Friday the 13th Part 4 tried to change the formula by having Tommy kill Jason and then having weird hints at the end that maybe this act fucked up Tommy and maybe something weird would happen with him. It was The Final Chapter, and thus you can close the book on the series and all is fine. Right? Well, it succeeded at the box office, and some bureaucrat looked at the bottom line and said, "Well shit, let's have another one come out!" (actual quote)
How to do this...how to do it. Well the clear answer would seem to me, the pedestrian, fast forward 6-10 years, have Tommy Jarvis in a psyche ward, mentally unstable since the Jason incident, plagued by visions of Jason. Have Jason start killing people in the psyche ward, eventually reveal it is Tommy who's actually been doing the killings because he is either 1) completely insane with dual personality whatever or 2) being infested by Jason's ghost which he eventually casts out of himself to face off in the last few moments of the film. But the actual movie we get? I never saw this coming.
Tommy is a slightly shifty 20's guy now, living with some other disturbed individuals in some sort of forest hangout where they are supposedly being treated. In the meantime, somewhere random nearby (honestly, where the fuck is any of this in relation to other things?) a guy goes nuts and hacks a fat obnoxious dude to death with an ax. Pretty soon Jason is on the loose, killing some random people that are around.
One notices a few differences in this movie right away. First of all, nothing is fully explained, to the point of wondering, like I said earlier, where the hell is all this taking place, where is everything in relation to other locations, etc. Tommy and company are in some commune home, and obnoxious fat guy dies in some other home, are they the same? Certainly doesn't seem like it. When Jason begins his kills, sometimes it's just people he happens upon, such as two guys fixing an engine, or a black guy and his girlfriend hanging out in a van. Also, the nudity is amped way up. Another thing I noticed, we as the audience hardly ever see Jason for the first hour or so unless it's in a dream.
Well, spoilers I guess. They were trying to change the franchise much like last time, and they decided to do it by having the main villain NOT be Jason. He wears a hockey mask, and kills people, but that's the only similarity. Once we see Jason, it's pretty clear that he looks different. It's a different mask, it doesn't have the trademark "machete notch" in it. Maybe a picture would explain:
To the right here is Jason from Friday part 4, with the red triangle on the mask, and the huge cut in the top of the mask. Above is Jason from part 5, with blue triangles on the mask and no machete blade mark on the mask. I notice these things, home boy.
Anyways, Jason clearly looks different. He acts about the same though, except towards the end when he is chasing people, it seems he takes a little bit more pain and notice as he gets injured by the would be victims. In the end, it shows Jason was in fact the father of the fat kid that died randomly in the beginning, and I guess he adopted the mask to exact revenge?
This one was the first to feel like not a great slasher. It felt formulaic, it felt like the tone was off. It didn't have a lot of great kills, and it for sure felt exploitative with the amount of unnecessary nudity. I didn't mind those things, but then in the end to find out it's not Jason as well? I felt vaguely cheated! It begs the question: Why not call it something else? Why did they call Halloween 3 Season of the Witch the same name, pretend it had anything to do with Halloween? It's a different story! I mean, I know realistically why they did these things, but it seems like such a weird idea. Were they actually hurt by the bad reviews or by the idea they weren't making a "good" movie? I mean, any franchise nowadays that achieves even a modicum of success hops on that sweet gravy train as fast as possible.
It's not the worst movie ever, certainly still an 80's slasher of the kind one would expect. I can't give it much less than a 2, but I'm only gonna give it a 2.5 I think. It felt very "by the numbers". Also, completely can be ignored within the series as it has nothing to do with the others. I also just noticed that this is directed by the same guy that did The Unseen. Weird. It makes sense, they both feel oddly disjointed and have issues.
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