I know that at some point in my early teens I saw some of this movie, just as I saw some of the others. As I watched it more recently, though, I was surprised by just how little of it I remembered….

The movie begins with Corey Feldman returning as Tommy Jarvis. He witnesses two young men digging up a makeshift grave for Jason Voorhees. Jason comes alive and murders them both. Then he comes after Tommy, raises his machete, and Tommy (John Shepherd) awakes, a young man, in the back of a van. He is being brought to a halfway house after his release from a mental institution. He has had a hard time coping with killing Jason (as well, I assume, as the grisly murders that took place around and at his home). Of course, violent murders begin happening shortly after Tommy arrives leading to a final showdown with none other than Jason…or is it?

Claiming the fourth movie as The Final Chapter no doubt brought people into theaters, which no doubt decided the Paramount brass, as well as producer Frank Mancuso, Jr., to immediately resuscitate the franchise. So A New Beginning was devised and the world became a darker place for it.

The Day

Corey Feldman returns as Tommy Jarvis. Seeing him and the level at which he works is a great thing. It’s a shame that it all went downhill for him after Stand By Me, but here he kicks ass–again–as Tommy Jarvis. In the five minutes or so he is onscreen, mostly in close-ups, he brings emotion and pathos to the film.

While I’m mentioning Feldman, I’ll mention Shavar Ross, who plays Reggie. If you grew up in the early-1980s, then you’d recognize Ross from Diff’rent Strokes, where he played Arnold’s (Gary Coleman) best friend Dudley. Here, he gives the second best performance of the movie. I think the reason both he and Feldman are so good in these movies is that they are kids. They’re not adult actors who are aware of the kind of movie they’re making. They’re child actors who are probably thrilled to be in a Friday the 13th movie, or any movie. It’s one more step to a long, fruitful career for them. Ross isn’t as good as Feldman was in the prior movie, or in his five minutes in this one, but he’s the best thing in the rest of the movie despite the poor writing he’d given.

Right now he looks like he wishes Arnold were there.

The nudity is the most in this series thus far. Now, I know it was a little funny the first time I mentioned this. And maybe still funny, a little, the second time. Now I look like a pervert. Well, allow me to defend myself: As I mentioned, the teenagers and young adults who paid for Friday the 13th flicks in the 1980s wanted only violence and sex. Let me go back and edit that. The teenagers and young adults who paid for many low-budget horror flicks in the 1980s wanted only violence and sex. Unless the horror flick was truly scary (A Nightmare on Elm Street, Hellraiser) the only thing going for these kinds of movies were violent and sexual perversion. So, by that standard, this movie succeeds. The nudity is upped. There are lots of breasts in this movie. Not as many as some, perhaps, but better than others in this series.

The violence has been upped. Again, if you’re paying for this–and teenagers were–then the depravities onscreen are upped.

And sometimes you get both violence and sex in one scene!

The writers try to go in a “new” direction. There’s a little more psychological suspense (a term I loathe) in this movie. When older Tommy Jarvis arrives on the scene, he sometimes sees Jason (Tom Morga). It’s apparent that it’s not the ghost of Jason but his own PTSD that’s fucking with him. Unfortunately, writers Martin Kitrosser, David Cohen, and Danny Steinmann and director Steinmann don’t really get into it. They try to keep Jason dead.

The Night

The acting is all around bad, except for Feldman and Ross. Again, I think they’re bad because they’re not given anything to work with. By the fifth movie, the template hadn’t just been set, it had become part of the DNA of a certain moviegoing audience. A small set-up at the beginning where we meet the characters, all stereotypes, and then 60 to 70 minutes of those people being murdered in especially grisly fashion, with tits thrown in for good measure. So the actors are there just to flesh out the stereotype and then react to the killer. And the actor who plays older Tommy, John Shepherd, is awful. He’s a goddamn zombie!

Emote, damnit!

If I’m going to be base, then I have to say that the killings are lame. Because the writers decided to try something kinda-sorta new, we never see the killer until the very end, when it appears to be Jason. This means that, like the first movie, the filmmakers have to be clever and not show the killer doing the killings. While this worked for the first movie, it hinders this one. Maybe that’s because it comes after three where Jason Voorhees was seen in all his cardboard glory, I don’t know. But it falls flat.

The writing is horrible. Yeah, Mssrs. Kitrosser, Cohen, and Steinmann get a little kudos for trying to go in a new direction, but the rest of the movie just sucks. And if you’re going to try a new direction, try a new goddamn direction. Don’t do the same fucking thing but with someone else, unless it’s in a new place, under new circumstances, and breaks away from everything that’s come before. And if you want the Tommy Jarvis connection (and what about his sister?), why not bring him to a hospital in the city where he starts having hallucinations? I don’t know. Like Friday the 13th in New York? (See what I did there?). But they don’t. It’s in the woods, assumingly in Jersey, near Crystal Lake. It’s a halfway house this time, that way we can give the kids in the movie a reason for acting differently, and maybe get some built-in pathos straight away. The lines the actors are given are bad. The story is nearly nonexistent, and there’s no real structure. The “heroine” in this movie, Pam (Melanie Kinnaman) is boring. She looks like Amy Steel from Part II but isn’t given anything interesting to do. And considering she’s one of the people in charge, she makes some horrible choices. The Black characters are given bad lines, the White actors each have their own stereotypes to deal with (the slow fat kid, the angry kid, the horny guy, the horny girl, the sweet girl, the new wave girl, the super-sensitive guy, the guy running the show) and none move beyond that. And let’s not forget the ending, which takes place in a barn. Just like the third movie. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the same barn. And the twist ending(s) of Jason not being Jason but rather an ambulance driver we see for 10 seconds at the beginning of the movie, after the first (actually, third, if you count the opening nightmare) murder who is upset because his son, the fat kid, is murdered by the angry kid. The other twist is that Tommy may suddenly be a killer. At least that’s what’s hinted at. Both leave the viewer feeling cheated. The former because there’s really so little evidence that it’d be the ambulance driver that no one could guess it, and the latter because if you want Tommy to be a killer, have him be the killer!

Fake Jason dies a death less painful than watching this movie.

The direction is horrible. Again, comparing this one to the first one makes the first one almost seem like Casablanca. Sean S. Cunningham will never win an Oscar for directing (or for anything else) but at least he did a semi-professional job. Danny Steinmann points the camera. Done.

Lastly, the violence. I know that I listed the increased amount of violence in The Day section, but that was in terms of what is wanted by the boneheaded 1980s teenager/young adult who pays for (or sneaks into) a Friday the 13th movie. In actuality, the violence is appalling. I counted 10 grisly murders in the first half hour, and 12 by the 40 minute mark. There were twenty grisly murders in this movie before the killer is killed and there’s still another one in Tommy’s epilogue nightmare. I just looked it up and, up until this point (I’m not spoiling the rest of the movies for myself) it’s almost double the average, already-too-high number of deaths in these movies.

Now, folks, I’m not a squeamish person. I think Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door is a superb, heartwrenching novel and I liked the movie (much to the horrified chagrin of my lovely wife). I have watched the original I Spit On Your Grave several times (and have it on my Netflix instant streaming queue for another viewing). I’m not squeamish when it comes to film violence, but I want it to at least have a reason, and preferably an outcome that is more than just a body count. This is the kind of violence that gave the horror movies of the 1980s a bad name. Maybe as a teenager I would’ve thought it was cool, but I have definitely outgrown the target audience for these movies. It’s almost enough to make me abandon this series and move on to greener pastures.

The ambulance driver is obviously a Halloween fan, using the same kind of coveralls that Michael Myers wears.

Saturday the 14th

This movie is despicable. There is no redeeming value in it. According to Wikipedia, Cory Feldman was only available for the five minutes at the beginning of the movie because he was filming The Goonies. Good for him. This turkey is beneath him. Even though the fourth Friday the 13th lacked charm, at least there was some. This movie is a giant, steaming pile of shit. It’s only purpose that I can see is to remind us of how bad these movies could get.

The movie cost around $2.2 million. It made about $22 million. So you know what that meant….

Boo?