Jason Goes to Hell
directed by Adam Marcus
written by Adam Marcus and Jay Huguely
starring Kane Hodder, John D. LeMay, Keri Keegan, Steven Williams, Steven Culp, Erin Gray, Rusty Schwimmer, Richard Gant, Andrew Bloch
In the ninth installment of the popular gore fest, Jason goes airborne and is suddenly capable of infecting others with a mangy virus and taking over their bodies in order to kill.
The film opens with a dodgy FBI operation where Jason (Hodder) is pulled into a trap with a slinky undercover agent who lures him into showing up at the cabin with her slick, sexy shower tricks. Jason is essentially obliterated and his body parts are gathered up and taken to the morgue where his crusty beating heart is eaten by the coroner (Gant). Jason enters the coroner’s body and the mayhem begins.
There is much carnage including a trio of randy kids out for some kicks at Camp Crystal Lake. Jason returns and quickly eliminates them before we hardly get their names. Still, as is always the case, it’s never a good idea to have sex anywhere near Crystal Lake because Jason abhors intimacy and must annihilate it at every turn.
The film explores new lunacy in the Jason mythos. We discover that he has a half-sister named Diane Kimble (Gray) and that he can only be killed with a magic dagger by one of his female kin. That leaves Diane, her daughter Jessica (Keegan) and Jessica’s daughter Stephanie. The film gets really wacky in the end as the great climax comes to a close. There are elements of Aliens that just don’t seem to work here. It’s comical rather than being dramatically effective.
Jason infects his targets by transferring a thick black ooze into their throats. Apparently this act replaces their hearts and he takes over operations from there. In one scene Jason actually kidnaps a policeman named Josh (Bloch) and straps him to a table before replacing his heart. From here there are many more deaths including that of Diane which is blamed on Steven (LeMay), Jessica’s former boyfriend and father of her child.
The story is fairly convoluted and includes a Crime show host named Robert (Culp) who decides to jazz his line up a bit by stealing Diane’s corpse and filming a show at the old Voorhees place. Of course he becomes the next empty shell killer when Josh does the whole ooze transfer on him. He too murders many people and naturally there are complications with Jessica.
So, this story has some interesting, if not wholly original ideas to play around with. Having Jason possess the ability to take up a new body when the old one is a bit creaky is fairly well-heeled territory. The film doesn’t do anything novel with the premise and we are actually left with a slimy black creature that comes out of Jason’s mouth looking for a way to be born. He finds a way and it’s the most interesting aspect of the film. The visual repercussions of the scene resonate long after the film is over.
Steven is the main mail protagonist in this film as he gets himself caught square up in the middle of the killing spree by merely being in he wrong place at the wrong time. He’s somewhat ineffectual but he can take and throw a punch. Still, he’s lacking in a discernible personality which drags the film down considerably whenever he’s on screen. He’s paired up with yet another charisma-lite female character who is supposed to force audiences into caring but we don’t care for her and we certainly could care less about her damn baby. I think it would have been a find idea to have Jason possess the baby and make her into a killer of other babies in playpens and such. It would be cool to have her smothering all the fat little babies in the neighborhood when their mothers come over to knit.
Jason Voorhees hardly makes an appearance here as himself. He fills the bodies of at least four men and we are given the succinct privilege of watching them hack their way to orgasmic oblivion. Admittedly, it’s just not the same as when Jason does it in his own flesh. His body, gnarled and rotten, adds a certain grittiness to his killing sprees which is completely lost in the new versions. It seems like a decent idea but the application is all wrong and the end result is essentially disappointment that this could have been something potentially more unnerving and toxic. Instead, it’s just silliness from beginning to end; once the final scenes commence you know you are in the place where interesting scenarios go to die. These ideas were not properly thought out and leave the viewer in a state of acute perplexity.
The film features a bounty hunter named Creighton Duke (Williams) who apparently is the only one who knows how to stop Jason. At the beginning of the film he offers his services to a TV station for $500,000 and they accept. All he has at his disposal is one tiny bit of information that he has culled from some source or another. That’s all he has although it does turn out to be a very valuable piece of info. It’s just not worth the money he demands from his potential client. So, he stands on the sidelines as Jessica goes about doing her business with the magic dagger. We know its magic because green light surrounds it when she picks it up. This also occurs whenever Jason transplants his heart into another body. It’s corny and turns the film into something completely outside the realm populated by the earlier films in the series.
Overall, the film isn’t as scary as it ought to be. The premise is fairly sound and there are plenty of opportunities to create a brutal, uncompromising film experience but it just never quite turns out that way. It’s comical in a way that the film makers most likely never intended although the men who are the recipients of Jason’s heart look like proper zombies with their mouths caked in blood and their frenetic killing styles. Ultimately, there is nothing in this film that requires Jason’s presence whatsoever. It could have been made with an entirely different character. It’s a Friday the 13th film without its star player and the result is entirely underwhelming.
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