Corey Feldman made his name
as the (let’s be honest) less attractive
of the two Corey’s, the other being the missing-in-action Corey
Haim. Together they ruled the hearts of pre-pubescent Eighties girls
with their smirking movie capers, making them the highest paid teenagers
in Hollywood history at the time.
However, let’s rewind. After several years of playing smart arse
kids on TV shows like Mork & Mindy and The Love Boat, Feldman landed
his first lead movie role in this, the fourth entry in the stubbornly
persistent Friday the 13th series, in which the 13-year-old Feldman pits
his plucky wits against the unstoppable juggernaut of unholy slaughter,
Jason Voorhees. Sadly, Feldman wins.
After a brief barrage of clips from the previous three movies, the optimistically
titled Final Chapter picks up right after Part 3, with Jason’s
supposedly deceased corpse being ferried to a local hospital. It takes
all of two minutes for the hulking killer to rise from the dead once
again, sawing the head off a horny morgue attendant and gutting his nurse
girlfriend into the bargain. He then stomps all the way back to Crystal
Lake, pausing only to ram his blade through the throat of a chubby hitchhiker.
This bracing dose of gratuitous bloody murder out of the way, we’re
then introduced to the nubile knife-fodder lined up for this adventure
in gore.
Despite Crystal Lake’s doubtlessly horrific reputation at this
point, having been the location of dozens of grisly deaths, we find another
carload of randy teenagers heading up to a house on the lake for a weekend
of beer and scandalous pre-martial sex. Among their number is a young
Crispin Glover, still a year away from finding some small measure of
fame as Marty McFly’s socially inept father in Back To The Future.
He’s playing an equally skittish and nervy geek in this movie as
well, so you just know that Jason has something special planned for him.
We also meet the Jarvis family – Trish, a tediously decent yet
startlingly hot young lady, her precocious little brother Tommy (Feldman)
and their struggling single mom. They live in the remote house opposite
the one rented by the bawdy teens, which at least means Jason doesn’t
have far to walk between slayings. We also meet Rob, the brother of one
of Jason’s victims from Part 2, who’s in the area armed with
a machete to find and slay the undead monster. Naïve idiot doesn’t
begin to cover it.
Following the obligatory twenty minutes of dull squabbling and shagging
from the cast, the stupid people finally start to do stupid things (case
in point: the girl who goes nude swimming in the dark), thus heralding
the long overdue arrival of Jason on the scene. He quickly makes up for
lost time, and gets to work slicing, crushing and impaling 99% of the
cast in an orgy of slaughter made possible by the often inventive gore
work of FX legend Tom Savini. Crispin Glover gets a messy demise involving
a corkscrew through the hand and a cleaver in the face. Jason later crucifies
his corpse, seemingly just for fun. Knives sink into skulls, axes thunk
into torsos and one poor horny sap takes a harpoon to the groin.
With Trish and Tommy the only ones left standing, they prepare for a
final standoff against Jason, but Trish clearly isn’t up to the
job. Luckily, young Tommy is a wannabe special effects guru and – working
with impossible speed and a convenient old newspaper clipping – he
shaves his head and makes himself up to look like the deformed child
that Jason used to be, back when he drowned in the lake. Meanwhile Voorhees
advances slowly on Tommy’s terrified sibling. Leaping down the
stairs with a cry of “Hey, Jason! Remember me?” the lumbering
Voorhees is naturally distracted by his miniature doppelganger. Well,
he has got maggots in his brain. Trish lunges forward with a machete,
but succeeds only in knocking Jason’s mask off, revealing the mutilated
features beneath. Being a girl, this makes her scream and drop the machete.
Tommy takes his cue, grabs the weapon and embeds it in the side of Jason’s
head. The killer topples over and, in a bravura piece of Savini FX work,
his impaled skull slides gorily down the blade. Just for good measure,
Tommy then hacks away at the corpse like a good ‘un, shrieking “Die!
Die! Die!” as he goes.
We cut to the local hospital, where Trish and Tommy are being cared for
after their ordeal. The doctor’s reassure Trish that Tommy acted
completely normally given the circumstances, and almost certainly won’t
suffer any lasting psychological damage from witnessing numerous visceral
murders and frantically slicing a zombie maniac to pieces, all at the
tender age of twelve years old. As the brother and sister embrace, the
ominous final shot of Tommy’s wild lunatic stare suggests otherwise.
Well, duh.
Need to know: Ted White, the bulky stunt man who portrayed Jason in Part
IV, asked that his name be removed from the credits, such was his dislike
for the relentlessly violent role. The Final Chapter subtitle proved,
of course, to be blatantly inaccurate – the franchise returned
the following year with the cleverly titled A New Beginning. Feldman
returned briefly as Tommy Jarvis for an opening dream sequence, before
bequeathing the role to John Sheperd as the now adult Tommy, locked away
at a remote halfway house for potential serial killers. Amazingly, people
start to die all over again. This entry proved controversial with fans,
when it was revealed at the climax that the killer wasn’t really
Jason Voorhees, but a local barmpot dressed up as him.
The Friday the
13th series would spawn another five sequels after that, culminating
in the futuristic carnage of Jason X in 2001. In 2003 the killer returned
in
the rather limp Freddy vs Jason, which pitted Voorhees against the demonic
dream killer from the Nightmare on Elm Street saga (see: Johnny
Depp,
Patricia Arquette, Laurence
Fishburne). At the time of writing, a new
Jason movie was being prepared for a 2009 release. For another star who
paid his dues in the Friday franchise, see: Kevin
Bacon.
Honourable mentions: Feldman made his big screen debut with a tiny role
as “Boy at Museum” in the 1979 film, Time After Time, in
which Jack the Ripper flees to modern day San Francisco using HG Wells’ time
machine. The classic author is forced to follow the killer to save the
day. It’s an insane premise, but the movie is well worth finding,
featuring as it does two superb performances from David Warner (as Jack)
and Malcolm McDowell (as Wells). Feldman’s career soared from 1985
through to 1989, clocking up major roles in critical and commercial hits
like Gremlins, Stand By Me, The Goonies and The Lost Boys, where he appeared
alongside Jason Patric and Corey Haim. In 1988 he re-teamed with his
fellow Corey for the teen comedy Licence To Drive, but the public had
already tired of their cheesy charms. After providing the voice for Donatello
in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie in 1990, Feldman’s career
sank into straight-to-video crap, while drug problems blighted his personal
life. His recent work includes such timeless classics as Puppet Master
vs Demonic Toys, Bikini Bandits and The Toxic Avenger 4 (see: Marisa
Tomei).
Availability: Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter is out on DVD
in the UK and US.
