I read about them wanting to do this documentary several years ago, but didn't think it would happen. I stopped keeping tabs on the news until recently, when I was like "Oh, yeah, what happened to them doing that?" I look it up and, to my surprise, Hearts of Darkness: The Making of the Final Friday was going to be hitting Blu-ray from Synapse Films in a month! I pre-ordered that sucker and seemed to have gotten it a couple of weeks early...
It's unheard of to have a full length documentary devoted to a movie as divisive as Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. I've come to really like the movie over time, but...man, I fucking HATED it when it came out. And I wasn't that big of a fan of the franchise at that point to have been entrenched in my ways and be like "Boo, it was too different." I hadn't been allowed to watch the Friday the 13ths until that point -- only the network airings of them! But, man, did Jason Goes to Hell have a hype machine behind it -- I remember a lot of ads and tie-in comic books and coverage of it.
Jason Goes to Hell was probably the first Friday the 13th movie I got to rent and see in its full, R-rated glory...and I didn't like it. It had nothing to do with the lack of Jason or Crystal Lake, but if I could choose a way to describe how I felt about the movie at the time, it would be "off-putting." I thought the heart-eating, body-hopping stuff was weird, I didn't like the music, I didn't like the way it was filmed. (There's something about the way a lot of '90s movies were filmed that I just don't particularly like the look of. A lot of them seem strangely TV-movie-like in their look.)
And then, over time, I really got into the Friday the 13th franchise. I loved the Paramount entries, the earlier ones the most. And then it came time to rewatch Jason Goes to Hell, which I'd only watch bits of every now and then. My video store had the unrated version by this point, which I rented. And holy moly did that make a huge difference in how I viewed the movie.
I'm not a gorehound. I don't say that with any snobbery, it's just not something that's at the top of my list for what makes a good horror movie. I'm a big fan of the Terrifier movies, but their detailed kill scenes aren't what I find most interesting about them. John Carl Buechler was a talented make-up effects artist, whose work sometimes actually made me fill repulsed, but even if they let him keep his gore in The New Blood, that wasn't going to make that movie any less boring.
So it's not necessarily the fact that the unrated version is gorier, but just that it completes the experience with Jason Goes to Hell. Because what's removed isn't just the gore of a kill, but entire sequences. You can easily edit Jason slashing with a machete, the victim screaming, and cut around the gore of the kill, but still imply what happened to that person. You can't edit around the disgusting, disgusting scene of Josh melting, so it was a sequence they had to lose entirely, but is so memorably fucked up and incredibly done and unique to the movie that it makes the movie lose something, it punches a hole into it.
Not just the unrated version, but listening to the commentary track by director-writer Adam Marcus and writer Dean Lorey greatly helped me appreciate the movie more -- their trying to explain what their objective was by making it so different, conveying what fans they were, and they were also a little self-deprecating when it came to how many new rules they came up with or how their reach might have exceeded their grasp in some areas. Besides being informative, they were funny and entertaining and it's one of the best commentary tracks I've heard. A lot of commentary tracks you'll forget as soon as they're over -- this one helped change my views on the movie. I went from hating the movie to being a fan of it! So a whole documentary about the movie, focused on Marcus? I knew I had to buy it.
The big thing I got out of the documentary was a bigger appreciation for KNB's creativity in how they approached bringing their effects to life. (I had no idea so much puppetry was involved.) It was good to hear from cast members who weren't part of previous bonus features or the Crystal Lake Memories documentary like Steven Williams (The Duke!), Michelle Clunie, Allison Smith and Kathryn Atwood. (Kari Keegan is, disappointingly, still a no-show.)
I think my favorite part of the doc was the featurette Never Say Dead, where documentary editor Eric Beetner interviews friend Adam Marcus and Marcus' wife Debra Sullivan and we learn more of Marcus' rise to Hollywood and see glimpses of his early works.
I would like to have been hipper and to have appreciated Jason Goes to Hell when it was new, but I at least did reach a point of liking it and being happy to see this documentary finally get made.
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