Kane Hodder was cursed with starring in the worst Friday movies
While he's widely acclaimed as the best Jason (runner-up would be C.J.Graham from Jason Lives), he also had the really bad luck of coming in when the franchise was running on fumes.
Wasn't supposed to be that way.
This was supposed to be the epic Freddy Vs. Jason movie (why Jason in Part 6 was chained and literally kept in storage until released).
But it didn't happen at that point.
And thus they had to come up with other stories, and they ended up being 100% filler.
Seriously, the ONLY good thing about these latter movies is Hodder. And the makeup and FX on this one (the latter ones don't even have that).