Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (Stephenverse)

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (or known as Friday the 13th: Part IV - The Final Chapter) is a 1984 American slasher horror film directed by Joseph Zito, produced by Frank Mancuso Jr., and starring Kimberly Beck, Corey Feldman, Crispin Glover, and Ted White. It is the fourth and the final installment in the Friday the 13th franchise. Picking up immediately after the events of Part III, the plot follows a presumed-dead Jason Voorhees (White) who escapes from the morgue and returns to Crystal Lake to continue his killing spree.

Mancuso Jr. wanted to conclude the series as he felt nobody respected him for his assisting work on the series regardless of how much the films earned at the box office, as well as wanting to work on other projects. Paramount Pictures supported the decision, as they were aware of the declining popularity of slasher films at the time of its release. As a result, the film was marketed as "The Final Chapter" to ensure it as such. Make-up artist Tom Savini, who worked on the first film, returned because he wanted to help kill off Jason, whom he helped create.

The film was originally scheduled to be released in October, but was pushed up to April 13, 1984. Upon its theatrical release, the film grossed $33 million in the U.S. on a budget of $2.2 million, making it the fourth most attended of the Friday the 13th series with approximately 9,815,700 tickets sold. The film received generally mixed reviews from critics but received positive reviews from audiences and fans of the franchise, at the time of release, in retrospectively, it is come to be considered one of the best in the series.

Plot
The day after the events of the third film, police and paramedics are busy cleaning up the mess deformed mass murderer Jason Voorhees left at Higgins Haven, including the defeated hockey-masked killer himself. Two paramedics deliver Jason's corpse to the Wessex County morgue. But afterwords, it turns out that Jason is still alive. He rises, kills morgue doctor, Axel (Bruce Mahler), by slicing and breaking his neck with a hacksaw and then kills Nurse Morgan (Lisa Freeman) with a stomach stab, and heads back to Crystal Lake. Meanwhile, a group of friends named Paul (Alan Hayes), Samantha (Judie Aronson), Sara (Barbara Howard), Doug (Peter Barton), Ted (Lawrence Monoson), and Jimmy (Crispin Glover) have rented a house on Crystal Lake. On the way there, the group passes Mrs. Voorhees' tombstone and a female hitchhiker (Bonnie Hellman), after the group drives off the hitchhiker becomes Jason's next victim, stabbed in the throat while eating a banana. Next to the rental house is the Jarvis home. The group meets 17-year-old Trish Jarvis (Kimberly Beck) and her 11-year-old younger brother Tommy (Corey Feldman) when they arrive. The teenages have an evening and night of fun which nothing happens. Trish wants to go over to the house where the group is, but her mother (Joan Freeman) forbids her from doing so. Tommy, a video game addict, spends the evening in his room playing Atari games and making latex masks as his hobby.

The next day, the group befriends two British-accented twin teenage girls Tina (Camilla More) and Terri (Carey More), who live in the area, and they all go skinny dipping at Crystal Point. Trish and Tommy, driving by, stop to see who's at Crystal Point and the group invites Trish to a party that night. Trish's car breaks down a bit further along the road, and they are helped by Rob (E.Erich Anderson), a hiker with mysterious reasons for visiting Crystal Lake, who soon becomes good friends with Trish and Tommy. Next door, the kids are enjoying themselves by dancing and listening to music. With four girls and four boys, each now has a date. However conflict ensues as some of the kids switch dates. These conflicts prove to be the least of their troubles as Jason predictably stalks and kills them one by one. Samantha goes out skinny-dipping and is impaled from under a raft. When Paul goes out to be with her, he finds her nude dead body in the raft and while swimming back to shore, he is stabbed in the groin with a spear.

When it begins to rain, Terri decides to leave early and is about to get on her bicycle but has a spear rammed into her back. After having sex with Tina, Jimmy decides to celebrate with a carefree bottle of wine. While searching for a corkscrew in the kitchen, Jason emerges and slams the corkscrew into Jimmy's hand and then drives a meat cleaver into his face. Upstairs, Tina looks out the window where she is grabbed and thrown two stories down landing on the car. While a stoned Ted watches vintage 1910s stag films, he gets too close to the projector screen and is stabbed in the head with a kitchen knife though the screen from the other side. After Doug and Sara finish making love in the shower, Jason attacks Doug and crashes his head against the shower tile. He then kills Sara by driving an axe through the front door when she tries to escape. At the Jarvis house, Trish and Tommy find their mother missing, so Trish goes to Rob for help. Rob explains that he's looking to get revenge for the death of his sister, Sandra Dyer. Trish and Rob take Gordon (the Jarvis family dog) next door to see what's going on.

Tommy is left at home, and finds Rob's newspaper articles about Jason. At the house, a frightened Gordon jumps though a second story window and flees. Jason kills Rob, and Trish flees back to her home intending to warn Tommy. After a long chase in and between the houses, Tommy shaves his head and makes himself up to look like Jason, which is effective in distracting Jason long enough for Trish to be able to attack him with his machete. She just misses him, but manages to knock the hockey mask off his face. Horrified by Jason's appearance, she drops the machete to the floor. Tommy picks it up and swings it at Jason's head. Jason then falls to the floor, causing the machete to dig further into his head. As he embraces his sister, Tommy sees Jason begin to move, loses control and, hacks Jason repeatedly with the machete, while Trish screams his name. The final scene of the film has Tommy visiting Trish in the hospital, and they embrace as they believe their nightmare is finally over forever, giving Tommy a hug as the film fades to black.

Cast

 * Corey Feldman as Tommy Jarvis
 * Kimberly Beck as Trish Jarvis
 * E. Erich Anderson as Rob Dier
 * Barbara Howard as Sara
 * Joan Freeman as Tracy Jarvis
 * Peter Barton as Doug
 * Crispin Glover as Jimmy
 * Judie Aronson as Samantha
 * Camilla and Carey More as Tina and Terri
 * Lawrence Monoson as Ted
 * Alan Hayes as Paul
 * Bruce Mahler as Axel
 * Lisa Freeman as Nurse Robbie Morgan
 * Bonnie Hellman as Hitchhiker
 * Ted White as Jason Voorhees (uncredited)

Production
When Friday the 13th Part III was released, it was initially supposed to end the series as a trilogy, however there was no moniker to indicate it as such. In 1983, there were rumors that Paramount Pictures billed the fourth film as "The Final Chapter" as a result of them feeling embarrassed by their association with the series. Despite how Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel claimed this in their review of the film on At the Movies]], Paramount Pictures was aware that the slasher genre had been declining in interest. However, the idea came from producer Frank Mancuso, Jr. (the son of Paramount CEO Frank Mancuso, Sr.) as he began to resent the series due to how he felt nobody respected him for working on Friday the 13th Part 2 as a production assistant and Part III as producer, regardless of how much money the films earned. As a result of this and him wanting to work on different projects, he wanted to conclude the series by killing off Jason.

Box office
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter opened on Friday, April 13, 1984, on 2,436 screens and grossed $21.7 million in its opening weekend, this was the third-highest of the year, ranking number one at the box office. The film would ultimately take in $92.5 million at the U.S. box office, placing number 26 on the list of the year's top-grossing films.

Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter holds an approval rating of 60% based on 68 reviews, with an average rating of 6.2/10. The site's critics consensus reads: "As lumberingly single-minded as its homicidal star, Friday the 13th - The Final Chapter adds another rote entry to an increasingly labored franchise."

On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 40/100, based on ten critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews."

In a series retrospective, Kyle Anderson of Entertainment Weekly ranked it the best Friday the 13th film, complimenting both its narrative and kills.

Difference compared to the real-life release

 * The film was actually well-received rather than genreally well-recieved.
 * The film lasts over 2 hours, instead of 91 minutes long.
 * In addition, the film uses extra scenes which were cut from real life release.
 * The film's ending is emotional (similar to Blow Out's ending) instead of a creepy ending.