Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)
★ — Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)
Let me be straight with you: Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday is not just the worst entry in the Friday the 13th franchise, it's one of the most cynical betrayals of a fanbase I've ever sat through. Whoever greenlit this script looked at everything that made Jason Voorhees work, the silence, the size, the sheer unstoppable brutality of the man, and decided none of that mattered. What we got instead is an insult dressed up in a hockey mask.
The premise alone should have been a warning. Jason doesn't really feature in his own film. He's dispatched in the opening sequence, blown apart by a government ambush, and from that point on his "essence" hops from body to body like some kind of demonic hitchhiker. We spend the bulk of the runtime watching various supporting characters twitch, gurgle, and murder people while Jason's evil slug-thing puppets them from the inside. It's not frightening. It's not clever. It's just baffling, and not in an interesting way.
This is the kind of idea that sounds like it came from a writer who'd watched A Nightmare on Elm Street too many times and thought the supernatural showmanship of Freddy Krueger was the bit worth nicking. But what made Freddy work was personality, wit, a consistent internal logic to his nightmare world. This film borrows the broad strokes of supernatural possession and leaves everything else behind. There's no wit here. There's no logic. There's just a confused tangle of lore about ancient daggers, demonic bloodlines, and a previously unmentioned niece who apparently holds the key to stopping all of this. I had to check I was watching the right film.
The practical effects, usually the saving grace of this franchise even when the stories wobble, are largely squandered. There are a handful of kills that try to push the gore into genuinely extreme territory, and a few of them land with the right kind of gruesome thud. But they're surrounded by body-possession sequences that look more like a bad sci-fi short than a horror film, and some early CGI that has aged about as well as you'd expect from 1993 on a budget like this. I kept thinking about how Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, no masterwork itself, at least had the sense to keep Jason front and centre and let the physical presence of the character do the heavy lifting. That film understood what this one forgot entirely.
The tone is all over the place too. It can't decide if it wants to be played straight or played camp, so it ends up being neither, just an uncomfortable middle ground where the dramatic scenes feel unearned and the moments that aim for dark humour fall completely flat. The cast are doing their best with a script that gives them nowhere to go. The characters exist to be possessed or killed, and occasionally both, but there's nothing to hold onto between the set pieces.
And look, I'll give it this: the final scene, the claw reaching up from the earth to grab the hockey mask, does generate a moment of genuine excitement. One moment. In ninety-odd minutes. That's not a defence, that's a condemnation.
The Friday the 13th series has had its wobbles. It's a franchise built on repetition, and repetition has diminishing returns. But there's always been a baseline understanding of what these films are supposed to be: Jason, a location, a group of victims, relentless forward momentum. Strip that away and you don't have a Friday the 13th film. You've just got a bad horror film wearing the branding. That's exactly what this is.
One star. Slasher sacrilege. An abomination. Skip it and pretend it doesn't exist, because Jason certainly deserves better than this.
Rating: ★ | Year: 1993 | Watched: 2025-10-01
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