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Friday the 13th Countdown, day 4
May. 5th, 2005 09:16 am(Previous entries can be found here)
Today, we're addressing the legendary black sheep of the series:
Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (aka Part V)
Concept: Tommy, Jason's killer, is at a halfway house after years spent at an asylum. But someone has started killing the residents (as well as anyone else in town). Could it be Tommy, gone insane? Jason, returned from the grave? Or someone else? We never see the person clearly (even in a hockey mask) until nearly the end of the film.
Primary Killer: Someone else. Specifically, Roy, an ambulance driver.
Kills: Roy kills seventeen folks. Vic, a patient, gets the ball rolling by killing Roy's son. Jason kills two folks in a dream sequence. And Tommy kills a character in a dream sequence, and kills Roy himself.
Really Bad Kills: Interestingly, some of the best kills in this movie are also ones that defy common sense. That includes the decapitation of Junior, who is riding his motorcycle around his yard in a huff when Roy sticks a meat cleaver out, allowing Junior to self-decapitate. It's a fun kill, but a silly one. Or Robin, who gets the traditional stabbed-from-underneath death that was a requisite in odd-numbered F13 films, right after she noticed that Jake's severed head was in the bed. Imagine if she'd noticed it before getting under the covers. Most of the kills are like that -- fun, but a little silly.
Really Good Kills: Really, that's pretty much the entire theme of the movie. The above-mentioned kills were still fun to watch, even if you knew what was coming. And Eddie is perhaps the best example of this. He and his girlfriend, Tina, go into the woods to have teen sex, the traditional ritual preparation for being slaughtered. When he walks away to take a leak (and apparently walks about three miles away), the killer comes along and stabs Tina through the eyes with garden shears (a damned impressive moment in and of itself). Eddie comes back, sees Tina lying face down (and somehow, there's no blood on the ground), flips her presumed-sleeping body over, and sees the eye wounds. He backs up in fear against a tree, only to have a leather strap whipped around his head and the tree trunk. The killer then tightens the strap (placing a stick through the loops on the end and twisting), and crushes Eddies head. It's an innovative, nasty kill. But you have to wonder -- what would have happened if Eddie had backed up against a different tree, or if he'd run away?
Other notable kills are Vinnie, who gets a flare shoved into his mouth, and Roy himself, who gets dispatched when he knocked from the loft of a barn onto a tractor harrow.
This movie also had a legendary "lost kill." Violet, the workout freak, was supposed to have been chopped with a machete while doing a handstand (mirroring the death of Andy in Part 3), but the MPAA had a shit fit, as it's apparently only acceptable to chop someone from below if they've got a penis. So they shot a scene instead in which Violet was simply stabbed in the stomach.
Celebrities: None. The closest is Corey Parker, who went on to play doctor on The Love Boat: The Next Wave, and hasn't been seen since then (he was also B movie actor Patrick Dempsey's stepson for about five minutes). Corey Feldman does reprise his role of Tommy in the opening flashback (they wanted him to be the star, but he'd already committed to other projects).
Denouement: As mentioned above, after a long chase (which including finding the bodies of the one doctor at the halfway house and the other paramedic), our heroes fought "Jason" in the barn, until they finally knocked him off onto the tractor. The sheriff then came to them in the hospital and told them that the kid killed by Vic at the beginning was Roy's son (something no one knew about), thus giving us his "motive" (even though Vic is one of the few characters in the movie not to get killed).
Miscellany: This movie claims that Jason was cremated, something that later movies would prove wrong. It also harkens back to the original two movies, where it was less about watching a big brute killing people than wondering who was doing the killing and why.
Overall: A lot of folks consider this to be the worst Friday the 13th movie. And it's certainly not a masterpiece, but it's got some stuff going for it. As with Jason Goes to Hell, give the producers points for not only trying something new, but also trying to honor the implicit promise of The Final Chapter, and keeping Jason dead. The problem is, they tried two different things. They went for an actual killer with motivation (something that'd been sorely lacking since the first movie, and even that one was tenuous), and they went for a friggin' huge body count (seriously -- until the final three, which all bumped up the counts with multi-victim mass slaughter scenes, this had the highest count in the series). That meant that over half the people that Roy killed had incredibly weak ties to the halfway house. It's hard to imagine why he bothered hunting Demon and Anita, since they lived so far away, or the orderly and his waitress girlfriend. And if there are plot holes galore, that's nothing compared to the acting, which is uniformly wretched.
Still, once you get over the fact that the killer isn't Jason, this was a perfectly adequate slasher film, with some nicely innovative touches. It also serves as a nice dividing point in the series, separating the human Jason films from the zombie Jason ones.
Today, we're addressing the legendary black sheep of the series:
Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (aka Part V)
Concept: Tommy, Jason's killer, is at a halfway house after years spent at an asylum. But someone has started killing the residents (as well as anyone else in town). Could it be Tommy, gone insane? Jason, returned from the grave? Or someone else? We never see the person clearly (even in a hockey mask) until nearly the end of the film.
Primary Killer: Someone else. Specifically, Roy, an ambulance driver.
Kills: Roy kills seventeen folks. Vic, a patient, gets the ball rolling by killing Roy's son. Jason kills two folks in a dream sequence. And Tommy kills a character in a dream sequence, and kills Roy himself.
Really Bad Kills: Interestingly, some of the best kills in this movie are also ones that defy common sense. That includes the decapitation of Junior, who is riding his motorcycle around his yard in a huff when Roy sticks a meat cleaver out, allowing Junior to self-decapitate. It's a fun kill, but a silly one. Or Robin, who gets the traditional stabbed-from-underneath death that was a requisite in odd-numbered F13 films, right after she noticed that Jake's severed head was in the bed. Imagine if she'd noticed it before getting under the covers. Most of the kills are like that -- fun, but a little silly.
Really Good Kills: Really, that's pretty much the entire theme of the movie. The above-mentioned kills were still fun to watch, even if you knew what was coming. And Eddie is perhaps the best example of this. He and his girlfriend, Tina, go into the woods to have teen sex, the traditional ritual preparation for being slaughtered. When he walks away to take a leak (and apparently walks about three miles away), the killer comes along and stabs Tina through the eyes with garden shears (a damned impressive moment in and of itself). Eddie comes back, sees Tina lying face down (and somehow, there's no blood on the ground), flips her presumed-sleeping body over, and sees the eye wounds. He backs up in fear against a tree, only to have a leather strap whipped around his head and the tree trunk. The killer then tightens the strap (placing a stick through the loops on the end and twisting), and crushes Eddies head. It's an innovative, nasty kill. But you have to wonder -- what would have happened if Eddie had backed up against a different tree, or if he'd run away?
Other notable kills are Vinnie, who gets a flare shoved into his mouth, and Roy himself, who gets dispatched when he knocked from the loft of a barn onto a tractor harrow.
This movie also had a legendary "lost kill." Violet, the workout freak, was supposed to have been chopped with a machete while doing a handstand (mirroring the death of Andy in Part 3), but the MPAA had a shit fit, as it's apparently only acceptable to chop someone from below if they've got a penis. So they shot a scene instead in which Violet was simply stabbed in the stomach.
Celebrities: None. The closest is Corey Parker, who went on to play doctor on The Love Boat: The Next Wave, and hasn't been seen since then (he was also B movie actor Patrick Dempsey's stepson for about five minutes). Corey Feldman does reprise his role of Tommy in the opening flashback (they wanted him to be the star, but he'd already committed to other projects).
Denouement: As mentioned above, after a long chase (which including finding the bodies of the one doctor at the halfway house and the other paramedic), our heroes fought "Jason" in the barn, until they finally knocked him off onto the tractor. The sheriff then came to them in the hospital and told them that the kid killed by Vic at the beginning was Roy's son (something no one knew about), thus giving us his "motive" (even though Vic is one of the few characters in the movie not to get killed).
Miscellany: This movie claims that Jason was cremated, something that later movies would prove wrong. It also harkens back to the original two movies, where it was less about watching a big brute killing people than wondering who was doing the killing and why.
Overall: A lot of folks consider this to be the worst Friday the 13th movie. And it's certainly not a masterpiece, but it's got some stuff going for it. As with Jason Goes to Hell, give the producers points for not only trying something new, but also trying to honor the implicit promise of The Final Chapter, and keeping Jason dead. The problem is, they tried two different things. They went for an actual killer with motivation (something that'd been sorely lacking since the first movie, and even that one was tenuous), and they went for a friggin' huge body count (seriously -- until the final three, which all bumped up the counts with multi-victim mass slaughter scenes, this had the highest count in the series). That meant that over half the people that Roy killed had incredibly weak ties to the halfway house. It's hard to imagine why he bothered hunting Demon and Anita, since they lived so far away, or the orderly and his waitress girlfriend. And if there are plot holes galore, that's nothing compared to the acting, which is uniformly wretched.
Still, once you get over the fact that the killer isn't Jason, this was a perfectly adequate slasher film, with some nicely innovative touches. It also serves as a nice dividing point in the series, separating the human Jason films from the zombie Jason ones.
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