31 Days, 31 Horror Movies: Jason Goes to Hell

I'm stumbling to the end of my Friday the 13th marathon feelling like there's a hatchet in my brain (another migraine). I made it as far as Jason Goes to Hell and I think - unfortunately - I'm going to take some time before watching the rest. I will watch them - but I need a break after the last two films. While I was able to find details in them that I could enjoy I can honestly say I (mostly) hated those movies, and they left a bad mental taste in my brain that is threatening to color my memory of the whole series.

Jason Goes to Hell (1993)
You know, I think there's a universe where this isn't a Friday the 13th movie and it's become a cult hit. Body hopping serial killer with a magic bloodline and a character like Duke hunting him? Those crazy folks at the diner? The gore and nudity? Yeah, this is someone's favorite horror movie in another timeline.

But not this one.

Things start of promisingly enough - a return to the classic formula: a woman heads to Crystal Lake (no longer Forest Green, I see) alone. Not a particularly bright person, you might think - I mean, at this point the place has got to be pretty famous. Still - this is a Friday the 13th movie and this is kinda thing is to be expected. Sure enough, Jason shows up, looking none the worse for wear since being melted in a New York sewer. He attacks, she flees, he follows - right into an FBI ambush. Nice try FBI guys! It's going to take more than bullets to take down...

Oh. Rocket launcher. Yeah, that uh, that seems to do the trick.

Well, thank God that's over. Who's up for a beer?

Well, okay, I guess we'll see where this goes. Maybe there's a cool scene in the morgue where Jason's constituent bits all come back together, leaving him with like a jigsaw puzzle and... ah, geez, what? That's not sanitary doc. So the coroner eats Jason's heart and Jason possesses him? But it's still Jason! See, there's his reflection in the...

My god, this movie. I mean, on one level I appreciate the complete chutzpah it has, to take a well established series and just throw everything about it out the window. To make things up out of whole cloth. There's a Voorhees family now? And a Voorhees house that's not the shack from Part 2? Is this Halloween?! And Jason's a body-jumping slug right out of The Hidden? And mystical bloodline nonsense. And this crazy cowboy guy who trades finger breaking for information? And the nebishy guy with the letter jacket is the hero?

If this looks stupid to you... you're right.

On the plus side, the gore quotient is significantly upped in this installment. I mean, I've only seen the unrated DVD, so I imagine it was cut a bit in the theater, but still - that whole eating the heart scene, the poor woman who gets cut in half by a road sign, whatever the hell that thing is that crawls out of the reporters neck. The movie gets some points for imaginative squick, for sure.

But it's just... it's such a mess. Such a weird, nonsensical mess. I don't even care when Freddy's gloved hand appears at the end, I'm so confused and pissed about the new 'mythology' crap. Not a good start, New Line (who ended up with the series after Paramount saw the returns on Jason Takes Manhattan). No wonder it would be 8 years before we'd get another Friday film and 10 before Jason and Freddy finally faced off.

But hey, at least we got some comic books out of it.
Which I now need to find because I'm a masochist, apparently

So, yeah. I know I have two more movies in the original series and one remake/relaunch/whatever it was, if I want to include that. It's... it's going to be a bit before I get to them. I promise it won't be 8 years, though.