Friday the 13th Part 5: A New Beginning (1985)
If there were such a thing as truth in advertising, the previous installment, subtitled The Final Chapter, would have closed the book on the Jason Voorhees saga, and it would have snuffed him out on a bloody high note. In the seemingly definitive conclusion, the hockey-masked, machete-wielding half-man, half-monster finally met his match in the form of a most unlikely opponent: a 12-year-old boy with a penchant for video games and mask designing, whose clever imagination and ability to thrive under stress led him to shave his head and manipulate Jason into believing he was staring at a doppelganger of his 11-year-old pre-drowning self. While Jason had his back turned, Tommy picked up a machete, snuck up behind him, and embedded the blade into the side of his skull. After detecting a flicker of movement from his fingers, Tommy began hacking away at Jason until he was finally dead.
In the closing scene, Tommy visits his sister, Trish, in the hospital and embraces her, glaring sinisterly into the camera to indicate that the evil that had consumed Jason has potentially been transferred into him, paving the way for a new Jason. It was a daring way to conclude the saga of one villain while paving the way for another.
As long as money talks, Jason walks, but that puts the pressure on the trio of writers here -- Martin Kitrosser (co-writer of Friday the 13th Part 3) David Cohen, and director Danny Steinmann -- to conceive of an excuse to resurrect the franchise without undoing the clear-cut and viciously gratifying climax of The Final Chapter, which currently sits at the pinnacle of the sequels and of the installments in which Jason is the killer of Camp Crystal Lake. Judging by the method the writers have imagined to work around the death of Jason, it turns out they should have followed his lead and remained dead and buried in the cinematic grave.
Taking place five years after he courageously sent Jason Voorhees (Tom Morga) to rot in a worm-infested grave, a shell-shocked 17-year-old Tommy Jarvis (John Shepherd) has been shuffled back and forth to numerous psychiatric hospitals, separated from his older sister, whose life he saved, and traumatized by the death of his mother. He is now being sent to Pinehurst Youth Development Center, a halfway house for juvenile delinquents. Unlike the state institutions, there are no rules or guards controlling Tommy's actions. Pinehurst runs on an honor system, preparing its inhabitants to reenter society where they may begin life anew. Shortly after he arrives, Victor Faden (Mark Venturini), an aggressive patient with a homicidal temper, hacks Joey (Dominick Brascia) to death with an axe after being interrupted from his work, unintentionally setting off a domino effect in which a mysterious man dons Jason Voorhees' costume and goes on a killing rampage, picking off any and everyone who lives on or around the Pinehurst property.
But if Jason is lying in a grave, who is behind the hockey mask? Could it be Tommy, whose childhood trauma has been compounded by the sight of a recent axe murder? Or perhaps Roy Burns (Dick Wieand), a paramedic who seems especially horrified and enraged by the murder of an innocent, mentally challenged boy? Or has Jason himself risen from his grave, determined to resume his mission of punishing those who remind him of the irresponsible, sex-obsessed camp counselors whose negligence enabled him to drown in the lake as a boy? I'll give you a hint: of those three possibilities, the writers of Friday the 13th Part 5: A New Beginning have opted for the most arbitrary and nonsensical.
Straight from the opening scene -- a nightmare in which 12-year-old Tommy visits Jason's grave on a rainy night and witnesses him return to life and murder a pair of idiots who pry open his coffin -- A New Beginning reveals itself as the worst installment of the first five. After sending Jason to his exhilaratingly grotesque death and delivering a star-making performance in the process, Corey Feldman is utterly wasted in this sequel. However, the reason is strictly business, nothing personal. Due to his involvement in The Goonies, which was released the same year, Feldman was only able to submit a cameo appearance, of which he filmed the inserts on a Sunday, his only off day from filming The Goonies. The footage was shot in the backyard of his family's home in Los Angeles using a rain machine, which soaks him from start to finish to a degree that appears glaringly uncomfortable and excessive. Aside from being pelted with artificial rain, Feldman is given nothing of consequence to do besides cower behind plants and, once spotted by his supposedly slain nemesis, quiver, shake his head, gasp, and squeal desperately, so immobilized with fear that he's too stupid to stand up and run.
Friday the 13th Part 5: A New Beginning demonstrates that the fifth time is the curse, not the charm, of the franchise, completely lacking the sense of fun that pervaded the original quadrilogy. By relocating the mayhem from Camp Crystal Lake to a youth rehabilitation center, the filmmakers automatically saturate this chapter in a more depressing ambience. Conflicted by the desire to change the setting and make the tone more serious while remaining true to the established Friday formula, Kitrosser, Cohen, and Steinmann regurgitate tropes in a fashion that feels more obligatory than spontaneous. Therefore, we have a couple who repeatedly sneaks off into a neighbor's yard to have animalistic sex, a transporter who reads pornographic magazines and snorts cocaine, characters who wander off alone into their bedroom or the dark woods at night, cars that break down, and chainsaws that run out of gas at the most inopportune moment. More glaringly than in any of the prior four installments, many characters in A New Beginning are introduced solely to feed the body count, and the writers forget to provide them with discernible explanations for their commitment to Pinehurst in the first place.
The twist ending is ill-conceived and predictable. When the hockey mask comes off, the killer is revealed to be not Jason, but Roy the paramedic, who suffered a mental breakdown at the sight of his son, Joey, hacked to pieces and used the Jason attire to cover his tracks, deceiving the town into believing Jason had returned to life. As a director, Steinmann makes the baffling decision to heavily foreshadow this anticlimactic reveal via a prolonged, sinister close-up of Roy glaring murderously into the camera prior to the first pair of post-Joey murders. Consequently, when the killer's identity is unveiled, it's unsurprising.
Furthermore, the twist lacks poignancy. As relayed in expository dialogue by Dr. Matt Letter (Richard Young) and Sheriff Cal Tucker (Marco St. John), Roy abandoned Joey at birth after his wife died during the delivery, rendering his only son an orphan and allowing him to be shuffled around his whole life from foster home to foster home until he was taken in by Pinehurst. At no point did Roy ever attempt to make contact with Joey or initiate a relationship with him. Only when he stands above Joey's mutilated corpse does his paternal instinct finally kick in. Too little, too late.
His motivation is illogical. One man is responsible for Joey's death. His name is Vic Faden, and he's taken into custody immediately after committing the murder. So why does Roy seek to murder a bunch of innocent people who played zero role in his son's death and whose only crime is either living in the same home in which Joey lived or in the vicinity thereto? Apparently, the power of paternal grief is so strong that Roy has been bestowed with the resilience of the real Jason, able to recover momentarily from being run over by a tractor, stabbed in the thigh with a switchblade, and slashed across the arm with a chainsaw.
Taking over the role of Tommy Jarvis, John Shepherd is physically committed, but the script saddles him with a one-note role that gives him nothing to do except wear a fixed expression of trauma and thinly concealed rage on a frequently sweat-drenched face. He widens his eyes in horror and stares glumly out of his bedroom window. That's about the extent of his assignment. Teenage Tommy shows none of the intelligence, energy, charisma, or self-preservation that made Feldman's preteen rendition such a feisty and formidable hero. He's become a shell-shocked shell of his former self, antisocial and tediously taciturn, refusing to interact with his fellow patients or utter sentences more detailed than "Sure" or "Yeah, alright." Somehow, at some point during the intervening five years, Tommy learned kung fu, which conveniently comes in handy because he's easily provoked into fighting, especially if someone dares to put on one of his masks.
After being caught beating up a retard in a trailer park, Tommy runs off to an unknown location, ridiculously resurfacing at a barn just in time for a climactic showdown between the killer and the two remaining residents of Pinehurst. Where did Tommy go during his absence, and how did he know where to find the last two survivors? When he comes face to face with the man he believes is a resurrected Jason, Tommy stands motionlessly and softly repeats, "Jason. Jason. Jason." As Roy slowly approaches him, does Tommy whip out his switchblade and stab it into his eye, neck, chest, or stomach? No, he just remains standing there, allowing himself to get slashed across the chest with a machete. 12-year-old Tommy would be appalled at the defenseless, passive imbecile his 17-year-old self has devolved into.
Pam Roberts (Melanie Kinnaman), the assistant director of Pinehurst, is a classic Friday final woman: sweet, soft-spoken, and patient, using affection to allay Tommy's disquiet and careful not to push him into talking or straying too far from his comfort zone. However, once required to enter "fight or flight" mode, Kinnaman isn't entirely up to the challenge. Her screaming and crying are whiny and unconvincing, and she's done a disservice by a script that misogynistically reduces Pam to a pathetic and helpless damsel in distress. Tripping while running from a masked psychopath is one thing; rather than stand up and resume her run, she elects to crawl across the muddy, rain-slicked ground, even though Roy is multiple steps behind her and she has plenty of time to stand. Then once Roy inevitably catches up and towers over her, Pam rolls over and lies down on her back, passively accepting her fate with a scream until a man -- in this case, a young black boy nicknamed Reggie the Reckless (Shavar Ross) -- comes to her rescue.
Tina and Eddie (Deborah Voorhees and John Robert Dixon) fill the roles of the obligatory horndogs, defined exclusively by an insatiable sex drive that compels them to repeatedly have sex on their irate neighbor's property even after being picked up by police and threatened to have their brains blown out by the owner, Ethel Hubbard (Carol Locatell). (Though maybe that threat doesn't scare them because they have no brains to blow out.) Credit where it's due: Voorhees and Dixon exhibit palpable sexual chemistry, seemingly incapable of disentangling their bodies from each other for a lengthy period. As for a much stranger and more disturbing relationship, Ethel and her son, Junior (Ron Sloan), are loudmouthed hillbilly caricatures who appear to have wandered off the set of another, goofier movie. With their faces caked in dirt, these two are hideous, shrill, and deplorable to a cartoonish degree. Each is given a single defining hobby: Ethel cooks a stew, and Junior drives a motorcycle. In terms of personality, Ethel is prejudiced against people with mental health complications, and so threatens to murder every resident of Pinehurst, and Junior loyally parrots her every word and eggs her on. With no patriarch in the picture, it's reasonable to infer that their relationship goes beyond that of a mother-son.
In the most asinine scene of the movie, Junior starts a fight with Tommy for no reason beyond the fact that he lives at Pinehurst, and after he gets his ass handed to him, Junior responds by driving his motorcycle around his home like a petulant man-child, screaming at the top of his lungs and demanding that his mommy chop up every last resident at Pinehurst. (Ironically enough, no one deserves to be confined to a loony bin more than him.)
With a megawatt smile and abrasive sense of humor, Shavar Ross evokes a young Eddie Murphy, supplying the charm, ebullience, maturity, and assurance lacking in Shepherd's rendition of his protagonist. Reggie's only Achilles heel -- and this is less the fault of Ross and more of Steinmann for not requesting another take or trashing the shot altogether -- is an embarrassingly shrill, girly shriek he emits in response to the killer emerging from below a cruiser.
Violet (Tiffany Helm) listens to music all day to shut out the rest of the world, so she's never seen without her headphones, and to show that she's a dedicated punk, her blond hair is streaked with black. The character detail is just scintillating, isn't it? When alone in her room, Vi performs a laughably horrendous mime dance set to Pseudo Echo's "His Eyes." By the time Roy grabs her by her throat and slams her against her wall, you're cheering just to have that dance cut short. Contrary to the idea put in our heads that he's a troublemaker, Demon (Miguel A. Nunez Jr.) proves a loving older brother to Reggie, hugging him with the enthusiasm of not having seen him in a while, offering him an enchilada for dinner, and gifting him an expensive ring. Had the movie centered around the Winter family -- Reggie, Demon, their responsible grandfather, George (Vernon Washington), and Demon's girlfriend, Nita (Jere Fields) -- A New Beginning might have had something going for it.
Jake is a lovesick nerd with a stutter who can't take a hint that his love interest is more interested in watching A Place in the Sun than listening to him awkwardly profess his unrequited love for her. "I wanna make love with you," he naively admits with a childlike lack of inhibition. When his confession is met with a fit of derisive laughter, Jake storms off in tears like a little bitch. What is with so many of the men in this movie having the emotional and mental intelligence of children? Following her tone-deaf reaction, Robin exhibits a remorse and self-reflection that makes her sympathetic.
Raymond (Sonny Shields) is the most obvious product of a lazy screenplay, materializing out of thin air at the front door of the Hubbard home, claiming he hasn't eaten in two days and offering his services in exchange for food. Clad in a tattered wife-beater to symbolize that he's fallen on hard times, Ray serves absolutely zero purpose to the plot, revealing himself to be a voyeur via spying on Tina and Eddie as they have sex in the woods, then being promptly killed off. It's almost as if the entire movie could have been made without his two scenes of worthless input.
Looking like a pair of rejects from The Outsiders, Vinnie and Pete (Anthony Barrile and Corey Parker) are leather-clad greasers whose car breaks down en route to their dates (who Pete oh-so endearingly refers to as "cunts"), and judging by the way they argue, they are the most toxic pair of supposed friends. Pete apparently messes around with their car a lot, yet he demands that Vinnie be the one who attempts to fix the engine. When Vinnie insists otherwise, Pete goes silent for a moment then honks the horn, laughing at the jump he got out of his friend.
Adhering to the technique employed by the three previous chapters, cinematographer Stephen L. Posey withholds the appearance of the mysterious killer until the final reel, at which point A New Beginning turns into a standard chase-through-the-rainy-nighttime-woods slasher. Prior to the money shot in which he crashes through the front door, looking down at a horrified Pam and Reggie, Posey keeps Roy's masked face out of the frame, depicting him through close-ups of his hands (as when he lights a road flare) and ground-level shots of his shoes creeping toward a target. In the climactic portion, Posey overdoses on a nighttime rainstorm in substitution for a legitimately tense atmosphere. Rather than turning on a light, he uses flashes of lightning to illuminate corpses on Tommy's bed.
Posey and Steinmann accentuate the breasts of their most attractive actresses -- a waitress named Lana (Rebecca Wood-Sharkey) flashes herself in front of a mirror, Tina lies naked on a blanket after sex, and Robin likes to sleep shirtless and braless even on a stormy night -- yet elect to water down the violence to avoid a possible NC-17 rating. Unfortunately, while they water it down to their desired R, they sap out much of the shock value. Some of the kills are conceptually creative -- Roy gouges out Tina's eyes with a pair of hedge shears, straps a leather belt around Eddie's eyes, inserts a branch through the metal ring, and repeatedly twists the branch around, crushing the belt into his eyes, until it snaps off, and shoves a lit road flare into Vinnie's mouth -- but visually unremarkable, thanks partly to editor Bruce Green cutting away at the moment of penetration or not lingering long enough on a morbid visual.
Roy is gifted a variety of weapons (a machete, cleaver, metal pole), but the majority of the kills themselves consist of generic stabs to the stomach or slashes across the throat. Posey shows a machete stabbing upward through the bottom of a top bunk bed, Green cuts to a close-up of Robin's anguished face, her eyes slowly closing, then back to the bloody machete sliding out from under the bed. As Jake sulks down the upstairs hallway, Green suddenly cuts to a close-up of an upraised cleaver, and once it's slammed down, he cuts to an exterior shot of the halfway house. As a method to draw attention away from the gore and onto the reactions of the victims, Posey zooms in quickly on widened eyes just before or in response to a stabbing or slashing. On a few occasions, an axe or machete will penetrate a stomach, and Green will cut to a reaction shot of the victims grimacing before their bodies limply descend.
Three murders transpire entirely off-screen, relayed through shots of the victims' corpses: Matt is nailed through the forehead to a tree with a bloody slit in his throat, George is tossed through a window with his eyes gouged out, and Nita is left lying on the ground with her throat slashed. Demon boasts the most viscerally impactful and relatively upsetting kill for a few reasons: (1) the outhouse is a claustrophobically confined and inherently nasty place to die, (2) Demon is easily the liveliest and most endearing character in the whole movie, and (3) the kill itself is brutal: a metal pole puncturing the walls and stabbing him in his leg and through his stomach as tears stream down his slack-jawed face.
As a shorthand for Tommy's trauma and paranoia, director Steinmann overly depends on hallucinations of the real Jason: a mirror reflection of him standing behind Tommy wielding a bloody axe, standing in the front yard of the house looking up into his bedroom window, standing in front of his hospital bed. Then he disappears every time Tommy turns around or closes and reopens his eyes. These visitations are transparently unreal, the figments of a severely traumatized imagination, and Steinmann deploys them more for cheap, thoroughly ineffective jump scares than to earnestly explore Tommy's gradually deteriorating psyche.
Harry Manfredini returns to contribute his fifth consecutive orchestral score, spicing it up with brass that misguidedly glorifies Roy's appearances. It's bombastic, ear-piercing, and overused, at one point playing over an exterior shot of Pam simply driving Reggie and Tommy to Demon's trailer park. There's no element of danger in this scene, so there's no reason Steinmann needed to musically deceive us into believing otherwise.
When casting was underway for A New Beginning, the script was sent out under the working title, "Repetition," and many of the actors were unaware they would be acting in a Friday the 13th installment until after they were cast in their roles. While definitely less marketable than A New Beginning, "Repetition" would have at least been a much more honest subtitle, as that's exactly what this misbegotten fifth installment offers a dispiriting exercise in.
4/10
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