Friday the 13th: A New Beginning

Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)

Runtime: 92 minutes

Directed by: Danny Steinmann

Starring: John Shepherd, Melanie Kinnaman, Richard Young Shavar Ross

From: Paramount

This is not what I was planning on watching tonight; that's just how things worked out. I got off to a later start than I was hoping... I don't even want to get into it. Anyhow, I rewatched this movie, among my least favorite of the franchise; I'll explain why I feel the way I do. I don't know about everyone else but me, I don't hate it because it's the Friday movie where there's no Jason and it isn't his mother but instead it's a random dude.

The plot, written by me: Tommy Jarvis (Shepherd) is now a few years away from killing Jason Voorhees; he's now mentally disturbed and somehow he goes from a mental hospital to a rehab center out in the woods; yep, great idea to bring him back to the woods after the events of the last film... and he is clearly more disturbed than most of the teenagers who are there. How did he get out of the mental hospital, anyhow? I do not know how much older he is, BTW, which does mess up with people's timelines in trying to figure out in what years all the movies happen.

Anyhow, the other teens there include someone with anger issues (enough to kill an annoying fat kid), but two teens whose biggest affliction appear to be “horniness”, then there's a punk girl, Not Pauly Shore who stutters but that's about it, and Bootleg Kerri Green. I really have no idea what the mental issues are of most of the people there, as they are never explained and Tommy is clearly more disturbed than anyone else. But it doesn't really matter as you don't spend much time with them except to see them killed, and not even as much time is spent with Tommy as you'd think. 

Instead you're distracted with such things as Reggie, an annoying young black kid (Dudley from Diff'rent Strokes) who is there visiting his grandfather, and brief appearances with several random characters who don't really mean anything at all. Sure, some of them are amusing, such as Reggie's older brother DEMON (apparently living in a 70's van and sporting a jheri curl); a redneck mother and son (that appear to be the exact same age) are NOT amusing; in fact, they are way overbearing awful caricatures. Then there's a drifter and some greasers straight out of the 50's who are dressed like Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones and say, "Rat-a-tat-tooey"... point is, it's hard to care about anyone. Not even Billy the horny middle-aged balding mustached orderly who is funny and enjoys snorting coke.

While there are some pretty cool kills, it doesn't really matter overall. The story is crap and so are the characters. The climax is mostly a middle-aged woman (Pam) who helps run the halfway house and annoying Reggie in his red 80's sweatsuit. Tommy isn't as big a factor as you'd expect, or hope. Young Mr. Jarvis actually speaks about as much as Ryan Gosling does in Only God Forgives, meaning hardly at all. I heard that Gosling only had 22 lines in the movie, which sounds about right. I also heard that Tommy here speaks only about 26 words in the entire film, which also sounds right.

Let me spoil things here with this bad 28 year old movie. Of course the killer isn't Jason Voorhees as he is dead. Instead it's the secret father of the fat annoying kid who picked up the corpse (as he's an ambulance driver) and he snapped at this. Motivations are understandable from that point, but why he decided to be Jason was incredibly weak and nonsensical, and I am not sure why at times the father (who looks like Lou Ferrigno) has similar powers to the incredibly strong and powerful mongoloid that Jason was in 2 through 4 before he was resurrected as an unstoppable zombie in 6. Many of the kills also come off as incredibly random and coincidental once you know who the killer is.

There is intentional and unintentional humor, such as how most of the women in this movie quite clearly did not wear any bras (there are several naturally large pairs of hooters in this movie, to be honest) or how you hear a Pseudo Echo song that wasn't their cover of Funky Town, but this is still one of the weakest in the franchise for reasons other than who the killer really is and hopefully have been conveyed well by me... at least I would rather watch it than Only God Forgives!

I'll be back tomorrow night, and likely not with a Jason Voorhees film.