During the 1980s, only two years passed without an entry in the Friday the 13th series. That's eight films in ten years, and while the quality usually betrayed those short production times, they always felt like kin. Spiritual relatives. It took four years for a ninth chapter to see the light of day, plus a switch from Paramount to New Line Cinema, and somewhere along the way there was a great disconnect.

A true B-grade picture in every sense, Jason Goes to Hell is the worst Friday yet, and one of the most desperate, flailing, pointless films I've ever seen. Though veteran blade-swinger Kane Hodder has returned to the role, this Jason bears little resemblance to the cool, creepy psycho killer of the earlier films. Inflated and deformed, at this point he's basically a roid-raging leper in a twisted, vaguely-familiar hockey mask, but he's changed in more than just a physical sense.

The story revolves around his black heart, literally migrating from host to host to inspire fresh killings after Jason himself is blown to bits in the opening scene. We've swallowed some absurdly stupid plot devices over the course of this franchise, including a similarly lame-brained "fake Jason" angle in 1985's A New Beginning, but this one sets an awful new standard. It plays like cruddy straight-to-video '90s gimmick horror, not the quaintly under-produced slasher material that had typified the series to this point.

Needless to say, the acting hasn't improved (somehow, impossibly, it's actually grown much worse) and the production values, which enjoyed a well-deserved bump in Jason Takes Manhattan, are once again cut-rate and pitiful. Not a good look for New Line, proving right out of the gates that they don't understand what they're making and don't honestly care, one way or the other.