Nothing this stupid ever dies.
For all its utopian promises of finality, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter was altogether too profitable for that to be feasible. It’s the eternal contradiction of sequels: The only reason for The Final Chapter’s financial uptick was because of its supposed closure. (All of The Final Chapter’s scant elements of quality derive from that fact as well.) But reneging in under a year, Frank Mancuso, Sr., unleashed the pestilent Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (nope, no “V” for this ‘un).
The only problem now: They’d decidedly eliminated the possibility of further sequels by killing series villain Jason Voorhees as dead as a hyperbole. How’s one do a Friday the 13th without Jason? (Psst, it’s called Friday the 13th.)
Well, they’d faced a similar predicament when first scheming out Friday the 13th Part 2, as one abandoned notion was to make the “series” out of disconnected movies thematically exploring the quasi-holiday of Friday the Thirteenth. Instead, that day hasn’t played any role in the sequels! Such a series-as-anthology notion isn’t new in the horror field; as with most of Friday’s ideas, one can see this more fully formed in the Halloween series.
That idea didn’t then come to pass, and instead we got horror superstar Jason Q. Voorhees, for our sins. But now Jasonless, the dilemma arises again, as Jason’d done so oft. Again Mancuso devised an anthology notion, only now a connected anthology. Sequels would now chronicle the legacy of the late Mr. Voorhees, with a new one-off psychopath taking on the mantel/hockey mask in each entry. Each’d be a sort of “Scooby Doo” for adults, only more formulaic and moronical. Why, it’d be a tradition! The kids’d come for one Friday each year, guess as to that year’s murderer, and watch human beings die en masse as a bonus.
Of course, The Final Chapter concluded with the suggestion that Jason-killing child Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman) was heir to lunacy. For one reason or another, A New Beginning doesn’t capitalize upon that idea, though they do employ an older Tommy (John Shepherd, another actor who found morality immediately after the depredation of headlining a Friday the 13th). He is the chief red herring, because this one struggles in vain to redo the whodunit mystery of the first – the element that one did the worst, hence its abandonment in the other sequels.
But I’m leaping ahead. For however wedded Mancuso and his filmmaking droogs were to this guest-killer approach, they also want to hide it from us – to create the false impression that it is Jason doing his thing again. To that end, Jason does kill some folk – in Tommy’s dreams. This lets Feldman appear for a few minutes, before Goonies demands him back, to watch a duo of Nobel Prize-winning yokels dig up Jason’s maggoty corpse. And die for their troubles. This, the film’s most effective scene, is also the germ for a far more effective film, the follow-up Jason Lives.
I’d love to just skip ahead. Oh well. In this movie-long stall tactic, Tommy is on the tail end of psychiatric treatment – necessitated by his former machete antics. Dramatizing a field of psychology I’ve no familiarity with, Tommy is placed into the Pinehurst Halfway House – a teen-filled estate which is, for all intents and purposes, a summer camp. In the Friday sense. To this end, there are many other teenagers here, in order to die. Oh, and A New Beginning has an ungodly body count (twenty-two, but I think I missed one or two), so recounting all this’ll take a while.
Matt (Richard Young), head of Pinehurst, world-class expositor, and not much else.
Pam Roberts (Melanie Kinnaman) is the Final Girl. This, too, defines her whole existence, as she lacks even the occasional grace note characterizations of her fellow gals.
Because The Final Chapter had an invulnerable child (Tommy), so does A New Beginning: Reggie “the Reckless” (he has no reck). Shavar Ross, a lesser cohort of Gary Coleman in “Diff’rent Strokes,” imagines the boy as A) the sort of mush-mouthed font of precocity and B) a spouter of mid-‘80s “urban” slang. “Dope!” “Solid!” Scripting a Friday movie must be an exercise in perpetual obliviousness.
Moving on…Jake (Jerry Pavlon), a third-rate variation on Billy Bibbit from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Robin (Juliette Cummins, whose presence in Psycho III and Slumber Party Massacre II means she has one of the better post-Friday careers)…um, redheaded.
Violet (Tiffany Helm), who fulfils the usual ‘80s slasher function of date-stamping the movie. Favoring only the most transitory of styles, she is this in extract form! Crimped, dyed, two-toned early Madonna hair? Check! Goth makeup, including false mole? Check! Dances the robot? Check! Listens to, seemingly, the same Quasi Echo song all day long, every day? Check! Violet is my favorite character!
Oh, and Reggie’s grandfather is also around, doing nothing whatsoever. Though he does somehow justify Reggie’s presence.
And finally, the inevitable Horny Couple, Eddie and Tina (John Robert Dixon and Debi Sue VOORHEES). Like a grotesque of former such HCs, this duo loves sexin’ it up to an absurd degree. It’s a daily habit of public fornication for them, earning the lamentable ire of –
Ethel and Junior Hubbard (two actors who anger me too much to warrant name citing), a duo of grotesque hillbilly stereotypes. For these two, life is a never-ending screaming competition, and they’d give Bobcat Goldthwait a good run for his money. I, like most of A New Beginning’s accursed commentators, hate these two. My solution to this dilemma is to flat out ignore them from now on. They drag this cinematic turd down to Chernobyl levels, when it usually hovers at a mere Three Mile Island.
Now, those two aren’t a part of Pinehurst. Neither are a rotating panoply of tertiary characters whose screen time adds up to over half of the movie. There is neither structure nor reason to this mess. So I haven’t mentioned the useless Sheriff Tucker (Marco St. John), nor his standard dopey deputy, nor the mayor who gets a single scene, and never appears again.
I’ve not, however, accounted for the two final members of Pinehurst. There’s a reason for that. One is Joey (Dominick Brascia), who is physically a sphere, owing to his dependence upon chocolate as his own personal oxygen. The slob even has chocolate perpetually on his cheek, in an effect far more disgusting than any gore they serve up. Joey is a most annoying individual, over-eager like a frou frou dog. The only reason he doesn’t grate is thanks to Vic (Mark Venturini), the lone Pinehurst inmate with any evident mental scarring (excepting Tommy, naturally). Now, Vic is potentially violent. In fact, he’s one Joey-bugging away from full-fledged axe murder! Exit Joey, leaking equal parts blood and chocolate! Hooray – I mean, oh God no!
This is a damnably random act of violence, which exists simply because twenty minutes in there’s no murderer on the loose, nor any reason for one. And for a movie so desperate to traffic in both corpses and red herrings, I’m shocked – shocked – that Vic is now shuffled off to prison, never to be seen again. He doesn’t even die!
Oh, the crime scene cleanup does reveal the eventual killer, though it tries to hide this fact. I shall keep mum for now, but if you watch the accursed thing (why?!), it is exceedingly obvious who’s ready to end nearly two dozen human lives. Hell, they even fade from a close-up on this minor, minor character to the first official stalking scene. Frankly, this is the single worst mystery I’ve ever seen! Though not even the cops treat it as such, depriving us of even the barest connective tissue.
A New Beginning is almost literally nothing more than disconnected murder scenes from here on out, separated by moments of Tommy hallucinating. In order to keep these moments from disrupting the ostensible central plot about teens existing at Pinehurst, the vast majority of the victims are totally unrelated to everything so far. Like the anachronistic greasers whose car (in)conveniently breaks down in the forest that night. They have an unfunny argument which climaxes in one character leaving to shit (a reoccurring theme), Then a disembodied arm, not even supplemented by a POV shot, arrives and kills them both in ways both unoriginal and bloodless. The series has been repeating murders for a while now. It now can’t even create variety within a single movie.
One hardly encounters a movie as disconnected as A New Beginning. Most that are aren’t even intended as narratives; clip shows have more unity than this! On contemplation, A New Beginning plays like forcing a story onto an episode of “Saturday Night Live.” Each five minutes is a mostly independent sketch, only these all conclude in death. Actually, as “sketches,” they aren’t even at “MADtv” level!
It took four screenwriters to create such randomness?! Four awful, awful screenwriters, including arguable-illiterate Martin Kitrosser of Part III. “Aiding” them behind the camera is director Danny Steinmann. We’ve gone now from Joseph Zito, a man best known for Chuck Norris cheese, to someone best known as “Danny Stone,” perpetrator of actual hardcore pornography (i.e. High Rise – uh-huh-HUH-huh-HUH-huh-huh!). Oh Steinman, you have no grasp of suspense, or basic staging, though at least you’re movie’s lit flatly enough one sees every depressing event without effort. The stalking sequences are only recognizable as such because of repeated tropes, like the omnipresent spring-loaded cat; for a person who’d never seen a horror movie, this wouldn’t even register.
So on top of the degreasing of the greasers, here are the other events which carry us along to 90 minutes:
At a diner, Tommy’s ambulance driver seen for under a minute some thirty minutes ago arrives to pick up a waitress. As a female, she (Lana) fulfills her only purpose by showing ‘em (her breasts, that it). He snorts cocaine, the first example of hard drugs in the series’ general marijuana haze. An axe kills both of them.
A transient appears in the forest apropos of nothing, says perhaps two lines of dialogue. He then receives the world’s most boring machete gutting possible. If they were that desperate to up the body count, couldn’t they at least make something of it?
In a slightly more pertinent ten minute detour, Tina and Eddie head out for their daily public fornication. It’s the usual sex = death scene, notable for Debi Sue Voorhees’ buxom nudity. (Actually, this movie has the heaviest nakedness quotient for maybe the genre as a whole, as befits a director who originated in pornography.) Sex done, they receive the highlight murders. Lucky them! Tina’s eyes are gouged out with shears, like this movie wants to be The Burning (this we see unedited, but God forbid Tina’s pubic hair show up). Eddie’s head is then…er…crushed (?!) against a tree with a belt (?!).
Reggie suddenly announces his elder brother Demon (Miguel A. Núñez Jr. – Juwanna Mann him/herself) is in town, for no reason. So he reunites with Demon – for all of one minute. This scene is fascinating, as Núñez imagines Demon as an ersatz Michael Jackson to rival Violet’s ersatz Madonna. His lone non-death scene sees him plying a young child with gifts.
Then Reggie leaves and Demon, left to his own devices, gets the screaming enchilada shits. Yes, feces remain A New Beginning’s eternal fallback mode. Demon sings a poo duet with his needless girlfriend Anita whilst shitting. Then she’s dead. And he’s impaled with a pole while still actively defecating. Tasteful!
Next up: Junior and Ethel’s long sought after demises. They happen.
As we enter the homestretch, the movie can redirect its murderous focus, and off of its central teenagers – who now only number Jake, Robin and Violet. There is nothing of interest here, apart from Violet’s continued loving embrace of 1985. Two of the three murders are repeats from earlier in this film; the other is a variation on the “knife under you” kill, making its fourth appearance in the franchise. There is one unexpected casualty amidst all this nothing. That’d be footage from A Place in the Sun, press-ganged into a Friday the 13th sequel. Why?! (P.S. belated R.I.P. Liz Tayor.)
By now, a few useless characters haven’t been killed yet, so they can be red herrings – red herrings who turn up instead as corpses killed off screen throughout the remainder. Of Tommy, he’s been utterly forgotten for nearly the past hour, with his absence in the climax an effort to make us think he’s doing the deeds. It doesn’t work.
The focus now falls upon Pam and Reggie. They’ve been occasionally alluded to while A New Beginning grinded its gears, but they’re still mostly question marks, as we’re supposed to route for them as they dodge a psychopath…
At last Quasi-Jason (Fauxhees) becomes something more than a stagehand’s, er, hand. Why couldn’t they just go with the mask from the start?! Eh, maybe because then we’d get too long a look at those baby blue trims, the surest sign this ain’t Jason we’re dealin’ with – and they wanna hide that particular movie-scuppering bomb as long as possible.
But A New Beginning doesn’t need help from its atrocious anti-reveal to suck mightily, even compared to its fellows. Here in the Final Girl sequence, often the most competent section, Pam and Reggie hold not a candle to Tommy and Trish – whose struggles theirs’ most closely mirrors. Pam, for example, is the sort of horror movie female who falls down, and cannot stand back up. Don’t make it too easy for Quasi-Jason! Old Q-S ain’t much better, as he just stands there as Reggie plows him with a bulldozer and – Ungngngnghh! I think my brain is shutting down!
…
Repetition, that’s all A New Beginning is. Not that the underlying concept behind Friday the 13th allows for much play – then again, the strict slasher formula makes minute changes far more telling. But this is contemptuous! Steinman has no capacity to bring any of the positive out of this recycled material. Even when ensconced in a barn (shades of Part III), the awesome prospect of a machete-on-chainsaw duel somehow comes across with all the tedium of a tea party.
Things seem dire for Pam & Boy (that is, a machete is raised in the air, a shot that gets about eleven variations throughout). That’s when Tommy shows up not as the killer, to the surprise of no one. And he turns out to be…not that effective, actually. Forever silent, Tommy just listens to Corey Feldman’s recycled audio track as Quasi-Jason gives him a dainty little machete slash. But just as the holy gods of randomness instigated this ridiculous brouhaha, so too do they end it, by flinging Quasi-Jason out of the barn and onto a spiky…thing. And his true identity is revealed.
“Jinkeys! It’s old man Burns!” “Zoinks!”
Okay, here at the end Sheriff Tucker (so useless, he didn’t even get the honor of a becorpsification) has his work cut out for him, as he exposits why paramedic Roy Burns put on a bald cap and a Jason mask and adhered to a generic formula. For you see, Joey was Roy’s son.
Nngnghghgh – brain shutting down again!
Um, Joey (the fat chocolate fiend) was an orphan – indeed, his mother died in childbirth because of his obesity. Daddy Roy cared so little for his whale-shaped progeny, he abandoned him to the mental health system; Daddy Roy cared so much for same pig, he responded to his death with a flailing murder spree. It’s the eternal paradox about parenting in the Friday the 13th universe. And Roy’s actions lack the focus of Mrs. Pamela Voorhees back in 1979. She at least, in her insanity, blamed camp counselors as a class for her son’s death twenty-two years prior. Roy, however, doesn’t limit himself to the Pinehurst bunch, but warms himself up with nearly a dozen people who have nothing to do Joey’s life whatsoever!
Boy, if they were gonna remold the series around this whodunit angle, they surely should’ve put some effort into it. Perhaps once this beast was in the can, the uselessness of that gesture was clear enough. A New Beginning ends, “beginning” unachieved, by positing the same damn thing that The Final Chapter hinted at: that Tommy Jarvis is the new Jason Voorhees. Which is what we were all sorta anticipating from the get-go, making this a movie-long holding pattern. At least the moment allows director Steinman to demonstrate his unique storytelling ability.
Ooh, subtle!
A New Beginning’s inevitable failure with audiences stated the obvious: We want Jason! Accept no pseudo-psychos! Oh, and would it hurt not letting the next one suck? Thank you. Verily, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning is not simply a misdirection; it’s this franchise’s Batman & Robin! It was time for a complete stylistic overhaul. And about damned time to respond to the new supernatural slasher climate A Nightmare on Elm Street created.
RELATED POSTS
• No. 1 Friday the 13th (1980)
• No. 2 Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)
• No. 3 Friday the 13th Part III (1982)
• No. 4 Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)
• No. 6 Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)
• No. 7 Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)
• No. 8 Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
• No. 9 Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)
• No. 10 Jason X (2002)
• No. 11 Freddy vs. Jason (2003)
• No. 12 Friday the 13th (2009)
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