Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday
The secret of Jason's evil is revealed. It is up to the last remaining descendant of the Voorhees family to stop Jason before he becomes immortal and unstoppable. This is the final (?) battle to end Jason's reign of terror forever.
Jacob O’Neal reviewedJune 16, 2025
When I was a younger man two movies confused me more than any others as to how they could flip so hard in my brain from loving to hating and back again each I time I view them. First, The Fifth Element. Sometimes I appreciate the goofiness and Heavy Metal rip offs. Other times I want to scream. The other movie is Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday. I admire its bold swings and creative characters. But they sidelined Jason…AGAIN! Did they learn nothing from the times Halloween tried the same?
The opening sequence was a lot of fun in this film. You had the requisite girl in distress alone in the woods of Crystal Lake. She knows something is watching her and so she decides taking off her clothes and getting into a shower defenseless is wise. Jason attacks and discovers the woman is military and it was an operation to catch and kill Jason. They fill him all full of holes then blow him up and shoot the remains. This sends Jason to Hell…sort of. We then discover that, through the power of the Necronomicon, Jason lives on by transferring his spirit into other people. But he needs family blood for it to stick. So he’s trying to track down his sister, niece and grand-niece for obvious reasons.
I know I said Jason was sidelined. Technically he’s there all through the film, but you don’t recognize him. We don’t have the hockey mask Jason we’ve come to know and love for some reason. It didn’t work. I get what they were trying and I will give them points for the attempt, but it was a first time writer director that somehow was able to fleece Ne Line into giving him his first shot with their first Jason movie. The result was a spectacular failure that can be loved and appreciated because it was made with love by a true fan who still loves to talk about it all the time. He’s even stated that the Necronomicon and Kandarian dagger are props from Evil Dead. He was trying to link Jason to the demonic world of Ash. Imagine how close we could have come - Freddy’s glove shows up at the end to pull the hockey mask to Hell and Ash’s crazy deadites all exist in the same universe. Too bad each party wanted their character as the clear winner and so we never got Ash in the mix.
Quick aside - had we got Freddy Vs Jason Vs Ash, to me there’s only one clear winner and it’s Ash. He may be a fool, but he’s the good guy. Isn’t that obvious to the studios of the early 2000’s? Guess not. Anyway, if you’re a casual fan, you can skip Jason Goes To Hell unless you like homoerotic scenes of a man tied to the table and shaved before having his heart removed. The movie is weird. That’s what I’m getting at. If you watch it, it’s not good. But at least it’s the kind of not good that is fun to watch.