Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)

Just when you thought the Friday the 13th series had ended on an upswing, here comes a head-scratching misfire that holds a scant few good ideas and a whole lot of poor execution. While it may indeed deliver a new beginning by not bringing Jason Voorhees back to life, that’s about as new or as fresh as it gets. The rest of the film features the same tired, formulaic goings-on as the other Friday flicks.

Several years after murdering Jason Voorhees, Tommy Jarvis still has visions of the masked maniac coming to get him. After bouncing around between psych wards he lands at Pinehurst Halfway House, a middle-of-nowhere facility for troubled teens to rehabilitate their emotional issues. When one resident brutally kills another, someone else starts killing the remaining residents and workers of Pinehurst and its surrounding neighbors. Tommy’s visions of Jason get worse, leading us to wonder if he’s finally snapped and responsible for the killings or if he is being set up.

I recall seeing a portion of this film on TV once when I was in either middle or high school. It didn’t make sense to me then and that assessment hasn’t changed much over time. The horror genre is built upon fake-outs and misdirection, but these foundational elements seem tedious now as they are presented in the series. I can only stomach so many bad decisions and scary moments revealed to be red herrings or dreams before I lose interest. After seeing these tools abused through four movies so far, I have little interest remaining to lose.

The problems with this film are numerous, but really, they are par for the course with Friday the 13th flicks. Disposable teenagers? Yes- and this time they’re all like the bad kids everyone hated in school, so audiences are almost encouraged to cheer on their deaths. Immoral behavior? Oh my yes- sex, drugs, and even trespassing! This film also includes plenty of 80s character stereotypes and embarrassing amounts of generalizations about African Americans and special-needs individuals. The setting feels unnatural and, for my tastes, there is way too much swearing going on. The filmmakers knew it would get a hard-R rating so they clearly are swinging for the fences on obscenity.

I like the concept of bringing Tommy Jarvis back and pushing him to the edge of sanity with all the murders, but this plot thread really didn’t need to occur in a Friday the 13th film. It is an interesting stand-alone concept forced into the framework of a bad movie series. We’re shown early on that the killer cannot be Tommy but we’re still fed the possibility that it might be him the rest of the way through the movie via the concerns of other characters. So much misdirection surrounds the reveal of the real killer but it becomes apparent who the real killer is just a few minutes before the big reveal. The motive comes out of nowhere and couldn’t possibly have been inferred from the events of the film, making it a final-reel revelation that’s the stuff of pulp fiction and amateur mystery writers.

Friday the 13th: A New Beginning is a lot like the first Friday and The Final Chapter. It’s got a few interesting ideas but the execution fails miserably. The two chief things this film has going against is the fact that I felt cheated out of a crappy but tolerable conclusion in Final Chapter, and that there is too much stupidity, absurdity, and randomness in this film’s ingredients for me to rate it any higher. Pulling back the finality of The Final Chapter is a misstep in and of itself. Instead of a fresh start, audiences are most likely wishing for Jason’s return after A New Beginning, which ends with more than enough room for more sequels. God help us all.

RATING: 0.5 out of 5