- Directed by Danny Steinmann
- Written by Martin Kitrosser, David Cohen, Danny Steinmann
- Stars Melanie Kinnaman, John Shepherd, Anthony Barrile
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 32 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ5cMK-3Z_I
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
It starts with young Tommy from the previous movie. Then some years jump and traumatized Tommy is now a young man. Jason is back, despite being clearly killed, with a fresh batch of victims he slashes his way through. How is that possible? All is explained. Sort of. It’s a decent continuation of the series.
Synopsis
We open on Tommy from the previous film walking through the woods in a rainstorm. He comes to the grave of Jason Voorhees. Some guys with shovels show up and start digging as Tommy watches from the trees. It doesn’t take long before they open the coffin and die by Jason’s machete. Jason stands up, mask and all, and looks right at Tommy before heading his way… Jason raises his machete as Tommy stands there screaming— Tommy wakes up, all grown up. He was dreaming about his real childhood encounter with Jason. He’s in a car heading to a mental facility. Credits roll.
Pam, the assistant director comes out to greet Tommy. He meets Dr. Matt, the psychiatrist at Pinehurst. It’s a camp where young patients live together with some freedom, getting the hang of living normal lives. Tommy is here to prepare himself for a new life in the outside world. He’s been messed up ever since he killed Jason when he was twelve, and he’s been on medication since then. Tommy meets Reggie, who plays a prank on him, then they find out who’s scariest. Tommy still has his collection of monster masks from the previous film.
A police car drives up, sirens blaring. The sheriff talks to Matt about complaining neighbors. Two of the kids were having sex in the neighbor’s barn. Ethel, the neighbor, rides up on her motorcycle, and she throws a tantrum about the trespassing.
Fat kid Joey comes out of the house and talks to two girls working on laundry. He gets chocolate on their clean stuff, and they shoo him. So instead he goes over and pesters Vic, who’s angrily chopping wood. Vic is not in a social mood and kills Joey with the ax. Roy, the ambulance attendant looks visibly upset at the condition of Joey’s body.
Pete and Vinny’s car breaks down not far from Pinehurst. Vinny gets stabbed in the mouth with a lit road flare, and Pete gets his throat cut.
Tommy wakes up after having more Jason-based nightmares. The breakfast table is unusually quiet since one of the kids was killed. Eddie jumps out wearing a mask, and Tommy gives him a thorough pounding.
Crazy Ethel hires a wandering vagrant to clean her chicken coops. The police start investigating the two dead kids on the road. Billy goes to the diner to pick up Lana for their date. He gets an ax to the head, and she gets it in the belly. The next morning, Tommy hallucinates seeing Jason. Or is it a hallucination?
The mayor yells at the sheriff, who says he knows who the killer is: Jason Voorhees. The mayor insists that Jason was cremated to ashes, so it couldn’t be him.
Tina and Eddie, the sex-crazed teens from yesterday, run off into the woods for more playtime. Someone is watching from the bushes—it’s the vagrant worker, who is soon stabbed to death. She gets the hedge trimmers while he gets a crushing headache.
Matt asks Pam to take Tommy along so that Reggie can stay with his brother in town. Reggie’s brother Demon and his girlfriend Anita seem to live in his van at the trailer park. Ethel’s crazy son Junior almost runs over Tommy on the road. Tommy’s quiet; he lets his fists do the talking.
Demon has some bad enchiladas and spends a lot of time in the outhouse. The screaming with that doesn’t compare to what happens next.
Pam and Reggie return to the compound, and Matt and Gramps have gone out looking for Tina and Eddie; Tommy hasn’t come back yet either. Elsewhere, Junior loses his head and Ethel gets stewed.
Duke and Robin are killed in their rooms, as is Violet. Reggie goes upstairs to look for Tommy and finds all the bodies. Pam is right behind him, and she sees them too. Suddenly Jason breaks in the door, and we see his hockey mask and machete for the first time. They run to the road and find the ambulance there, with the dead driver inside. Pam finds Matt in the woods, nailed to a tree; Gramps’s corpse comes flying in through a window. She runs back outside.
Jason catches up to Pam and gets ready to hack her, but Reggie runs over him with a tractor. Of course, Jason gets back up and continues the chase, but we see that he’s bleeding. Pam comes after Jason with a chainsaw—until the motor stops.
Tommy returns and has a faceoff with Jason. He thinks it’s a hallucination until he gets slashed, but then he stabs Jason in the leg. They all climb up to the balcony in the barn. Jason and Pam do a little dance in front of the open window until Jason falls out and is impaled on some kind of spiky machine. Yep, he’s really dead this time. But wait, is that a latex mask on him that is split open showing he was someone in disguise? Yes. He would have got away with it too if it wasn’t for those pesky kids.
Everyone goes to the hospital. The sheriff comes out to talk to Pam. Joey, the kid who was axed to death early in the film, was the son of Roy, the ambulance attendant. When Joey was killed, Roy snapped and decided to get revenge on everyone and used “the Jason thing” to cover up his murders.
Pam goes to see Tommy, but he stabs her with a machete—no, that was a dream. Tommy wakes up that night in the hospital and sees Jason in his room, but when Jason fades away, Tommy takes a hockey mask out of his drawer, puts it on, and kills Pam for real. There’s a new Jason in town.
Commentary
This is the first time in the entire franchise that anyone said the name “Jason Voorhees” in full. We never see Jason or his hockey mask except for Tommy’s hallucinations until the final battle. The killer could literally have been anyone! It’s down to the last fifteen minutes before we see that Jason is the killer, in his mask and everything!
It’s an OK continuation, more of the same, but this time, it’s not actually Jason in the mask, which is an interesting turn, but also kind of a cheat.