Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (

1985

)

Anyone who genuinely believed that Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter (1984) was going to live up to its name and serve as a capstone for the series had to have been pretty dim. This was a series that, year after year, was reliably making back its budget fifteen times over. Just one of these movies could completely offset the losses of a massive flop like The Cotton Club (1984) or Ishtar (1987). There was no way that Paramount was ever going to kill this goose while it was still laying golden eggs. While Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter (1984) was still in theaters, a sequel was already under production (under a phony name to keep the secret intact from even the actors until they were contractually sworn to silence). That said, the studio's ploy to pretend to end the series to drum up extra publicity and box office returns may have dealt irreparable damage to its reputation. From here on out the Friday the 13th films would suffer from diminishing returns. Part V was a massive disappointment, as it only managed to make back its budget ten times over instead of the usual fifteen to twenty. Even audiences as undiscerning as those that turned out for a new Friday the 13th film every year thought that continuing a series that had already had an episode called “The Final Chapter” was pretty lame.

Still, Friday the 13th Part V was more than willing to make an honest stab at being a solid little slasher in its own right. The primary appeals of the Friday the 13th series were always a copious helping of sleaze paired with a few gory special effects. However, those special effects were more or less the work of one man, Tom Savini, and when he was unavailable or simply too expensive for the meager budget that Paramount was willing to shell out for these movies, the gore effects could not be relied upon. Just look at the drop in quality between the gore of Friday the 13th (1980) and the haphazard kills of Friday the 13th Part II (1981) or Friday the 13th Part III (1982).

Since he wasn't going to have access to the best special effects, director Danny Steinmann decided to lean into the series' other hallmark: nubile female flesh. Not a surprising tactic, as Steinmann's previous outing was the impressively sleazy, even for the mid-1980s exploitation fare, Savage Streets (1984). Part V is probably the raunchiest film in the whole series, no mean feat when you remember that Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter (1984) featured identical twins who show up for no reason and immediately go for a skinny dip. Apparently, the version we got of Part V is the safe for TV version too, as Steinmann would later boast that he “shot a fucking porno in the woods there. You wouldn't believe the nudity they cut out.” I assume that he's exaggerating for effect, but it's amusing to think that there exists in some Paramount vault, an X-rated cut where the film pauses for fifteen minutes for Violet to give Tommy a blowjob.

The film begins with an inversion of Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter (1984) opening title. In the prior film, Jason's mask was obliterated by the title, while in this one the title is obliterated by Jason's mask. From there we cut to the woods behind Corey Feldman's house, where the child actor briefly reprises his role as Tommy Jarvis before heading out to film real movies like Gremlins (1984) and The Goonies (1985). He sees a couple of yahoos defiling Jason's grave before the killer rises from his slumber and quickly murders both of them. Tommy awakens from his nightmare, no longer as Corey Feldman but as the significantly older John Shepherd (though since the character of Tommy is in a home for wayward teens I suspect he's a bit younger than Shepherd's mid-twenties).

The aforementioned home for wayward teens is the Pinehurst Halfway House, and it is packed to the brim with expendable meat for the inevitable slaughter. In addition to the director Matt Letter and his assistant Pam, there is a whole gaggle of thinly written kids who will take turns stripping down, screwing around, and getting murdered. There is goth girl Violet, punk rocker Vic, annoying fat-ass Joey, designated bimbo slut Tina and her himbo counterpart Eddie, a stutterer named Jake, and one more girl named Robin who lacks any real characterization but is here because we need some more tits in the movie and the actress playing Violet wouldn't agree to a nude scene. The Friday the 13th series has never had the most impressive roster of characters, but even by those low standards, these kids are forgettable. Seriously, I shouldn't be pining for the complex characters and motivations of Friday the 13th Part III (1982).

Impressively, this rather large roster of characters was deemed an insufficient number of victims by the filmmakers, so a few more annoying side characters are shoved into the film to be promptly murdered and forgotten. So, we will have a pair of greasers straight out of The Outsiders (1983) whose car breaks down on the side of the road and who promptly get butchered, as well as a coke-sniffing waitress who dies in the same scene she is introduced (but not before flashing her tits at the camera for no reason). The most insufferable of these additional murders are the eternally-shouting hillbillies who live next to the Pinehurst Halfway House, Ethel and Junior. These two had me reaching for the volume controls whenever they came on screen. It seems that Danny Steinmann was an early pioneer of Will Farrell's comedic style and thinks that by having his actors talk loudly in funny accents. Though one has to wonder why the hicks in rural New Jersey have southern accents, they are pretty far from the Mason-Dixon line.

Interestingly, for the first time since the original Friday the 13th (1980), A New Beginning attempts to be a mystery in addition to being a horror movie. When a psycho in a jumpsuit and a hockey mask starts disemboweling people with a machete, we initially don't know who is behind the mask, and we're even given some information to speculate on. Top of the list of suspects is Tommy Jarvis himself, as the young man is plainly traumatized by his experiences in Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter (1984), and is haunted by vivid hallucinations of Jason (The best of which has an inert Jason staring up at Tommy's room from the lawn in a blatant rip-off of a shot from Halloween (1977)). It makes sense in terms of timing as well, as the killings start almost immediately after Tommy arrives at the Pinehurst House. It would not be an unreasonable assumption to think that Tommy has finally snapped and has adopted the Jason persona for himself. It's certainly a more reasonable assumption than the Sheriff's belief that Jason Vorhees has risen from the dead. However, it is amusing to see an authority figure in a horror film who mistakenly believes in an absurd, magical explanation for murders in his community without a second of consideration. Where was this guy in Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)? He would have been a lifesaver.

Then again, a zombie-Jason would be a lot more sensible than what we actually got. Magic and voodoo may be far-fetched but in a movie, they are easier to swallow than characters with inconsistent or confusing motivations! So instead of Tommy becoming the new Jason or the old Jason rising from his grave to continue his eternal crusade against teen bimbos, we have a paramedic named Roy who is secretly the father of one of the kids at Tommy's group home. Roy's bastard child is Joey, a dim-witted obnoxious fat-ass, who has the rare distinction in a Friday the 13th film of being murdered by somebody other than Mrs. Vorhees, Jason, or someone pretending to be him. Shortly after Tommy arrives at the home, one of the other kids stuck there, an especially angry punk rocker named Vic, gets fed up with Joey's constant pestering and carves him up with an ax. Joey is annoying make no mistake about it, but even I have to admit that this is a little extreme. Roy finds out about this, and maddened by grief decides the best thing he can do as a father is to dress up like a long-dead serial killer and massacre a whole bunch of people who were largely unrelated to the death of his son. Seriously, when you look at the list of murders and attempted murders in this film, most have nothing to do with Joey's death at all. Aside from Matt and Pam who are ostensibly responsible for looking after Vic and making sure he doesn't murder anyone, none of the other victims are more than tangentially involved. What does Ethel and her son have to do with Roy's vengeance plot? Moreover, why did Roy feel the need to kill the two greasers who broke down on the side of the road? Hell, he doesn't even try to kill Vic, the guy who actually murdered his son.

This twist is even harder to forgive when it is completely negated by the film's ending which has Tommy putting on the original Jason mask (Roy was always wearing a distinctive copy sporting blue triangles instead of red) and killing Pam, the film's closest thing to a final girl (though I don't think we're supposed to assume she's a virgin). So it really makes the whole previous movie feel like a bit of a holding pattern with a substitute Jason standing in while our next Jason gets over his opening-act jitters. If you wanted to have Tommy Jarvis be the new Jason Vorhees, which was Paramount's plan from the onset, why not just have that or at least work it in so that some of the victims were killed by Roy and some of the victims were killed by Tommy with Roy getting the blame for all the killings so Tommy can return in Part 6 and beyond?

This is by no means a good movie. Indeed, in terms of writing, special effects, and acting it's downright poor. Yet, I have a certain soft spot for it all the same. I have a preference for the mediocre middle films in a horror series. The ones where the formula is firmly established, the stock characters are comfortably familiar, the settings feel well-worn and cozy, and the threats are so familiar that they feel downright nostalgic. One may be frightened by Mrs. Vorhees in Friday the 13th (1980) or Jason in Friday the 13th Part II (1981), but by this point in the series, our hockey-mask-wearing murderer is a familiar friend, even if he's not technically the same person as before. It is an odd development, by which a series goes from shocking and audacious to pleasantly familiar. It's the same phenomenon as how terrifying horror legends like Frankenstein and Dracula gradually become so familiar that they can feature in children's cartoons. Human beings fear the unknown, and by degrees the more we know something (even if it is absolutely dreadful), the less ability it has to frighten us.

Alas, this cozy middle-period of horror series is not something that is destined to last very long. Inevitably the studios and filmmakers will start to tinker with the formula in a quest to reinvent the IP or realize greater profits. This is why we will see Jason resurrected into an unkillable zombie in Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986), pitted against a discount Carrie (1976) in Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988), and shipped off to NYC in Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989). Indeed, the process had already started in A New Beginning with the attempt to replace Jason with Tommy Jarvis/Roy. I don't watch slashers to be astounded by unexpected developments and novel situations, rather I get great joy from seeing the same familiar stories play out, populated with stock characters that I can safely categorize into neat little boxes. It's kind of like those Hallmark Christmas movies your mom binges each year, except with more tits and blood.