Friday the 13th Part 4 (1984) review.

With Part 3 being a major success, another movie was commissioned. Sensing the changing public tastes, with most 1982 and 1983 slasher movies being released to little financial success, and a growing moral backlash towards slasher movies, the producers figured that Part 4 might be the last. Thus, it's title: The Final Chapter. Naturally it made so much money that more films were made, but in a sense, it is the Final Chapter. How so? It's the last movie in the original run of F13 movies to feature a human Jason. It's the last movie to feature even the tiniest bit of Seventies influence (Part 4 was shot in late 1983). It's the last movie with FX by Tom Savini. It's the last movie to not bear any big influence from mainstream or MTV culture.

Not that we got that out of our system, onto the plot....Such as it is. Jason has been hauled away to the local morgue, apparently presumed dead. One crass morgue worker thinks there's no better time to make a pass at a nurse, who rejects his advances when the "corpse" of Jason lays a hand on the nurse. Several moments later, Jason butchers them both and hightails it out of the morgue (how he does this undetected is not revealed), from whence he decides to......Stalk ANOTHER group of teens, who happen to be near a single mom led family of three. You can imagine what happens next.....

With, AGAIN, practically the same plot as the earlier movies, how does this one fare? Pretty good, actually. It's shot in CA, again, but at least they chose better looking locations this time (plus they use an actual lake in this one). While I would argue that there's less suspense in this one than in the first three, Director Joe Zito still conjures a very dark mood and he got some very good performances from his actors. Among whom you have Corey Feldman and Crispin Glover, who are effortlessly watchable. The other actors aren't as notable, but they still do their jobs well. Due to the acting and writing, this entry has perhaps the best characterization of the original series. Really, think about it: it can't be easy to flesh out characters in a 90 minute movie where each character is usually going to be killed off at some point.

The MPAA went pretty easy on the movie's FX, maybe because Tom Savini blackmailed them (Part 2, 5, 6, and 7 each got hit pretty hard by the censors).

Overall score: 9/10