Jason was dead, to begin with.
The Final Chapter (which, now, it clearly wasn't) opens with a mega flashback compilation covering all the earlier Friday The 13th films to bring us up to speed
Then the action picks up from end of Part Three with the police taking away the bodies, including Jason, from the farmstead massacre.
Jason (Ted White) is taken to the morgue of the local hospital where he comes under the care of sleazy Axel (Bruce Mahler) the mortuary technician, and before you know, without any explanation, Jason suddenly springs back to life and begins his slaughtering ways again... this time (presumably now) as a zombie, of sorts.
He returns to his old stomping ground of Crystal Lake, homing in on a couple of lakeside properties - one where hot single mum, Mrs Jarvis (Joan Freeman) and her two kids, Trish (Kimberly Beck) and Tommy (Corey Feldman), and their Golden retriever Gordon, are staying, the other being a newly-rented property with its mandatory collection of - surprise, surprise - horny, stereotypical teens (this time including a gloriously scenery-chewing Crispin Glover).
Seemingly taking place just a day (maybe two) after the massacre in Part Three - and we know it's made the headlines in the local newspaper and on television - all the locals seem remarkably blasé about the whole horrorshow in Barney Cohen's script.
I think it probably says something about my age that of all the attractive characters in the cast, the one I find most appealing is the mother, Mrs Jarvis (who doesn't even merit a first name or an onscreen death!)
There's a teensy-weensy more flesh on display in The Final Chapter, as well as (shock, horror) a smattering of f-bombs, but director Joseph Zito drops the ball when it comes to pacing. It really lags in the middle third and you find yourself yearning for Jason and his violent behaviour.
What the hell is going on here???
While the seminal slasher does make some creative use of props as murder weapons, The Final Chapter is most memorable for a couple of really peculiar sequences: namely the Crispin Glover dance scene and then the "clever" way Corey Feldman tricks Jason in the final act.
Goofy young Tommy Jarvis is some kind of child prodigy, at the age of about twelve he's able to fix car engines and house electrics, as well as make B-movie quality horror masks.
And yet none of this really plays into his final trick - which, in a way, emulates Ginny's deception in Part Two (but Tommy is pretending to be "young Jason" while she was being "mother").
Despite this being the first part of the saga where Jason was clearly meant to be more than human, a supernatural killer returned from the grave, I found The Final Chapter the least engaging of the franchise so far, because of the erratic quality of its direction.
The one possibly interesting aspect, that has been a feature of all the films in some shape or form, but is possibly more overt with Tommy is the psychological damage that surviving an encounter with Jason does to people.
All the main, last, survivors of the films have suffered terrifying hallucinations or delusions of one form or another.
Is there some sort of support group they could join?
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