ROANOKE TIMES 

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, August 14, 1993                   TAG: 9308140144
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: B7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: STEPHEN HOLDEN NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

THE LAST OF JASON . . . AT LONG LAST

Although the movie's final image of a pitchforked hand thrust up through the ground hints otherwise, "Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday," which opened Friday in Roanoke, claims to be absolutely the last in the "Friday the 13th" horror series. It's about time.

The ninth episode in the phenomenally successful series, which began in 1980, "The Final Friday" is a largely incoherent movie that generates little suspense and relies for the majority of its thrills on close-up gore. Most of the grosser images in the film, which was directed by Adam Marcus, come near the beginning, not long after Jason Voorhees, the series' hockey-masked fiend, is dismembered by a squad of machine gun-toting police.

Cut up and splayed like a giant charred pork roast in the autopsy room of the Federal Morgue, Jason seems well beyond repair. Then suddenly his extracted heart begins to beat. The coroner, who was analyzing the organ, becomes transfixed and grabs the heart, cramming it into his mouth. With many flashes of lightning, Jason is reborn in the coroner's body.

Once back in action, the unstoppable serial killer heads straight for - where else? - his hometown of Crystal Lake, where the local restaurant is foolhardy enough to be advertising a "Jason Is Dead 2 for 1 Burger Sale." Over the the next few days, Jason inhabits one body after another, transferring from person to person in a messy ritual that might be described as a forced mouth-to-mouth heart transplant.

The only person possessing the secret to Jason's undoing is Creighton Duke (Steven Williams), a glowering professional bounty hunter, who has been studying Jason for years.

Creighton becomes involved after a tabloid television show offers a $500,000 reward for Jason's demise. In order to learn Creighton's secrets, Steven Freeman (John D. LeMay), who leads the anti-Jason forces, must allow Creighton to break several of his fingers.

Such gratuitous sadism gives "The Final Friday" an edge of sourness that is unusual for a horror movie. It doesn't help that Jason's intended victims (and the actors who play them) are pallid sitting ducks.

\ "Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday"

Showing at Valley View Mall 6 and Tanglewood Mall. Rated R for violence and nudity. 88 minutes. 


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