The movie Roger Ebert called an “immoral, reprehensible piece of trash” and a danger to society
While it’s true that certain movies have the power to impact society, for better or worse, Roger Ebert might have been overstating things when he suggested that a shoddy horror sequel could wield the same kind of power over its captive audience.
The critic was never the biggest fan of the genre to begin with, and many of his most vicious reviews were reserved for horror flicks that placed violence, gore, and bloodshed at the forefront at the expense of any sense of plot, character, or artistic achievement, so you could say he already had an axe to grind.
Not that he was necessarily anti-horror, though; Ebert appreciated, enjoyed, and occasionally even adored some of the entries that he found to succeed as both scary stories and works of cinema, but when it came to hack-and-slash fodder that didn’t have anything to say, he was usually left indignant.
From the outside looking in, the fourth instalment in a franchise that had already run out of gas wouldn’t leap out to anyone as being a menace to society. He would disagree, considering his overriding assessment of 1984’s Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter wasn’t too dissimilar from Helen Lovejoy’s signature refrain in The Simpsons: “Won’t somebody please think of the children???”
Starting his review off on the right foot, Ebert declared director Frank Mancuso Jr’s second consecutive Jason Voorhees-led nightmare to be “an immoral and reprehensible piece of trash”, one that left him in a state of despair for the generation’s youth after it scored the highest-grossing opening weekend of the year.
“That is a very, very depressing commentary,” he intoned after sharing that it had sold more tickets than any other release of 1984 up until that point. “Really, makes me sad to think of all those moviegoers spending four and a half, five bucks, most of them teenage kids, sitting there watching this sad, cynical, depressing movie.”
As is the standard practice of any Friday the 13th movie, The Final Chapter, which obviously wasn’t the final chapter when they made another seven of them, and a crossover with Freddy Krueger, finds Jason defeating death, escaping a morgue, and then murdering the shit out of anyone in his path at Camp Crystal Lake.
“90 minutes of teenagers being strangled, stabbed, impaled, chopped up, and mutilated, that’s all this movie is; just mindless bloody violence,” Ebert added, even if it’s 91 minutes if you want to nit-pick. Beyond the endless slaughter, he was genuinely concerned that the impressionable youth would leave their showings with a new, nihilistic outlook on life.
“Just think of the message this film offers to its teenage audience,” he lamented. “The world is a totally evil place, this movie says; it’ll kill you.”
Obviously, and thankfully, to be honest, that didn’t happen, and The Final Chapter had all but been forgotten by the time A New Beginning arrived the following year, creating the impression that the critic may have been clutching at pearls that weren’t even there.
