Friday the 13th Part 4: Cowboy Jason Versus Corey Feldman

1984 is a year which stands out vividly in my memory. For some reason, my brain opened wide and sucked in external stimuli like a vacuum. I had a Walkman cassette deck and headphones on which I would constantly listen to songs I recorded off the radio. I had also discovered the joys of collecting vinyl. I purchased my first 45, Freak-A-Zoid by Midnight Star. Herbie Hancock’s Rock It was huge. Everyone wanted to be Michael Jackson because he was so awesome and all the cool kids were breaking and popping. I was popping out of my pants.

A girl upon whom I had a major crush pulled off my shorts in the public swimming pool and grabbed my penis. This awakened all sorts of funky feelings I wasn’t really understanding. My friends and I very much enjoyed exposing our parts to the local lasses (and to each other, for that matter), something for which a young man today would surely get sent to juvie. There was a crazy half hour show on Showtime called Aerobicize where three women, foxy and fit, would do aerobics wearing skimpy black bathing suit sorts of things. They’d bend over and bounce around a lot. There was a blond, a redhead, and a brunette. The show was crazy. I also discovered the music of Prince, songs about getting jacked off in a movie theater and fucking one’s sister. Holy shit! All these things were unbelievable to me. I thought I was living in a dream. My memories of the time still have a strange hallucinatory quality about them.

In Friday the 13th Part 4, Crispin Glover’s character says, “God I’m horny.” He was giving voice to something I just didn’t understand. I lived alone with my parents and they came from a world very different than that of the parents of the kids I knew at school. I didn’t have anyone to help me navigate the waters of my nascent sexuality. I was acting out of instinct which created a cycle of excitement, shame, and horror, feelings very much akin to my psychotronic film escapades.

I saw the commercial for Friday 4 on television. To me it was like seeing Jesus walking on water. A disembodied hockey mask zooms in. The credit, Friday the 13th comes up. Then the mask explodes and the words The Final Chapter fade in. I couldn’t believe it. I don’t think I was ever as excited about a movie as I was for Friday the 13th Part 4 in 1984 when I was eleven years old. But I was too scared to ask my dad to take me. There would be gratuitous gore and nudity and in my young mind subjecting my father to such things was downright embarrassing. I’d be guilty by association.

So I asked my friend Jason to tell me all about it instead. And he did. I think it took him the entire half hour walk home from school. I found out that Jason got chopped up into little pieces by Corey Feldman. Somehow I didn’t buy a kid making mincemeat out of the hulking brute, but I was still pretty excited, though a bit disappointed when I found out the chopping up takes place off screen. My prolific output of Jason Voorhees drawings found a new hysterically fevered pitch. I would have to wait until the final chapter arrived on VHS cassette tape for rental. Until then, I had to content myself with Prince.

Though it only took about five or six months, it seemed like an eternity for Friday four to arrive at Anderson’s, my favorite local video rental store. The clerk knew my dad and she knew I was in love with horror and I can remember the pleasure she took in laying the info on me that it would soon arrive. She called my house to tell me it was there and ready for my transgression seeking eyeballs. I was so excited and I was in no way disappointed.

Part 4 is directed by horror and action director, Joseph Zito. He did The Prowler, Missing In Action and the incredible Invasion USA. Part 4 has a meaner spirit and a rougher edge than the other Fridays. The color palette isn’t nearly as saturated and yummy as that of Part 3. Part 4 has more greens and blacks than blues and reds. It’s one of the tightest Friday sequels and moves along at a very brisk pace. The body count is high, with a murder or two every few minutes. There’s also a pair of hot Brit twins, reminiscent of those double mint gum commercials that were ubiquitous at the time.

It starts off in typical Friday sequel fashion with a prologue recap of all three of the previous movies. The prologue is well done and cut together in an interesting way. It gets straight to the point.

We see police cleaning up the scene after the events in Part 3, with Jason presumably dead in the barn with an axe stuck in his head. Naturally, when he arrives at the morgue he comes back to life and saws off the head of that guy from all of those Police Academy movies and then stabs a foxy nurse in the chest.

Now we have a group of twenty somethings renting a house on a lake (Crystal) for a weekend of drunken debauchery (this Friday has a very generous helping of nudity). The group includes a very young Crispin Glover, who stands out in his role. There was always something so interesting and watchable about him, even when he was so young.

Next door to the teens live Tommy, a nerdy mask making kid, his mom, and his sister, Trish, who ends up as another blond Friday the 13th heroine. Oh, they also have a dog named Gordon who either gets thrown out a window by Jason, or jumps out to escape him, it’s not very clear. What it is is bat shit crazy. Kind of like the scene in Part 2 where there’s a rat sniffing Ginny as she’s hiding under a bed. There’s a random shot of urine leaking out from under the bed and one’s not sure whether Ginny peed her pants or if the rat was the one guilty of the bladder relief.

Part 4’s Jason is scary as hell. This time around we don’t see very much of him, and when we do, he is often in the shadows. His look is totally compatible with that of Richard Brooker’s portrayal in Part 3, but there are a few differences. In Part 4, Jason has these gnarly brown claws and wisps of stringy hair dangling from his bald pate, while in Part 3 he looked pretty hairless all around.

Like the Jason from Part 3, he is a big guy. He’s played veteran stuntman Ted White (he did stunts for John Wayne) who goes uncredited because he wasn’t too crazy about the role or his director. You see, he got super pissed at Zito when they were shooting a scene where a naked woman in a raft gets stabbed by the maniac. The actress was cold turning blue and White got pissed because the director wasn’t doing anything to make her more comfortable. He said if they don’t get her out of the water, he’d walk. They got her out of the water. What a nice Jason!

But he also hated Corey Feldman. White apparently gives off a true cowboy vibe in person, which Corey Feldman wasn’t too crazy about, and the young actor readily gave voice to this feeling on set. White thought Feldman was a spoiled brat and decided to scare the shit out of him in the scene where he breaks through a window and attacks him. The pauses between each of the actors’ movements were rehearsed heavily. White waited several extra beats before busting through the window to grab Feldman and it freaked the little moppet the fuck out! That must have been a pretty awesome thing to witness.

Tom Savini is back on board for the gore effects and there are some pretty great ones. Jason getting smacked in the side of the head and then falling on the handle, causing the blade to cut through his skull, is damn nice. But somehow the murders aren’t as memorable as they are in some of the other Fridays. One that always stood out for me was when the hunky fellow in the shower gets his face and head crushed against the bathroom tile by Jason’s gross claws. Another good one is when a guy gets the arrow tip of a harpoon gun jammed into his crotch. Jason lifts him high into the air and then pulls the trigger. Yikes! The Jason unmasking scene is classic. Savini’s version of the grown up killer’s face is still the definitive gross-out gnarly Jason countenance in my mind.

In a way, Friday the 13th Part 4 was a rite of passage. I grew into a well versed student of on screen sex and horror, reading anything I could find on the subject. I wasn’t really a kid anymore. I was a horny little creep obsessed with finding my next transgression. I wasn’t afraid anymore and nothing would ever be the same again. Not even Friday the 13th.

I made my dad take me to see Friday the 13th Part 5: A New Beginning when it came to theaters a year later. I didn’t give a shit.