“Freeze! Get the hell away from her, Ed!”
The iconic slasher villain Jason Voorhees was, like Michael Myers from the “Halloween” series, defined in part by his silence. The first eight “Friday the 13th” films only showed him talking as a child, when he was drowning to death while camp counselors took busy having sex ignored his cries for help. Once he became a slasher villain, however, he became a mute. It made him more intimidating because you couldn’t hear what he was thinking, just as his masks (from a bag to the better-known hockey goalie mask) scared you because you couldn’t see his facial expressions.
“Jason Goes To Hell” disregards all of that. The lore of the first eight movies — that Jason is a supernatural killer motivated by a desire to avenge his mother, who died at the end of the first film because she wanted to avenge him — is completely swept aside. Even Kane Hodder, who played Jason in four of the series’ films (making him the only actor to portray him more than once), is underserved. He was the best Jason of them all, yet here he is absent in the role except in the opening and final scenes. (He also has a brief cameo as a Jason victim, which is a nice touch.)
“Friday the 13th” movies are like the James Bond films: They work precisely because you stick to a lore and add your own little variations. If you hew too closely to your predecessors, your movie fails because it lacks originality, but if you stray too far from the franchise’s roots, people will feel like they were on the wrong end of a bait-and-switch.
It’s a shame too because there is a lot to like in “Jason Goes To Hell.” It has likable characters, a kickass opening scene, haunting cinematography and great practical effects for its gorier scenes. Yet it feels less like a “Friday the 13th” film than a completely separate horror story grafted onto a “Friday the 13th” template. It’s one thing to experiment with the series’ formula by having it revealed that he was actually be impersonated by a different character, or by pitting him against a girl with telekinetic powers, or by sending him on a cruise ship, or by playfully poking fun at the formula while amping it up. This is what happened in the fifth, seventh, eighth and sixth films, respectively.
This, on the other hand, takes things too far. The new lore created for Jason doesn’t even make a great deal of sense. One character seems to know everything about how to stop Jason, but it is never explained how he came across his information. Backstories were clearly cut for specific characters that make moments which would otherwise close narrative arcs instead feel arbitrary. And the rules behind the body-switching premise are never explained. It’s bad enough to create a mythos that completely ignores the previous movies; it’s worse when that mythos isn’t even compelling in its own right.
While I try to judge movies based on a number of variables, this is one of those occasions in which a single big problem overwhelms my ability to appreciate anything else. If “Jason Goes To Hell” had been a standalone film, it might have worked; as a “Friday the 13th” movie, it sucks.
Oh, and that opening quote? Those are the first words and only words that Jason ever speaks as a slasher villain, and he only does so because the filmmakers wanted to briefly trick the audience about whose body he was occupying. I’m sure that was worth it.