Ugh. Thank heaven this is the "final Friday," although after the "final chapter" I'm not sure I believe it. You wouldn't think a divergence from the lame Friday formula would be unwelcome, but "Jason Goes To Hell" manages to come up with something worse. From the looks of it, director Andrew Marcus showed up on the set on day, blew his nose, sent the tissue to the editing room, and called it a wrap. This is the most shameless of the series, the most graphic, the most sickening, the most tasteless, and the most gooey. There's pointless gore all over the place in this flick. At one point, a guy melts into silly putty for no good reason.

Jason's death at the end of Part VIII is wisely ignored. We open with him getting blown to pieces. But, wonder of all wonders, Jason was never human after all (well, we kind of suspected that), he's actually a snakelike gremlin alien lizard who burrows into people's bodies. What's more, there's one guy on the planet who inexplicably knows all about Jason, what he is, what he's capable of, and how to kill him once and for all. It seems Jason needs the body of a member of the Voorhees family to be "reborn" in something that looks like his old body, but if one of the Voorhees family stabs him with a magic knife that this inexplicable know-it-all character pulled out of nowhere, he'll die. This magic knife has special properties: if a Voorhees holds it, it turns into a sword.

No, I'm not kidding about any of this, and this isn't a swords-n-sorcery movie, either. The screenwriters were sure down to the dregs of their ideas and would have done far better -- I can't believe I'm going to say this -- to recycle the same old "Jason kills people" formula again. They did it eight times -- would a ninth have hurt? Well, yes, but not as much.

This know-it-all character is stupidly weird. He enters a restaurant where people are celebrating Jason's death (this is just after he was blown up) and orders a Voorhees burger and Jason fries. (Har har!!) He starts talking all doomy, and the police cart him off. There he is soon joined by Male Lead, accused of a murder Jason committed (using a different body). Male Lead asks for information, but Know-It-All needs payment first. The payment is that Male Lead must let Know-It-All break his finger.

Whoa. Hold on. Stop right there. I'm not sure what anybody was thinking, but if I were sitting in a cell adjacent to a guy who would provide information in exchange for letting him break my finger, I'd be spending a lot of time on the far side of the cell. There's no indication whatsoever that the guy knows anything useful (and the movie never explains how or why he does), and anybody who would find the privilege of breaking a finger satisfactory payment is psychotic anyway. But Male Lead doesn't have much common sense, and he lets the guy break not one but two of his fingers in exchange for the secret to Jason's vulnerability. And he believes him.

So Male Lead escapes from jail. In the process, he lingers overlong in the police station, firing shots at Jason, who happens to be hanging around. After much shooting and screaming and killing, only then do the cops at the station come charging in from the next room to see what's going on. By then, Male Lead is long gone.

He finds Female Lead, who is the last adult Voorhees family member alive. He has a time of it explaining the situation, but eventually they go track down her baby, who was left in the care of the people who run that restaurant that was serving the Voorhees burgers. Inexplicably, the lady refuses to hand over the baby to its mother, even amidst the mother's viciously angry demands. Why, you ask? Because it creates Plot Tension, as the police and Jason are both on their way. Yeesh.

Suddenly, after all they've been through and all the efforts he's undergone to find Female Lead and stick with her, Male Lead runs off to "get help." (From WHOM??? Everybody's DEAD, and the remaining police are after them.) This provides Female Lead with a plot-needed opportunity to take off to a spooky old house without him. This house is insane. The floor is strong enough to hold dust, and that's about it -- except when the plot requires it to be strong enough to hold people running and jumping and crashing to the floor in combat. At other times, people fall through the floor at well-calculated "random" intervals, even when all they're doing is standing around. And the magic knife (remember that?) is apparently so heavy that when it lies on the floor, it breaks the wood underneath it and tumbles to the cellar all by itself.

In the final battle, Male Lead and Jason (reborn by taking over the body of Female Lead's dead mother) duke it out while Female Lead is trying to find that silly knife sword. Because Male Lead is supposed to live, Jason is unable to kill him when he has the guy's head in his grasp, unlike the countless previous times where he could kill instantly and effortlessly, with less of a grip. No, this time Jason is only able to throw the guy around. Finally Female Lead comes out with the knife sword and stabs him. All the fireworks escape from his body, and ugly Muppet hands drag him down to hell.

Rating: 1 turkey. No outright laughs, just a lot of nonsense with any potential for amusement crushed under the weight of its brooding meanspiritedness.

The final, closing shot is the single entertaining shot of the whole movie. And it's quite an interesting and surprising shot. I am not so cruel as to make anyone suffer through this snot of a movie just to get to it, so...SPOILER WARNING...

IF YOU PLAN ON WATCHING THIS MOVIE EVER, AGAINST MY SINCERE EFFORTS TO DISSUADE YOU, DO NOT READ FURTHER. After the ugly Muppet hands have taken Jason down to hell, we watch Male and Female Lead walk off together. The music gets all lovey-dovey, which means there will be one last gimmicky scare. We zoom in on the spot where Jason was sucked down, and the wind uncovers the hockey mask. Suddenly, Freddy Krueger's knife-blade hand pops up out of the ground, grabs the mask, and pulls it down. The shot HARDLY makes up for the tortorous drivel that preceeds it, but it was a neat if gimmicky gesture.