Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)

I didn’t actually think that it was possible, but the people who made Friday the 13^th: A New Beginning have made a film that is actually dumber and scummier than the films that preceded it.  Seriously, this is a terminally dumb movie and the production values have the charm of moldy bread.

The movie, of course, is the fifth in the endless series of adventures for the executioner who sports a hockey mask and hacks up hapless twenty-somethings with a machete.  It’s not Jason this time, however.  He was killed off at the end of The Final Chapter and so the mystery of this new killer stays with us until the end – though we have a pretty good idea early on.

A New Beginning opens several years after the events of The Final Chapter and catches up with Tommy Jarvis (John Shepherd) who is now a disturbed young twenty-something who is on his way to a secluded halfway house for mentally ill youths that is located just down the road from Crystal Lake.  He is plagued by nightmares of his experience and so naturally those events start happening again, despite Jason’s exit from this mortal coil.  Never less to fuel Tommy’s raging psychosis.  These things happen.

In a series of events that I am way too indifferent to recall here, a series of axe murders begin and are being blamed on somebody wearing a hockey mask.  Is it Jason back from the grave?  Well, it is hard to think not but since the producers at Paramount Pictures want to keep priming the pump of this series, let’s just say there’s a killer in a hockey mask and cover-alls and the murder implements are exactly the same as they have been before – machetes, hedge-trimmers, spears, etc.  Hapless youngsters are hacked to death one by one and the mystery killer remains a mystery until the very end.  The identity won’t satisfy those coming to see Jason do his thing.

If you’re into this sort of thing – i.e. one of the millions who have contributed to making this series a box office success – then this is one of this series’ low lights.  There’s a trashy quality about this film that somehow manages to feel even less contributory to Western Civilization than the previous four movies.  It won’t satisfy you, but at least I can report that at 92 minutes it won’t take up much of your time.