What is a franchise to do when its most recent installment declared that everything was coming to an end? The Friday the 13th franchise, which launched in 1980, was a relatively cheap cash cow for Paramount Pictures, but it was also their rotten stepchild. The films never received stellar reviews and were reprimanded by many critics for being senseless gorefests, but fans ate it all up.
Hoping to step away from the IP, the studio released Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter in 1984, and it was to be the definitive end of Jason Voorhees. Solid box office receipts put that notion to rest only a year later, but with Jason dead, how could the franchise go on? The answer was Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, which became a very divisive installment because of a major creative swing. It’s still polarizing, but it’s far better than some of the sequels that followed.
Directed by Danny Steinmann from a screenplay by Steinmann, Martin Kitrosser, and David Cohen, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning takes place several years after the events of the previous installment and follows a now-teenage Tommy Jarvis (John Shepherd) after he has been institutionalized at a halfway house located near Crystal Lake. He has been having nightmares about Jason Voorhees after killing him viciously as a child, and they continue to haunt him. While Jason is believed to be dead, a new set of murders involving everyone’s favorite hockey mask-wearing serial killer begins and Tommy has to face his fears once again.
Will the Real Jason Voorhees Please Stand Up?
It’s probably best to get the elephant about this film out of the way and, given that this movie came out 40 years ago, a spoiler alert is likely unnecessary, but proceed with caution just in case. A New Beginning found itself in a pickle with Jason seemingly dead to the world after the previous installment, so the sequel had to find an inventive way to make a Friday the 13th film but still maintain the lore of Jason Voorhees.
In a move that remains controversial among fans, the real Jason Voorhees doesn’t appear in the film and is instead a copycat killer taking on the Jason persona. This is sparked by the demise of the film’s first victim named Joey (Dominick Brascia), who is murdered by a fellow patient, with serious anger issues, at the Pinehurst Halfway House, where Tommy is now institutionalized. Roy Burns (Dick Wieand), one of the paramedics who was on the scene of Joey’s murder, is revealed to be Joey’s father and the events of that day drove him to seek revenge by taking on the very man that haunted Camp Crystal Lake.
This proved to be a controversial move for many because they felt cheated that it really wasn’t Jason doing all the hacking of the new victims in the film, thus making the installment virtually irrelevant. Think of this installment as the Halloween III: Season of the Witch of the Friday the 13th franchise, just without totally doing away with the legend of its main antagonist. While it’s understandable that fans would be upset by this turn of events, it was a bold and creative move to keep the franchise going when the notion of a supernatural revival wasn’t in the cards. For this reason alone, A New Beginning proves to be the most interesting of the sequels after The Final Chapter and arguably even better than some of the sequels that followed.
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‘A New Beginning’ Ups the Kill Count
Even though the real Jason Voorhees isn’t present, the fifth installment stays true to the franchise’s thirst for blood and gore by offering up arguably the most violent installment of the bunch. There are a record-breaking 22 kills in A New Beginning and Steinmann knows how to craft a creative kill. Perhaps having begun his career shooting hardcore pornography before transitioning to actual movies allowed the director to give the film a bit of an unfiltered edge.
Steinmann was clearly not afraid to push the boundaries of the film’s violence and nudity (there is a lot of female flesh to go around), and sometimes it’s served up at the same time. In the film’s most memorable kill, Tina (Debisue Voorhees) and Eddie (John Robert Dixon) are a couple obsessed with sex (this is likely why they’re at the halfway house, but it’s never explained) and after one of their sexual encounters in the woods, Tina is speared in the eyes with garden shears while Eddie is murdered via a tree-wrapped leather belt. It’s certainly meant to illicit a combination of violence and sex, even in its depiction of the murders, and while that might be vile to some, it still signals an entry that isn’t afraid to go there.
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The Film Has a Wickedly Dark Sense of Humor
The film also has its own wickedly dark sense of humor. Demon (Miguel A. Nunez Jr.) is killed in an outhouse after a case of explosive diarrhea involving enchiladas, which is preceded by a little R&B serenading with his girlfriend that is abruptly ended when she is dispatched by fake Jason. There is also a pair of rednecks named Ethel (Carol Locatell) and Junior (Ron Sloan), who embody all the necessary stereotypes of being rednecks. The duo would be annoying in most cases, but Junior’s beheading demise while riding a motorcycle is equal parts jarring and hilarious enough to justify their existence.
Interestingly enough, there is only one aspect of the film that’s played as seriously as it can be, and that’s the portrayal of Tommy Jarvis. While played by Feldman in a flashback scene that starts the film (the actor couldn’t do the full movie due to shooting The Goonies), the character is aged up to be played by Shepherd, and he’s honestly pretty good as the withdrawn Jarvis dealing with past trauma. Shepherd reportedly went very method during filming and even volunteered at a state mental hospital to get into character.
The legend is that Steinmann tricked Shepherd and the other actors into thinking they were in a deep psychological thriller called Repetition before they learned what movie they were really a part of. This explains why Shepherd took the role as seriously as he did, but the one shame of the film is that Tommy, despite being the perceived lead, gets minimal screentime and even disappears for nearly an hour of the movie before returning for the climax. Who needs a compelling lead when the real thrill of these films is seeing random characters dispatched in creative ways one by one? Either way, it was a missed opportunity.
Friday the 13th: A New Beginning is available to stream on Pluto TV.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
