The WORST episodes of Friday the 13th: The Series
Every episode of Friday the 13th: The Series ever, ranked from worst to best by thousands of votes from fans of the show. The worst episodes of Friday the 13th: The Series!
Two young antique store owners must recover cursed antiques.
#1 - Year of the Monkey
Season 3 - Episode 11 - Aired 1/27/1990
The trio track a cursed tea set to a samurai, Musashi: an honorable man, but one who refuses to give them the antique unless they aid him in recovering a mystical set of oriental monkey statues (which represent See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil). A wealth Japanese industrialist, Tanaka, has them, and they reward his honorable behavior with success in business. Now he is almost ready to die, and the magic of the statues require that he use them to test the honor of his three children to see which one will inherit. Each monkey gives a child magical powers, but the two sons abuse their power and fail to act honorably. Forced to choose seppuku (ritual suicide) they refuse, and the monkey statues then kill them. each death further reinvigorates Tanaka. The daughter passes her test, but is then required to use the statues to kill her father. She refuses, and kills herself. Musashi then confronts his old friend Tanaka and tricks him into killing the unarmed samurai. Having acted dishon
#2 - My Wife as a Dog
Season 3 - Episode 16 - Aired 3/3/1990
A lonely fireman is obsessed with his dog, loving it more than his shrewish wife. He is able to fulfill his fondest wish when he finds a cursed aboriginal dogleash that lets him slowly merge his wife and his dog into one being that will love him forever.
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#3 - Badge of Honor
Season 1 - Episode 23 - Aired 7/9/1988
An old boyfriend of Micki's, Tim Ayres, shows up in town, and immediately begins acting suspiciously. Ryan, somewhat jealous, believes that Ayres is working with local counterfeiters. It turns out that Ayres is an undercover cop. Unfortunately, the crook he is tracking killed the wife of Russ Sharko, who has the cursed sheriff's badge of Wyatt Earp, and is using it to kill off criminals vigilante-style. In the end, Ayres and Sharko are both killed and the badge is recovered.
#4 - The Shaman's Apprentice
Season 2 - Episode 24 - Aired 6/3/1989
The son of an Indian shaman, who has embraced the white man's medicine and become a doctor, is frustrated by the patients he loses. He stumbles across a cursed Indian rattle hidden away by his father, which allows him to miraculously cure the sick at the cost of another's life. Unfortunately, the doctor's next patient is Vera, a friend of Micki's. She has to choose between getting her friend cured at the cost of another's life. Ultimately, the trio unite with the father and his daughter (also a shaman) to stop the curse. The son is killed and the shaman promises to keep the rattle safe in his care.
#5 - Pipe Dream
Season 1 - Episode 24 - Aired 7/16/1988
Ryan's father Ray, a small-time inventor, rolls into town and announces that he's achieved great financial success and is planning to finally marry. Ray's managed to do so with the aid of a pipe given to him by Lewis Vendredi, which allows him to totally disintegrate first the young inventor whose ideas he stole, and then his rivals in the company he's working for. Eventually Ryan and Micki discover the truth. When Ray tries to kill Micki with the pipe, Ryan throws himself in the way. Ultimiately reconciled with his son, Ray then takes the blast of smoke for himself, dying to save his son.
#6 - Night Hunger
Season 2 - Episode 10 - Aired 1/14/1989
A young hot rodder is given a gift by Lewis Vendredi: a silver key chain that lets him win car races. However, he has to kill those he races against to get the curse to work. His ultimate goal is to beat his rival, Deacon, and show he's worthy of his abusive father's respect. Micki and Ryan try to get the key chain away from him, but only succeed in crashing the rodder's car...and causing the key chain to enter his heart! Ultimately, the boy's father sacrifices himself to stop his son by ramming him head-on during the final race.
#7 - Tattoo
Season 1 - Episode 16 - Aired 3/12/1988
A young man, Tommy Chow, gets hold of a set of tattoo needles. He tattoes an innocent victim, and the tattoo then comes to gory life and kills the victim. In return, Tommy, a compulsive gambler, gets good luck in the games. The trio team up with Tommy's grandfather, Lom, a Chinese medicine man, and try to save Tommy's sister, the next victim, before the snake tattoo kills her. Unfortunately, Tommy is playing a game of high-stakes Russian Roulette when they save his sister.
#8 - Bottle of Dreams
Season 1 - Episode 26 - Aired 7/30/1988
A mysterious messenger brings a Coptic urn to the store, which bursts open when Micki and Ryan take it to the Vault. The gas from the jar puts them into a trance where they are forced to relive their most horrifying moments over and over until they die. Jack calls upon his friend, a fellow mystic named Rashid, to help him enter their trance and free them. To do so, Jack must both overcome the spirit of Lewis Vendredi, who arranged for the urn's delivery to gain revenge, and confront the spirit of his deceased son.
#9 - The Mephisto Ring
Season 2 - Episode 17 - Aired 4/15/1989
A World Series ring for the infamous Black Sox game allows its owner to predict winning games to gamble on...if the owner puts the ring on a sacrificial victim and condemns them to a gory death. A three-time loser gets hold of the ring left to him by his deceased father, and tries to use it to gain wealth.
#10 - Face of Evil
Season 2 - Episode 14 - Aired 2/11/1989
The compact lost in last season's ""Vanity's Mirror"" is found by the dead girl's sister, who is now working as a make-up artist. Inadvertently, the aging starlet she works for gets hold of it, and discovers it has a new ability: by flashing light from the compact into a victim's eyes, they die a horrible, disfiguring death but the actress looks are rejuvenated. Our intrepid trio manage to get hold of it, leaving the actress to suffer all the disfigurements she inflicted on others as the curse snaps back.
#11 - The Voodoo Mambo
Season 2 - Episode 2 - Aired 10/7/1988
During a local voodoo celebration, Jack meets an old friend, Hedley, who is a voodoo houngan, and the ""Keeper of Fire"". Hedley's granddaughter Stacey is to be initiated as a priestess. However, the other three priests of the other elements are being killed off by Cole, a rich young man using a cursed voodoo mask. He is working for Laotia, a priestess who has promised him power but plans to take it all for herself once Cole has killed the priests. We eventually find out that Laotia and Hedley were married, and that Hedley had killed his wife years ago when she turned to evil. The cousins, Jack, and Hedley must defeat Laotia once and for all.
#12 - A Friend to the End
Season 2 - Episode 18 - Aired 4/22/1989
This is essentially two half-episodes. In the first, Micki and Ryan are trying to recover a cursed piece of rock, the Shard of Medusa, from a sculptress. Using it, she can kill a victim and transform them into a prize-winning piece of art. The cousins fail to get the Shard, and the sculptress escapes. In the second half, Micki's visiting nephew J.B. stumbles upon a haunted house and befriends a young boy, Ricky, who is living there. It is revealed that Ricky's parents were Satanists who bought a cursed childs' coffin from Lewis Vendredi. The coffin can resurrect a child, but at the cost of an adult's life. Ricky is revealed to be a ghost, and tries to claim Micki's life. J.B. persuades him not to out of their friendship, and Ricky passes away for good.
#13 - Better Off Dead
Season 2 - Episode 15 - Aired 2/18/1989
A doctor is trying to develop a cure for a childhood syndrome lending towards hyperviolence. Due to his mistake, his daughter was inadvertently infected with the disease from a contaminated needle. Now, the doctor uses a cursed silver syringe to suck out the essence of a small gland that controls violent behavior from unwilling prostitutes, and inject it into his daughter to give her a temporary cure. Unfortunately, the process renders the donor hyperviolent as well. A friend of Micki's is grabbed by the doctor and submitted to the treatment. Trying to locate her friend, Micki herself is kidnapped and subjected to the process.
#14 - Read My Lips
Season 2 - Episode 8 - Aired 11/25/1988
Micki's college roommate wants her to be bridesmaid at her wedding. However, the woman's fiancee, a ventriloquist, appears to be going insane. He spends most his time talking to his dummy as if it were a real person. A string of murders in his past are also starting to show up. Ultimately the groom goes insane, but a new ventriloquist takes over the dummy. Since there is no antique ventriloquist dummy in the Manifest, the trio aren't sure what's going on. Ultimately they figure out that the lapel flower is the cursed item in question. Unfortunately, the curse hs finally allowed the dummy to animate itself. Ryan manages to pull the flower from the dummy, rendering it inert once more.
#15 - The Butcher
Season 2 - Episode 19 - Aired 4/29/1989
While Micki and Ryan are on vacation, Jack has nightmares of his World War II experience when he was captured by the Nazis and nearly killed by Rausch, a commandant known as The Butcher. The Butcher used a garrotte made of barbed wire to kill his victims. Jack was saved by the rest of his battalion then, but now in the modern day his surviving friends are being killed off one by one with a barbed-wire garrotte. It turns out that an escaped Nazi, Mueller, is using a mystic talisman, the Amulet of Thule, to resurrect Rausch. Rausch, masquerading as a right-wing radio talk-show host named Walden, is seeking revenge on Jack and the others. Although the Amulet is not an antique, Jack must recover it to defeat Rausch and send him back to the grave.
#16 - Epitaph for a Lonely Soul
Season 3 - Episode 12 - Aired 2/3/1990
A lonely, somewhat twisted mortician stumbles upon the cursed properties of an antique embalmers' aspirator. He can use it to kill one person, to resurrect another without memory. He kills someone with it and then uses it to resurrect a young woman he has fallen in love with. Unfortunately, the woman's husband begins to suspect, and the resurrected woman starts to remember her past life. Ultimately the mortician is killed after he starts a fire, and the women decide to remain in the fire and die again, leaving the trio to recover the indestructible antique from the ashes.
#17 - Repetition
Season 3 - Episode 14 - Aired 2/17/1990
In this unusual episode, none of the main characters appear except Micki very briefly at the beginning and end. A newspaper columnist accidentally hits a young girl who was wearing a cursed cameo. The silhouette starts harping at him in the young girl's voice to free her by killing someone else. The columnist then kills his ambitious, obsessive mother which frees the girl...but then the mother's voice starts haunting him. He kills a homeless man to bring her back to life, but then is haunted by that man's voice. Ultimately the columnist tries to reverse the curse by killing his mother and then the girl again, and ends up killing himself. At the end, a social worker stumbles across the locket and turns it over to Micki.
#18 - Symphony in B#
Season 2 - Episode 5 - Aired 11/4/1988
Jack is a fan of deceased violinist, Janos Korda. Ryan's new girlfriend Leslie, a violinist, is Korda's widow. Each year a new album of Korda's ""lost"" music is mysteriously released. Also initially believing that The trio find out that Korda is still alive, but horribly disfigured and crippled by the car crash it was believed he was killed in. Only by using a cursed violin, and killing a victim with its razor-sharp bow, can Korda temporarily gain enough control of his hands to produce new music. Upon seeing his ex-wife Leslie, he becomes obsessed with her and tries to steal her away. Leslie sacrifices herself rather than let Ryan become Korda's next victim, and Korda kills himself in despair at her loss.
#19 - Midnight Riders
Season 3 - Episode 13 - Aired 2/10/1990
Micki, Johnny, and Jack are taking a break, and star-gazing in Jack's old hometown. However, a ghostly biker gang, the Midnight Riders, rolls into town. At the same time, Jack's father Cawley, who has been gone for ten years, also shows up. The gang is out for revenge, as they were falsely accused of raping a girl who lied to protect her reputation and explain the fact she was pregnant. Jack's father was one of the ones who killed the gang and hid the secret. It turns out that Jack's father is also a ghost: he died at sea, but has returned on the anniversary of the gang's death. The girl and the others who participated in the gang's death are killed, and after a brief reunion with his son, Cawley's ghost disappears as well.
#20 - The Electrocutioner
Season 1 - Episode 17 - Aired 4/23/1988
An innocent man is condemned to the electric chair, but manages to survive. Embittered, the man buys the electric chair from Lewis Vendredi. A dentist, he takes a job in an orphanage and disguise it as a dentist's chair. He then kills the orphans and covers up their disappearance by claiming they are runaways. The killings let him electrically charge himself into a living dynamo, so that he can go out and kill those responsible for finding him guilty at his trial. The trio must ground him before he can kill again.
#21 - Femme Fatale
Season 3 - Episode 9 - Aired 12/2/1989
Desmond Williams, a director, is obsessed with the role that his now-aged actress-wife played 50 years ago: that of femme fatale Lili Lita in a film-noir crime film. He finds a cursed reel that lets him bring the Lili character to life, by pushing an innocent female victim into the film itself while its playing. The victim is forced to relive the entire movie...which ends with the character they are stuck as being killed. Meanwhile, the movie version of Lili emerges into the real-world for the same period of time. To stay alive, Lili must convince Desmond to kill her aged real-life counterpart. The character is also increasingly dissatisfied with her limited "life" as a sex toy for Desmond. Ultimately, the aged actress shoots her husband when she finds out what is going on, and decides to enter into the film (replacing a trapped Micki) so she can have her youth back. Trapped with nowhere to go when the film ends, the film Lili is destroyed for good.
#22 - Bad Penny
Season 3 - Episode 6 - Aired 11/11/1989
While mourning the death of his father (in last season's The Prisoner), Johnny catches wind of a series of murders with the victims bearing the mark of a ram's head on their forehead. It turns out that two crooked cops have recovered the Coin of Ziocles (from Tails I Live, Heads You Die). In a shootout, one of them is killed along with a drug dealer they were in cahoots with. The other, live cop figures out the coin can resurrect the dead, and uses it to resurrect his partner as a semi-zombie. They then use the Coin to kill a prostitute, but Johnny grabs the coin from them...and uses it to resurrect his father. Meanwhile, Micki is in a near-useless state, since she herself was briefly dead, killed by the Coin earlier. She doesn't want to go through that again. Disgusted with Johnny's selfish use of the coin, Jack kicks him out, but Johnny manages to redeem himself after the cops get the coin back and try to resurrect the drug dealer to find out where their money is. Johnny saves Micki,
#23 - The Maestro
Season 2 - Episode 23 - Aired 5/27/1989
A famous dancer, Anton Pascola, is crippled in an accident before completing his masterpiece, ""Shiva."" He obtains a cursed symphonia (music box). Using it, he can have students dedicate themselves to the dance, and they then begin to enact the parts of the dance. However, each one dies shortly in a frenzy of dancing. A daughter of one of Jack's friends is enraptured by Pascola. Ultimiately, knowing of the curse, she herself takes on part of the dance to help Pascola but it's still not enough. Ultimately, Pascola himself takes on the curse, which allows him to dance despite his crippled legs and give his greatest performance even though he dies in the process.
#24 - Eye of Death
Season 2 - Episode 13 - Aired 2/4/1989
An antiques collector, Atticus Rook, makes a fortune selling as-new antiques from the Civil War era. It turns out that they are ""as-new"": by fueling a cursed ""magic lantern"" with the blood of a victim, he can travel back in time through a slide of wherever he wants to go, until the lantern ""fuel"" burns out in three hours. Ryan and Micki follow, but Ryan is captured as a spy trying to get close to Lee (whose sword Rook is trying to grab). A local women, Abigail, helps Ryan only to be killed by Atticus. Ultimately Micki helps Ryan to escape, and they go back to the present and blow out the lamp...just as Rook emerges behind them, dying a particularly gruesome death caught partway in a wall where the image was projected.
#25 - Scarlet Cinema
Season 2 - Episode 16 - Aired 2/25/1989
An outcast college film student is obsessed with werewolves. Mercilessly teased by frat boys and rejected by the girls, he stumbles upon a cursed movie camera. When he films someone with it, he sees them being killed by a werewolf through the viewfinder. The victim is then actually killed by a mystically summoned werewolf. According to the camera, when the student kills three victims, he will get his fondest wishes. He does so, and becomes a werewolf himself. Ultimaitely, he tracks the trio back to Curious Goods, where they kill him by strangling him with the camera's film...made out of silver nitrate.