Review #393: Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)
October 2026 Horror Reviews #21 - Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter is the fourth of twelve movies in the Friday the 13th franchise, and marks a big turning point in the series (which will become relevant in the next couple entries, but I do have some things to say about it in this review). Like Part III, this movie begins pretty much immediately where the last one left off, with the hulking killer Jason waking up in the county morgue, killing a couple people, and then escaping. Meanwhile, a group of college students are heading out to a rented lakehouse near Crystal Lake, and befriend their neighbor Trish and her little brother Tommy. They throw a party, and wouldn't you know it- Jason shows up, as does Rob, a man seeking revenge after the death of his sister back in Part 2. Will this saga come to a close, with Jason's death at the hands of an unexpected hero? Or will they manage to find several more movies at the bottom of this well? Tune in to find out!
I'm going to get my overall opinion out right now: I love this movie. I think this is the best of the Friday movies (with the only real contender in my mind being the 2009 remake, which admittedly I haven't seen in a VERY long time) and it's got so many things going on, and all of them are good. Mainly, I love the characters. Crispin Glover is perfect as the "dead fuck" Jimmy, and his obnoxious friend Ted and his invisible computer provides one of the movie's many fun sideplots. Trish and Tommy give a really interesting perspective, in that of a family who lives in the area and isn't just here to have a good time- and the two of them become the main focus of the climax of the movie (and more to come). Rob was a fascinating addition to the story as well, being a person with ties to the previous movies and with a vendetta to take care of (which paints him as a little bit of a mysterious figure for the first half of the film). There's other memorable characters too, which is great because I don't think there's a single bad, boring, or poorly-written one in the whole bunch! That's WAY more than I can say about any of the other movies so far. This movie isn't perfect but spoilers, it's gonna be a 10/10.
There's a couple things I wanted to talk about next- not necessarily complaints, just some things about this series that don't really make sense, and which become pretty apparent in this entry: first is the timeline, and second is whatever TF Jason is.
First, the timeline. Each of the last two movies happened within a couple days of this one- Part 2 takes place a few years (I think?) after Part 1, but then Part 3 and Part 4 each start off with characters seeing news coverage of the previous movie, so at absolute most we're looking at maaaaybe a week passing between the start of Part 2 and the end of Part 4. (Probably closer to 4 days.) That really messes with a few things in this movie- Rob is out hunting after the man who killed his sister Sandra, which happened in Part 2. So, despite the movie treating him like a grizzled outdoorsman who has been on this long journey driven by years of hate (which makes sense since that movie came out three years previous), she died less than a week ago. (He also has a bunch of old newspaper clippings about Jason's many kills, which, again, all occurred in the previous week.) And while we're on the subject of the timeline, I just want to point out- the series title makes no sense. In the first movie Pamela said Jason's birthday was Friday the 13th (which is itself kind of nonsense because your birthday isn't tied to a day of the week, as it would be different every year- but whatever, she was a nutjob) but I think the implication is that the movie takes place on a Friday the 13th. But even if that's true, which of these past three movies took place on a Friday? At most the answer is one of them, since each one takes place the day or two after the previous one. So does the title actually mean anything?
The other thing I want to talk about is: WTF is Jason? In later entries (spoilers) he will explicitly be brought back as a supernatural zombie, but so far, by most metrics he seems to be an ordinary living human. Yes he's incredibly resilient (as is the case for all slasher villains, whether they are explicitly supernatural or not), and he has a particular knack for being mistaken for dead (which he even had as a child, somehow causing his mother to go on a twenty-year revenge mission for his death, despite I guess never actually dying), but apart from that, he bleeds, he vocalizes when he's hurt, and- again, spoilers for the end of this movie and beginning of next one- he actually dies for real in this movie. I mentioned back in my Part 2 review that this series is playing fast and loose with the continuity, but people have spent decades trying to reconcile these seemingly-extraordinary things Jason does, with many people insisting that he's been dead ever since he drowned as a child (somehow aging up to adulthood despite this setback), which would definitely explain why he keeps getting back up after seemingly being killed (with this movie's instance being the most absurd, with him being taken to the county morgue and then just getting up and walking out)- but if he's always been unkillable, how did Tommy Jarvis, a 12-year-old kid played by tiny Corey Feldman of all people, manage to kill him for real? It's not like Tommy did anything supernatural to break the spell animating him, he just hit him with machete a bunch of times. (If I were the writer and someone put a gun to my head and told me to reconcile this, I would say that maybe Jason's animating force is tied to his mental state, and he was put so off-balance mentally by Tommy pretending to be a younger Jason that it stopped his regeneration or whatever. But if that's what the writer had in mind, it most certainly didn't make it down onto the page.) Basically, if Jason IS supernatural, his supernaturality has no consistent rules and the writers just have it work however they feel like at that moment.
Anyway, just to reiterate, I really, really, really like this movie. I think it would have been a fantastic ending for the series (and seemed to be written and titled as such), but I'm fine with it continuing on. I'll have more thoughts on that in the next couple reviews.
Overall Rating: 10/10 Naughty Film Reels
Additional Media: I can't recall if I've mentioned this in any of my previous reviews, but if you like podcasts, tabletop RPGs, and Friday the 13th, have I got a recommendation for you! There's a podcast called The Film Reroll, where the hosts play through the plot of popular movies as tabletop roleplaying games, improvising their way whenever the characters deviate from what happens in the movie. It's quite a good show, and they've covered some great movies over the years- including Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter! But the best part is, the GM lied to the players and told them they were going to be playing through an 80s teen sex comedy movie called "Summerspell"- only for them to discover, much too late, that there was a hockey-masked killer coming for them instead. You can listen to it here!
Next Up: Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)!
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