered. The famous shower scene in Psycho was of Janet Leigh being "raped by steel" by Norman Bates, who can only let out his sexual frustrations through murder. Similarly in his murder of the showering guy, as is the case with all the women that he has murdered, Jason's killing is in effect a "rape by steel."

What is fascinating about this scene is not as much that it levels the playing field, so to speak. There is still sexual violence against women. But as there is sexual violence against men, men are also then turned into victims and sexual objects for destruction. The sex in Friday the 13th films has much more often than not existed between people in relationships. This is not the case in Friday the 13th: Part 4. Couples who had just met that night are going for a roll in the hay. Crispin Glover's Jimmy character, carrying the Larry Zerner torch from Friday the 13th: Part 3, actually gets some from a hottie he had just met that night. Teddy, who was the target of that "dropped the soap" crack, has explained to Jimmy that Jimmy's girlfriend dumped him because he was a "dead fuck." This is a running gag throughout the film, and what plot exists in the film generally revolves around whether or not Jimmy will be able to redeem himself.

Well, he does of course; after sex he asks if his lover if he was any good. She smiles and rubs against him moaning, "I think you were incredible." After handing Teddy a pair of stolen panties as evidence of his conquest, Jimmy is murdered. This of course does not seem nearly half as cruel as the execution of Zerner in Part 3, who had remained a virgin and undesirable loser all the way up to the end. It's nice, I guess, that Jimmy regained his sexual prowess. Nonetheless, I must acknowledge that that term "dead fuck" has secondary meanings that are impossible to deny or ignore. Being dead and "fucking" make up the only two character attributes that are needed for Jimmy and for that matter most any other one of the characters. I was going to actually write that the murdered hitchhiker exists only to be murdered, and she is entirely peripheral to the plot. However, as I've written again and again, there is no plot at all, only periphery. All of these characters exist for no other reason than to be murdered.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has been read as a pro-vegetarian film. The meat eaters in that film learn what it's like to be at the other end of the fork. An excerpt: "They just shoot a bullet in their head, and then retract it. It's just BOOM-shht-BOOM-shht." "Franklin, I like meat, please change the subject!" The idea is that they, and the audience, are treated like animals and we have to acknowledge what we do to animals in order to eat, by vicariously experiencing their slaughter. Now, quite a few of the animals that we eat do not naturally procreate. We have bred them in a manner where they would not be able to survive without us. Whereas at one point, cows, turkeys and whatnot existed for their own sake, they are now at a point where they exist only to be killed and eaten. This is the life of the Friday the 13th character. They exist and live in the same manner as livestock, for no other purpose than to be slaughtered. Whereas in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre we identify or are meant to identify with the characters, we stand above them in Friday the 13th: Part 4. We look at them objectively, not personally. Jason is not cannibalistic, of course. Also, he is not hunting these characters down; there is no sport. It's more like their murders are a foregone conclusion. An excuse to work out the muscles in his arm, and amuse himself. The film gives us the suggestion that Jason is finding revenge against those who have murdered his mother and caused him so much pain. But that doesn't seem to accurately explain the nature of the film's killings. It puts Jason into an equal plane with his victims, whereas it's very clear that he is superior to them.

In the best movie monster tradition, we have yet further evidence of Jason being a product of the subconscious, doing that which the conscious entity is unable to. Corey Feldman's Tommy Jarvis is a disturbed little kid. (The Jarvis character is continued in the next films of the series, which I will of course view and review in the next two months.) There is a strong implication that Jason is an extension of HIS subconscious. He sees his horny teenage neighbors getting dressed and is visibly highly excited. (These scenes are edited in a way that it's more than plausible young Feldman didn't see a thing.) The Jason character could then be Tommy's way of "having sex with them." Tommy makes masks, and invites a teenage boy who he seems to have a sort of boy/male adult figure-type crush on. While up there, Tommy plays a bunch of little jokes with his masks. This seems to further the idea that the murders themselves are a form of communication between Jason (as Tommy) and the other characters.

Tommy is the one who finally defeats Jason. He sets the stage by first shaving his head and dressing like young Jason. When Jason sees this he is visibly confused. After he gruesomely puts one through Jason's eye socket, Tommy embraces his sister only to find that Jason's fingers are still twitching. Upon seeing this, Tommy goes into a rage and heavily hacks Jason. He is vicious and crazed at this point. The film seems to be saying that Tommy is now becoming Jason, which sounds like it may come in handy for the next in the series: Friday the 13th: A New Beginning. But Tommy seems to support the popular theory of Jason punishing people for having sex and of the virgin surviving until the end because he/she is more like the killer and has remained a child. This is a theory that was illustrated rather brilliantly in Manny Coto's Dr. Giggles, but until now seemed difficult to properly subscribe to the Friday the 13th films. None of the characters until Tommy Jarvis really had a whole lot to them. They are better as victims, empty vessels to be valued solely because they exist as sexual beings. Either way, I suppose that this is more or less a chicken-and-the-egg-type argument.

Corey Feldman and Crispin Glover were not exactly stars when Friday the 13th: Part 4 was released. Respectively, The Goonies and Gremlins and the Back to the Future films were just around the corner. Both Feldman and Glover were experienced child stars, however, and were considerably more visible than most of their Friday the 13th brethren. (I believe that I would argue that Kevin Bacon in the original Friday the 13th remains the series' biggest star.) However, the presence of both actors nonetheless helps transform the film into a true oddity. Glover takes great pains to be an eccentric in his career. He wrote and directed a mostly unreleased film called What Is It? where the entire cast was afflicted with Down Syndrome, and has since released the occasional book or album. Most famously he showed up on Late Night with David Letterman dressed like his character in Rubin and Ed. Apparently staying in character, he swiftly kicked David Letterman's head, causing them to cut to a commercial. No Crispin, you've convinced us. You're entirely out of your gourd.

Glover provides the best performance of any Friday the 13th actor so far. I was actually curious about what was going to happen to him. Nonetheless, one has suspicions regarding his sincerity in the project, as one must. The only time Glover slips any weirdness through is in his now-infamous dancing scene. He passionately, sincerely and forcibly jerks around in a contra-rhythm to the music. It's embarrassing and delightful to watch. Glover looks and sounds a helluva lot like David Lynch in this film. He conveys a Lynchian "Jimmy Stewart from Mars" vibe that he would tap again in Neil LaBute's bizarre and profoundly disturbingly pat Nurse Betty. This is Glover "acting normal," soaking into the woodwork of an irrelevant Jason victim while maintaining all the properties of a Crispin Glover. He's a bouillon cube adding salty flavor to the formula.

Corey Feldman's role as Tommy Jarvis is of course highly significant, and I didn't like his performance as much. But Feldman is a real oddity. We don't tend to treat Corey Feldman's career like a piece of performance art but perhaps we should. His latter years include a sequel to Rock and Roll High School called Rock and Roll High School Forever (when I was younger I believed that Rock and Roll High School Forever was the best film ever made) and Meatballs 4. Not to mention Stepmonster, Bordello of Blood and the occasional appearance on Son of the Beach. Feldman seems to have too a Generation X-like stance of irony over the films of his hated childhood. His hipster/geek persona is then cannibalized and turned into crap that knows and celebrates its crappiness. Feldman seems to loathe himself something awful. His presence in ludicrous pop fantasies like The Lost Boys, The Goonies and Gremlins automatically obtain a knowing "train wreck" effect due to all that has followed it. The accumulated effect of Feldman as Tommy Jarvis seems to take the best qualities of both Miner and Cunningham's work, turning the Friday the 13th film into something of a ludicrous pop fantasy. What Feldman's character in this film does is nuts and insanely over-the-top, and it's a sort of nuts and insanely over-the-top that Feldman's presence can only accentuate.

The heightened sex and violence, the professional approach, the possibly unintentional strength of Corey Feldman and Crispin Glover all add up to a film that I think seems to reward Friday the 13th fans for sticking with the series. Is Friday the 13th: Part 4 a great movie? Is it a masterpiece? Oh boy, that's a tough question. But I think that it is one that we must finally ask, as this is probably as good a Friday the 13th film as we can get without them ceasing to be Friday the 13th films. The film simply doesn't work entirely perfectly as a whole, and unfortunately that is how I think that we must view movies. I'd prefer to simply say that the Friday the 13th experience is one of the greatest of all cinematic experiences, with Part 4 as being one of the high points. However, if you will only bother to see one Friday the 13th film, you'll want to make this one it.

Friday the 13th: Part 4 begins with highlights of all of Jason's killings edited into a brutal montage. We see pretty much all of them. For the unconverted this may seem tasteless and cheap. For the converted we see it for what it is: a celebration of our beloved mass murderer's life and afterlife on this, the final Friday. The last batch of teenagers that he'll massacre. Fortunately for us, Jason would come back for four or five more sequels, going all the way to hell and outer space. It almost brings a tear to my eye.