Friday the 13th

Friday the 13th: A New Beginning
Reviewed by Edward Larsen Terkelsen

USA, R, 92 m, 1985
Directed by Danny Steinmann. Stars Melanie Kinnaman, John Shepherd, Shavhi Ross, et al.

Critics are notorious for being unduly dismissive of genre pictures, particularly those of the horror variety. Ever since George Méliès premiered The House of the Devil to a Paris audience on Christmas Eve in 1896, horror has been treated like the movies’ redheaded stepchild. But consider the unfortunate horror sub-genre that is the slasher film: it commands all the respect of horror’s redheaded stepchild. There’s a good reason for that: most of these things are thrown together by a bunch of inexperienced goofballs looking to turn a quick buck. So it goes without saying that a sequel to a slasher film isn’t going to earn any Academy Award nominations, but a sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a slasher film is looked upon even less favorably than a Paulie Shore comedy. That’s too bad; I think if folks approach Friday the 13^th: A New Beginning in the right frame of mind, a good time just might be had. Don’t get me wrong: nobody’s going to mistake this fifth chapter in the Jason Voorhees franchise for art house fare, but as far as bodycount pictures go (and most of them are admittedly shit), it is not without its charms. There are more red herrings here than you can shake a blood-covered machete at, and the killer’s means of dispatching with all those randy teens is maddeningly uninspired: he impales, hacks, slices, dices, and rubs their faces in poo-poo undies. But director Danny Steinmann (Savage Streets) keeps the tension up with all those wonderful clichés we’ve come to expect from our gorenography: dark and stormy nights, a musical score with screeching violins a plenty, and long stretches of uncomfortable silence that set you up to be jolted out of your seat. Of course, many of the shocks here are false alarms, my favorite being the old rubber spider in the closet routine. You laugh at yourself for falling for such hackneyed tricks, but you gotta give the filmmakers props for making them work.

The last installment of the Friday the 13^th series (misleadingly entitled The Final Chapter) saw the supposed demise of Jason Voorhees (that big, wordless psychopath who hides his misshapen mug under a hockey mask), but A New Beginning’s writing team has found a good way of keeping the blood spilling in his absence. The murder rate in this neck of the woods is out of control; people are offed right and left, but it’s all done with tongue planted firmly in cheek, so you don’t feel guilty for breaking up when some doofus made up to look like Jermaine Jackson (this is the glorious ‘80s, after all) gets his in a potty shed.

The film opens with a “special appearance” by ten-year-old Corey Feldman (his character, Tommy, put Jason in the ground in the previous episode) as he spies on two dipshits sneaking into a boneyard after dark (and during a hellacious thunderstorm, no less) to dig up Jason’s corpse. Naturally, Jason can’t abide anybody interrupting his beauty sleep, so he hacks the grave robbers to pieces. Tommy watches in horror (his eyes magnified by a pair of jumbo specs that Larry King wouldn’t dare putting on) as Jason lumbers toward him. Note that I said “lumbers,” which means the little goof in the yellow rain slicker has plenty of time to scuttle off, but (and here we’re honoring one of those great horror show clichés) he remains put, blubbering away like a twist. As Jason raises his trademark machete to do in the only slightly more talented half of the late-eighties’ inexplicable Corey phenomenon, we are rousted back to sunlit reality as Tommy (now eighteen and played by John Shepherd) is being bussed off to a halfway house for screwy kids. (Ah, ‘twas all a dream. Mark off another item on your checklist of scary movie clichés.) Actually, the woodsy surroundings make it look more like a summer camp (or a hippie commune), though it’s chock full of stock laughing academics: the stutterer, the slut, and the slow-witted fatso. The slow-witted fatso, his face covered with chocolate because he’s too dense to figure out how to eat a candy bar, waddles around the camp, annoying the beejeezus out of his fellow crazies with his nonstop blather. After being dismissed in disgust by a couple of the chickies, the overweight ne'er-do-well approaches a rather surly looking guy who’s chopping away at a pile of wood. Well, I’m sure you can see where this is going. Yep, the wood-chopping guy buries his ax in the slob’s back, putting an end to his nonsensical rants once and for all. When the ambulance arrives to bag the corpse, one of the paramedics disrespects the crime scene by cracking jokes and blowing bubbles with his gum. This doesn’t sit well with the paramedic’s partner. (For those of you that give a fart, that’s a clue.)

Though the fuzz carted off the loon with the ax fetish, more stiffs continue to pop up around camp. You might assume it’s Jason back from the dead to keep the series alive (he always did have a thing for camps, eh?), but such suspicions aren’t confirmed one way or another until far, far into the picture. And even then, it’s not what you think. Not unlike the first Friday the 13^th, we observe most of the killings from the killer’s POV; for all we know, Urkel could be committing these crimes. But the picture gives us all the usual suspects: a local hag who’s fed up with a couple of the hornier kids making whoopee in her cornfield, a scruffy wanderer who’ll scrub the shit out of a chicken coop for a crust of bread, and the leading man himself, Tommy. Tommy, who suffers from paranoid delusions, has been in one institution or another since his run-in with Jason back in the day. He’s such a whack job that he becomes virtually inaccessible as a protagonist, and it doesn’t help matters that he barely ever utters a word.

We’ve all learned from other slasher films that the boogeyman frowns upon illicit drug use and premarital sex, so kids who engage in such activities are in for a painful lesson here. The first to go are a pair of leather-clad greasers as they prep their hot rod to hook up with a couple of girls (or “cunts,” to use the vernacular of these refined gentlemen). The killer takes care of one of the boys by shoving a burning road flare in his mouth, and then dashes the other’s hope for a blowjob by cutting his throat. Later, an orderly from the institute (his macho posturing and bad mustache would’ve helped him fit right in with the ‘70s porn scene) sits in his beater waiting for his girlfriend to finish her shift at a greasy spoon. To pass the time, he pulls out a vile of blow, but before he can toot a line, the killer splits his head open with an ax. (Uh oh. Did that wood-chopping guy go and grab the midnight express?) When the waitress, who promised her beau that she’d give him a little nookie after she punched out for the night, finds him oozing life in the parking lot, she runs screaming for help. But she doesn’t get far before the killer swings his ax into her chest with a force that would make the Babe himself stand up and take notice. Golly, I guess just the intention of doing the nasty will get you killed in these things.

But if you do manage to go all the way outside of holy matrimony, an even crueler and more unusual form of execution awaits you. The libidinous younguns that the old bitty keeps chasing off her land eventually find some privacy in the woods. There, amongst the badgers and tics, they make sweet, sweet love in a marijuana haze. Thankfully, their clammy tryst takes place during the day, letting us take in every inch of the girl’s luscious curves. Oh, such lickable gams. Oh, such suckable ta-tas. Oh, such a fu—omigod, nooo! The goddamned killer throws a wet blanket on what could’ve become some stellar spank bank material when he wakes the girl up from her post-coital snooze and rips her face apart with a pair of hedge clippers. But the film isn’t done yet with exploiting her (ahem) assets: When her dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks fuck buddy, who was off freshening up at a nearby stream after blowing his load, returns to mount her from behind (he doesn’t realize that she’s deader than the dick in his grandfather’s pants), we get a nice, clear view of her million-dollar ass. Hey, in a picture this retarded, you need to take your pleasures wherever you can find them.

Later, the killer sneaks up on a girl with a freaky hairdo as she does the Robot to some bad bubblegum pop. In what looks like something out of Halloween, the killer takes her by the throat and impales her against her bedroom wall with a… Ah, I don’t need to take you through all this; you know how it’s going to play out. Friday the 13^th: A New Beginning is complete and utter crap, but it manages to give off a less offensive odor than the other chapters in this series. (I’m excluding Jason X and Freddy vs. Jason, both of which I found positively inspired.) I know that’s like saying Shemp is the least unsightly Stooge, but A New Beginning should be applauded for breaking from the herd with its winking approach. (It’s fun in a Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla kind of way). The filmmakers here were instructed by Paramount to turn out nothing more than a gory exploitation picture, and it looks like they had a grand time delivering the goods. (I’ve read some stuff that suggests otherwise: one source has it that Steinmann was so stressed out by the shoot that he hung up his megaphone and retired from filmmaking for good.) Of course, A New Beginning doesn’t give you anything to talk about afterwards, but films like this aren’t meant to stir the intellect. Its sole function is to scare you, and I guess that’s okay. There’s always tomorrow to watch Wild Strawberries, Fellini Satyricon or Un Chien Andalou.

May 21, 2008

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