I didn’t start seeking out and enjoying horror films until I was in high school. As a littler guy I was scared PRETTY EASILY and didn’t see how choosing to be scared could possibly be fun. But I’ve always loved monsters and creatures and stuff, so to test my child-mettle I’d at least peek at the horror section at our local video store (the long gone but not forgotten Video Tree, thank you Ernie, wherever you are!). The box for Jason Goes to Hell was a standout:

The VHS sleeve was embossed so that Jason’s chromed-out mask (sick, BTW) and his demonic butt-worm popped out from the box. In 1993 I had certainly not seen any Fridays the 13th, but I more or less knew who Jason was through pop culture osmosis and, well, the huge crazy furious man in a hockey mask hacking people’s limbs off in the woods was pretty goddamn scary to me. So seeing that Jason was titularly Going to Hell, I assumed the movie would chronicle his gruesome demise and subsequent journey through the the realms of Hell. I imagined Jason’s Divine Comedy being a sort of reverse-slasher film, where the forces of Satan would chase, torture and terrorize Jason as ironic punishment for his decades of malice. “What a crazy, bold vision for the final entry in a slasher series!” kid me thought.

When I finally sat down to watch it years later I figured I wouldn’t get to see Jason wading through lakes of fire and dodging devils. And I was right! Jason Goes to Hell is basically “what if Jason was The Evil Dead” and that’s pretty cool too.

More years passed, and my OTHER favorite psychotic rage monster DID have an honest-to-Satan underworld odyssey:

As always, thank Godzilla for Godzilla.