For some strange reason, I couldn't find a copy of Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday on DVD. I was looking forward to obtaining a copy, as in my last review I described how New Line Cinema is finally showing Jason fans a little respect in giving us a DVD package worth writing about. The movie manager at Hastings is usually on top of things, but he didn't even know the subtitle of Friday the 13th Part 9. It turned out that they didn't order it. I probably should have known better to expect a DVD rental store to stock a disc of a ten-year-old film of which I was probably one of the few to actively seek out. You know, I don't think that I can really blame them. And so, I was forced to make a trip to the LDS bookstore The Book Table, who I knew would stock the film on VHS, in its unrated, uncut version even. There will always be a Book Table. Anyway, I suppose that it's for the better, though, that I didn't spend two dollars instead of one for this smarmy, ugly piece of junk, much less feel obligated to sit through it again with an audio commentary so I could gain some idea of what was going on in the head of writer/director Tom Marcus and series creator Sean S. Cunningham.

The twist this time is that Jason's soul is embodied in a flatworm or something, and when his body is damaged his soul must find a new host. My wife informed me that this flatworm is really an alien that snuck a ride to the Voorhees residence with a crate from Antarctica. It possessed Jason, inhabited his body, and this is why he can survive all the punishment that's doled out against him. If I paid extra-close attention, I will see the crate. I suppose that I wasn't playing close enough attention. (A study on the film’s trivia section on the Internet Movie Database implies that this is a reference to Creepshow. Still, it’s just as good an explanation as any.)

A couple of obvious questions though: How did a crate from Antarctica get to the Voorhees residence? Who sent it there? And if Jason is an alien, why does he go around killing people? Furthermore, Jason changes bodies constantly in this movie. Why didn't we see him switch bodies in any of the previous films? Oops, those are the sort of questions nice Friday the 13th fans aren't suppose to ask.

If I had known that it was so important I would have done more research and rented a few of the films of Jack Sholder, but this plot has been noticed by most everyone to be rip-off of Jack Sholder's The Hidden, where Kyle MacLachlan tries to track a killer. Of course, before he made The Hidden, Sholder made A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge. In that film, Freddy Krueger decided that he wanted to possess the body of this teenage boy and become manifested into the real world, indicating that Sholder ripped himself off a bit when he made The Hidden. By all accounts, he got it right the second time. Freddy's Revenge is considered by many to be a black mark on the Nightmare on Elm Street series, as it disregards the logic and even the metaphysics of the universe set up by the original film. There's a lesson to be learned there. Body possession and sequels to Mad Slasher movies mix like salmon and chocolate. I can see how this material would work, but when you have already established your monster and brand name it seems to be the very last approach to take.

Jason Goes to Hell is full of little homages to other horror films. Those directed towards The Evil Dead, Alien and indeed The Hidden are some of the most obvious. A scene where a Jason-possessed character terrorizes a diner and is met with the business end of a shotgun clearly recalls the police station scene of the first Terminator film, one of the few connections that a good deal of critics have failed to make. The film is constantly winking at its audience and has made Jason, I'm afraid to say, everything except himself.

I know that I praised New Line Cinema for finally releasing substantial DVD packages (although, again, I have unfortunately not seen any of them), but I'm now wondering whether or not respect for Jason is really a very good thing. Upon spotting a copy at Graywhale's CD exchange, I promptly purchased the Friday the 13th film NES game. It's a piece of shit, but I'm proud to have it. Somewhere in storage I know that I have a glow-in-the-dark Jason mask that I went trick-or-treating with years ago. In fact, if I see any Friday the 13th memorabilia, it probably is still up for grabs. In promoting the death of Jason, a diner in the film makes hamburger patties that look like hockey masks. That would honestly get me to eat there. But you know, just because I celebrate the popularization of Jason Voorhees and the culture of crap that has evolved under his name, does not necessarily mean that I embrace it its infiltration into the Friday the 13th films.

Jason Goes to Hell has the same problem as Jason Lives, only it's much less subtle about it. It wants to show us that it is superior to its material. It wants us to laugh with it, rather than at it. This is, of course, highly unhealthy for the Friday the 13th films, as they depend on the perpetuation of a self-contained universe. From the beginning, Freddy Krueger was a bit of a joke monster. Self-conscious silliness is fine for him then (and so is a more refined, special effects-oriented look), but not for Jason. When they finally do battle in Freddy vs. Jason it will unquestionably be Freddy's show. Only Freddy Krueger could justify such a match.

There isn't exactly any central character that can be identified as Jason's controller, and so Jason is not enacting any subconscious wish on behalf of his controller. And so there doesn't seem to be any rationale behind the violence. I think that director Adam Marcus wants to use Jason as a symbol for the HIV virus (?). AIDS had been around for more like a decade, but 1993, when Jason Goes to Hell came out, could be identified as the time when the subject was finally addressed by mainstream film. Remember that 1993 was the year of the very-good-in-spite-of-itself AIDS awareness and anti-homophobia sermon Philadelphia. And David Fincher's Alien 3 (well, a 1992 film) and Abel Ferrara's Body Snatchers were seriously interpreted as parables for the AIDS age. In Jason Goes to Hell, two horny teenagers begin to get it on. They pause to consider using a condom, but shrug it off. Jason (inhabiting somebody else's body) comes to get them, and we see the condom being stomped on in close-up. There is then a connection to be made between the oncoming of Jason and the disposal of this perfectly good rubber. The film seems to suggest that were they to use the condom, they would have, forgive me, saved their lives. (This scene, ending with a girl being sliced in two in mid-orgasm is probably as clear as the film goes with the "rape by steel" and the equation of sex with death. The first sequence that we see is of a woman go into and abandoned bunk and undress. It turns out to be a sting operation by the FBI in order to catch Jason. Observant viewers are likely to detect this through the heavily muscular body type of this potential victim. Obviously this sequence is exhaustingly self-conscious and doesn't seem to operate on the same direct level of the "orgasm kill.” The absence of "rape by steel” logically follows from the absence of a central controller that would make Jason a subconscious creation. It also, needless to say, is not half as intriguing.)

There is a distinct degree of homophobia in the film. The vast majority of Jason's victims appear to be male, and he infects them by puking a slimy slug into their bodies. It plays on the male audience's fear of another man ejaculating into them, as well as perhaps the penetration implied of the homosexual act. There is a fairly inexplicable scene in the film where Jason pins a man down and begins shaving him. It is not only an act of intimacy, but an act of initiation into (gay) manhood! One potential host for Jason, later in the film, is an infant. You see, these diseased homosexuals aren't just preying on strapping young men, they're going for our children as well!

If the film has a bigoted opinion towards homosexuals, its view towards its sole black character is certainly not any more evolved, although offensive in a manner that is broader, stupider and less interesting. I remembered Steven Williams as X from “The X-Files,” where he had a character who was tough, mean and very, very smart. The character was someone who you respected. Williams plays a bounty hunter in this film, and the role is frankly extraordinarily demeaning. He looks like he just got off the cotton gin, using terms such as "boy,” "mighty inconvenience,” and "he wears other people's bodies like folks wear suits.” Early in the film he goes into a diner to make a few crude comments about the sheriff's wife. Williams is as southern-fried as they come. While a quick breezing though of Williams’ career shows that it is largely made up of racial typecasting, I like him a lot better when he's playing detectives and FBI agents, who, you know, are back with that tough and smart thing, representative of order. Why in hell do they have to make him into a bounty hunter?

For really no good reason at all Williams knows everything there is to know about Jason. Such as, "In a Voorhees he is born and through a Voorhees he is reborn, and only through the hands of a Voorhees may he die." He's also able to identify Jason's sister (?!) as the only person who is capable of slaying the Masked One. Mike Bracken describes the character as mystical, and indeed watching Williams in this film reminds me of a particular black stereotype that Spike Lee has identified as the "magical nigger,” providing The Legend of Bagger Vance and The Green Mile as examples. (I'm assuming that The Family Man would also count.) The black characters in these films have tremendous magical powers, but may only use them in servitude to their white masters. You know, if Bagger Vance is able to play golf so well, why is he so obsessed with making sure that Matt Damon can get his "swing back”? Similarly, Williams is incapacitated when it comes to actually slaying Jason; he can only provide the white heroes with helpful tidbits. At least when he played that role to Fox Mulder in “The X-Files” he had the virtue of having ultra-ambiguous motivations. Were there some sort of indication that Williams was being empowered through his battle with Jason, the film may not have maintained such a sour taste.

It's not just the content of the film that is upsetting, but the style and manner in which it was made, or rather the lack of style and manner in which it was made. You may notice that this is the first film in the series that does not have a title sequence. Title cards with a few credits are simply interjected with scenes of exposition. The film feels distinctly less cinematic with the exclusion. It's more lax, not only unable but refusing to produce any real power or eerie atmosphere. The same can be said of the score by Harry Manfredini. It's really awful. There is a sort of broad openness to the music that scores the coroner scene. It makes fun of its own supposed omniscience by going way over the top. The last bit of music is made to sound like a sarcastic lullaby. To be fair, this is consistent with everything else in the film. That doesn't change the fact that it's ugly and very insulting.

The lax visual element and the ultra-cheesy score reminded me of Quest of the Delta Knights and Elves. Of the latter, which certainly could be said of the former, someone wrote, "It appears that the film was shot on video, transferred to film, then transferred back to video.” Uh-huh. This is as cheap-looking as a film can be and still be sold on the video market. The fact that Jason Goes to Hell WAS shot in film, the fact that it looks like a video production trying to look like it's film, is reason enough to confiscate Adam Marcus' filmmaker license. (Although I have been very tempted, I haven't seen those direct-to-DVD gorefests that appear to have been shot on digital video and transferred directly to the disc. They don't look appetizing enough to rent over, well, most any new film that I missed in theaters. But you have to admire their honesty. Unlike movies like Elves and Quest of the Delta Knights, they're content to admit, "Yes, we really are this cheap.")

The special effects are also a problem. I'm so stupid; when I heard that Jason went to Hell this time I actually thought that the filmmakers were going to show us what Hell looks like. Nothing doing! Some orange globs of light appear on his body and zoom around, and he is taken up by the earth, or something. I dislike the gore also. It's of the gross-out variety, designed to make you retch. And retch we do. On that level, it does need to be said that it certainly never comes near the level of a Peter Jackson film. And in making the gore of the "gross-out" variety, the killings lose the impact that they had. There is nothing remotely sadistic about what Jason does to his victims in this movie. Certainly nothing compared to the eye mutilation of A New Beginning or the crucifixion of The Final Chapter. Or the force-fed road flare of A New Beginning. Jason crushes some heads and does some impalings, but you know, it just isn't quite the same. Absent of the sexualization of the violence, the film loses the punch and relative shock of the previous entries. As anybody who has read any of my Friday the 13th reviews before knows, I have never really insulted the technical credits of these films. With The Final Chapter onward I acknowledged that there was a distinct change in the quality in which they were made, but I would never complain about a Friday film being made too hastily or even incompetently. I guess that there always has to be a first.

Avoid this one.