Movie Review- Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter is far from the last movie in the series, but it might as well be. The series really goes downhill from here, but this is a pretty nice end to the series if you ignore the eight films that followed this one. There's the right balance of scares and camp that were imbalanced in the previous two sequels. It's still not as good as the original, but it gets pretty close.

The story is still the typical "promiscuous teens die in the woods" storyline, but there's an addition of a young Corey Feldman that somewhat shakes things up. The pacing is still the same as the rest of the series, but this time we have a much shorter flashback to the previous films, this time it's a creepy montage set to the Jason campfire story from Part 2. The death scenes are also more frequent, and its well before the 45-minute mark before one of the main characters dies. We still have the typical cast of paper-thin twits, but Crispin Glover is one of the dumb teens, so that makes up for it.

Crispin Glover and Corey Feldman are the best part of the film, outside of the death scenes. Crispin delivers his usual weirdo performance,  and in a notoriously goofy moment, does a really spastic dance-thing halfway through the film, and that alone makes the movie worth watching. Corey is a rare feat, a not-annoying child actor. He plays a strange little kid who's obsessed with monster masks and video games, and he gives off an equally strange performance to match the character. And he kills Jason, which is pretty cool, too.

The death scenes are really top-notch, too. Tom Savini returned to do the special effects, and it really shows. We get some really gross and brutal offings, ranging from a neck-stab while eating a banana, a meat cleaver to the face, and a harpoon gun to the crotch. Jason's face is also really well done, albeit weird-looking. He no longer looks like the mongoloid hillbilly from Part 2, nor does he look like the pig-man from Part 3. Instead we get a Jason that looks strangely like a zombie, which is a rather uncanny foreshadowing to the later films. Friday the 13th Part 4 doesn't hold back in the least, and it really helps make this film memorable.

There's not a whole lot wrong with this film to point out, unless I wanted to nitpick, but there are few weird plot holes. Part 4 doesn't take place anywhere near Camp Crystal Lake, so it raises the question why Jason chose to hunt down teenagers that were nowhere near his home. Jason also starts to seemingly exhibit teleportation  powers, as he manages to pop up in places around the woods far faster than humanly possible. Jason's still human in Part 4, too, so this comes across as really ridiculous.

Overall, this is a great Friday the 13th sequel. It's not as much fun as Part 3, but it manages to properly balance between scary and campy, giving us a film that's on par in quality with the original. The previous storylines are all nicely interwoven and ties everything together for a nice finale. This wasn't the last film in the series, of course, but it ends the arcing storyline of the first four films, and paves the way for the Tommy Jarvis storyline in the next two films.

Entertainment- 4/5

Quality- 3/5

IMDB Page- http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087298/