Friday Week: Now, I certainly know what it is you're trying to do, and I respect it, I do

FRIDAY THE 13th: A NEW BEGINNING

1985

Directed by Danny Steinmann

Written by Martin Kitrosser, David Cohen, and Danny Steinmann

Spoilers: severe

For reasons discussed last time—an anticipation that the slasher film was on its way out, increasing friction with the MPAA, and, apparently most importantly, producer Frank Mancuso Jr.'s sense of languish over the franchise his dad had put him in charge of—Paramount had finished their Friday the 13th series with its fourth entry, 1984's The Final Chapter.  Three-hundred and forty-three days later, they'd already put another one in theaters.  What changed anybody's minds is hard to figure; for all I know, Mancuso was rogue in the first place, and that's just the how he got kicked upstairs into an "executive producer" position with this one, yet still quite involved in the franchise, his punishment for delivering a hit out of spite.  Obviously, the reason for a fifth Friday is probably just the almighty dollar (The Final Chapter earned a cool $33 million, an impressive hold from the most remunerative of the main phase of Friday sequels, Part III).  But of course that's not a satisfying answer, even intellectually, since any intelligent executive should have reckoned that The Final Chapter's status as something of an actual event—they told people they were killing Jason Voorhees, they weren't lying, so of course everyone came to pay their respects—meant that you couldn't draw any but the haziest conclusions from its performance.  By the same token, reversing course this soon—resurrecting, rebooting, or otherwise rejiggering Jason back into existence—could only make you look like an asshole.  Yet as for the idea of making one without Jason, well, you really must be on drugs.

One would like to think that there was, somewhere in those 343 days, some spark of true ambition, because they did in fact go for the crazy option.  Maybe it seemed less crazy at the time, when you could point to only three Jason Voorhees massacres, and the first Friday the 13th wasn't even one of them.  Besides, Final Chapter director Joseph Zito had provided something resembling a path forward, with his film's final freeze-frame of preteen berserker Tommy Jarvis staring balefully out upon the world with newfound blood madness.  Even before that, and it's a shame he was done, Steve Miner had made not one but two abortive efforts, with both Part 2 and Part III, to explore the effects of a Voorhees-mediated slaughter upon a surviving victim, only to have both of his Fridays decisively reoriented onto more customary franchise lines, and not even because Paramount told him to, just because, for whatever reason, hardly anybody has ever wanted to commit to being in more than one whole Friday the 13th movie per lifetime besides the series' most famous Jason, Kane Hodder.  So there was groundwork already laid for revisiting Tommy Jarvis in a mental health vein, and it's not so difficult to imagine that in some universe not so different from our own, there's a Friday the 13th: A New Beginning that actually did something pretty chewy with that, even using exactly the same basic framework as the Friday the 13th: A New Beginning we know.  But, unfortunately, you do have to imagine.

So with the film's effort to take on the legacy of Jason Voorhees, we reach a secret milestone for the franchise, the first entry that is, however awkwardly, a meaningfully direct sequel to the previous one, and, speaking personally, I don't love the Fridays for the ongoing stories.  But, along with a cool (if gaudy) thematically-loaded title sequence involving the iconic hockey mask, we begin with a gesture that even does honor to the impulse for continuity, with our previous Tommy, Corey Feldman—despite being extremely busy on The Goonies—having been prevailed upon to use up his one day off to shoot reaction shots for what rapidly resolves itself into a dream sequence.  Here we find young Tommy trekking through a forest on a rainswept night to visit the grave of the man he killed, only to retreat when a pair of teen thrillseekers emerge from the storm, evidently more dedicated to digging up this particular grave than Harley Warren and Randolph Carter were for theirs.  They do their grisly work, and, to their surprise, and Tommy's terror, Jason—shall we say—lives.  They die.  Then the revenant turns towards Tommy.

Slam-cut to present day—thereby undoing the work of The Final Chapter in rationalizing the series' chronology, and sending us forward to around 1990—where we are confronted for the first time with the haggard and weary face of a must-be-an-adult Tommy (John Shepherd), en route from his previous abode in a New Jersey mental asylum to his new home, a halfway house-like institution run by Matt Lewer (a Patrick Dempseyish Richard Young) and his assistant Pam Roberts (Melanie Kinnaman), an astonishingly laissez-faire group home for wayward, mentally ill, and/or cognitively-impaired youth.  Its residents number seven: leporid couple Eddie and Tina (John Robert Dixon and Debisue—get this—Voorhees); headphone-using and therefore functionally-deaf music fan Violet (Tiffany Helm); stutterer Jake (Jerry Pavlon); uh, redhead Robin (Juliette Cummins); childish chocolate addict Joey (Dominick Bracia); and hyperviolent axe murderer Vic (Mark Venturini), inasmuch as while I'm not sure what he was before, the very day Tommy arrives to take his place in this extremely ill-defined setting, Joey irritates Vic until Vic plants an axe in the kid's back, and, apparently, in between shock cuts, fully chops him up into pieces, leaving him such a wretched wreck that one of the paramedics, Roy (Dick Wieand), is very visibly upset.  Very visibly upset.  There is also the cook George (Vernon Washington), himself principally an excuse for the presence of his grandson Reggie (Shavar Ross), a lad whom we meet pranking a mental patient—probably a good thing it was Tommy, not Vic—thereby allowing himself to be the exigence for the first and unfortunately last glimpse of our protagonist that's connected in any way to the Tommy Jarvis we knew, when they sort of bond over Tommy's cool horror masks, and then never really have another conversation again.

I'm already veering into substantive complaints about this movie which, newsflash, is the most-hated Friday for a reason, but to finish our plot summary, it is, still, "Jason kills them."  Or at least someone in the guise of Jason (stuntman Tom Morga, sometimes Ron Hock), and the middle hour or so of this 91 minute film is disconnected or barely-connected modules of a man in a hockey mask (it occurs to me I should have recorded when his "face" first appears on screen with that curiously off-model hockey mask, with its blue rather than red arrows, but I didn't, and it feels relatively late in the game) murdering more-or-less random people who have all been arranged in pairs so they can all have a scene partner for a small comedy vignette prior to dying.  (The meat collection for this movie is simultaneously awe-inspiring and one of the reasons it's bad: 22 kills of some kind, but still something like 18 that "really" happen, since a few occur non-diegetically.)

The movie offers other novelties, but A New Beginning's real innovation is the shift in the filler scenes, from that venerable slasher standby, 80s sex comedy, to an outright comedy variety show, and hence deploying an enormous number of semi-humorous or completely un-humorous stereotyped figures to put on a sketch, then die.  The best of them is Demon (a Rick Jamesian or, indeed, "Rick Jamesian, bitch" Miguel A. Núñez Jr.), Reggie's party guy brother, along with his paramour Anita (Jere Fields), in that their comedy sketch is at least fucking bonkers enough to be unforgettable, involving bad enchiladas, the runs, and dialogue being exchanged (pranking, flirtation, and a short singalong) between Demon and Anita through the sheet metal walls of his trailer park's outhouse while he presumably unloads his bowels (though, bizarrely, they sort of make it seem like enchiladas gave him constipation), finally concluding with a mordant echo of the prank phase of this scene before Jason/"Jason" impales him through the wall.  So, like I said: I sure remembered it.  And not for nothing, we sort of get to know them first, and they're not annoying, which is rarely the case in our other modules: a pair of mouthy greasers (Corey Parker and Anthony Barille), one of whom also gets killed while pooping ("crap, my ass!" sez his buddy, but you know, if you were going to kill somebody, it's the best time); one of Tommy's old nurses from the asylum (Bob De Simone) and his waitress girlfriend (Rebecca Wood), the latter of whom receives a fake jump scare via a cat that seems to have been dropped on her from a scaffolding, and this pair isn't too bad, if for no other reason than Wood shows her breasts to nobody/us and the scene involves some semi-interesting neon lighting; and, by far the worst, in part because they actually have multiple scenes, the Hubbards, a pair of Southern stereotype farmers, here in New Jersey, hateful idiot mother Ethel (Carol Locatell) and stupid bellower son Junior (a Randy Quaidy Ron Sloan), whose previous intersection with the plot was that they're NIMBYs about the halfway house who object, specifically, to its residents banging in their (in fairness to the bangers) rather extensive idyllic woodland backyard.  The Hubbards, in addition to being shrill are also uniformly presented at roughly ten decibels louder than anyone else, and they're quite noxious.

Another bad thing about this, if maybe not the most salient thing, is the splitting of the effects budget between this many damn deaths, my suspicion being that they were already attempting to substitute "many murders" for "good murders" as a way of simultaneously placating both the MPAA and slasher fans, and good luck with that.  A New Beginning had a number of makeup effects artists, and none, I believe, of particular distinction; they're certainly not distinguishing themselves here.  I'll weakly defend the movie's bloodletting as "sort of fine, if you appropriately recalibrate your expectations."  A lot of it can't even be fakey because it's not shown long enough to tell.  The inability to linger on these mediocre effects—they can frequently amount to a still frame, so that many of these deaths are the equivalent of trying to appreciate the art of an EC comic while it's being flung through the air—does begin to grow stale.

Still, at least the sheer number of deaths does mean the occasional colorful idea comes our way, like a road flare jammed into someone's mouth, or a woman crawling into bed with what turns out to be a severed head (though this is questionably continuity edited), or even the bizarro thriller construction of Demon's outhouse death; and there's a pair of garden shears through the eyes that genuinely makes an impact, albeit more for reasons of editing and the content of the surrounding scene.  And with that segue: as if in compensation for the fragmented violence, this is (I assume) The Friday With the Most Nudity.  On this count, quantity coincides with quality, and I think it'd probably get to "best" anyway, thanks to Voorhees—that is, Debisue—a former Playboy Playmate (though also already a TV actor), simply because she's more at home with, e.g., rolling around completely naked on a forest floor than her skinny-dipping predecessors were rendering their own services to visual pleasure in narrative cinema.  (Voorhees is providing quantity all on her own, if you know what I mean.  But what if you prefer smaller breasts?  Bud, A New Beginning has got you covered.  It really is that kind of movie.)  Maybe our director (and co-writer, and, amongst others on this set, stimulant aficionado) Danny Steinmann, being a veteran pornographer, helped matters here, for example knowing from experience that naked women get cold and you need some plan to keep them comfortable, which apparently needed to be explained (at nearly the risk of fisticuffs) to Zito on the last movie, the jackass.

None of this is vitally useful for anyone here in 2024 with Internet access, obviously, and, otherwise, Steinmann is aiming at an extremely basic level of bland competence and hitting the very modest mark of never being (visually) confusing.  The death scenes have some quick cuts that slightly improve their visceral thrills, though it's really noticeable at 22 repetitions (the working title of A New Beginning was, rather disturbingly, Repetition) that almost every single victim dies immediately, actually afraid for their lives for either a few seconds or none because this "Jason" prefers to murder by ambuscade; in only a few instances does the camera language permit us to be afraid on their behalf, even if you felt like it after listening to them yammer.  Steinmann gets a score out of Harry Manfredini, who admits to being stymied, that's just spraying thriller music all over everything, including scenes of, like, peaceful driving.  Steinmann's Final Girl sequence is lousy and derivative, excepting the beat when "Jason" gets run over by a farm tractor, which is at least unexpected; of course, it's being driven by young Reggie in what I suppose is a conscious repetition (ahem) of The Final Chapter, except for whatever reason it felt like Tommy could be in danger there, like a Friday might actually have the guts, but we know now that it does not.

But what's that?  "Final Girl" is a term of art, and they needn't be a girl, yet in this case—it's Pam—it is fully descriptive, and whether she were a good Final Girl or a bad Final Girl, she's the wrong Final Girl.  See, I can actually live with a lot of the movie's weaknesses, and don't really find A New Beginning too tedious.  But the underlying terribleness of wandering about creation killing whoever it finds is that this movie gives up on giving a shit about the only reason it even exists.  Though more-or-less entirely hypothetically, A New Beginning is doing two big things: 1)being a murder mystery and 2)being a psychothriller about Tommy's madness, and forwarding Tommy as the "Jason" now on the warpath, the survivor who's dealt with his trauma and terror by becoming the very dragon he slew.  (If you wanted to get really heady, consider that Tommy would probably have gotten nothing but positive feedback for his heroic act of violence.  But at this point we're starting to wonder what the fuck happened to his dad and sister, or how he got thrown in a mental institution at all, and this is a mistake, as the movie does not care.)  So it manages to present Tommy as the likeliest culprit mostly to the extremely mechanical extent that Tommy's whereabouts cannot be visually accounted for when people die.  And it becomes an outrageously serious problem when it turns out it wasn't even Tommy—it was Roy, for Joey was his son, and he's Mrs. Voorheesing—which maybe isn't ever obvious, but it's also very shitty, and meaningless to us, and by the time we finally get there we've known it must be somebody else for ages, because the time to reveal Tommy, were it Tommy, would've been much, much earlier.

It means that Tommy doesn't really exist in this movie as a character, and that he fails to exist as a character alongside a bunch of other non-characters, in a melting pot that you'd assume, given the mental health facility setting, would at least have some kind of dynamic or measure of personality.  Instead, the kids are disposable flesh even by Friday standards, Pam is mindless genre convention wrenching this haphazardly back onto Friday plot rails (part of the appeal of these movies is that things happen because the campfire tale dictates they must, but not this time), and Tommy is but a failed misdirect (though not one as altogether unregistered as Vic).  This was much to the dismay of Shepherd, who didn't even realize when he signed up for "Repetition" this was the codename for a Friday relaunch (which feels downright sleazy), so he spent months preparing for the role of a disturbed youth for this.  It results in "good" acting, of a sub-Biehnian kind, channeled into about ten lines and the same "sullen traumatized asshole" beat, over and over.  It doesn't even play interestingly with Tommy's hallucinations of Jason, I believe, until someone realized that'd be a fun way to exonerate Tommy when he shows up to the scene of violence, and stands there trying to talk himself out of believing in the guy with the (blue-arrowed!) hockey mask who's physically standing in front of him.  He doesn't do so in time to avoid machete hacking, so now the poor but only anchor we ever had to this movie is practically a non-factor for the rest of the climax.

The kicker is that now the plot also doesn't make sense: it's already generous to say that Roy's vendetta against the halfway house kids ever "made sense," but there's really no reason to run around murdering all these other people.  And his plan (I think someone literally says "I guess" while reconstructing it) is to throw the blame onto "Jason."  I don't want to rewrite this movie, but I think throwing the blame onto Tommy Jarvis would be a bit more persuasive, and since that actually could have been a cracking thriller—"my God, did I do it?" (or even Roy realizing he's not the only Jason in town)—I would very much like to assume this was the nebulously-expressed original goal for the fucking thing, and the speed and chaos of this production outran its writers' and director's ability, and accordingly resulted in pure horseshit.  At this point, I even appreciate the nihilistic reversal of the epilogue where Tommy, at last, does don the mask; but if you didn't have the gumption to do the complicated version well, and plainly you did not, then the simple one, that it somehow takes 90 minutes of whirling nonsense to even get to, should've just been the movie you made in the first Goddamned place.

Score: 4/10

Reviews in this series:

Friday the 13th (Cunningham, 1980)

Friday the 13th Part 2 (Miner, 1981)

Friday the 13th Part III (Miner, 1982)

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (Zito, 1984)

Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (Steinmann, 1985)

Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (McLoughlin, 1986)

Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (Buechler, 1988)

Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (Hedden, 1989)

Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday (Marcus and Cunningham, 1993)

Jason X (Isaac, 2002)

Freddy vs. Jason (Yu, 2003)

Friday the 13th (Nispel, 2009)