Friday the 13th, No. 7 - Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)

Low grosses or no, these things were still cheap enough to be profitable. Hence more. Q.E.D.

Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (the second time a title has press ganged the word “new” into a lie, just as they’d later do again with the word “final”) has the interesting challenge of following up Jason Lives. I don’t just mean having to follow a fun, funny, action-packed, family-friendly tale of mass murder. I mean Jason Lives rewrote the rules on Jason himself, now an immovable object, a thoroughly unkillable zombie – he represents his owns series most adeptly.

Actually, with Jason Lives’ Godzillafication of Jason Voorhees, it thus makes sense that Paramount sought to do as King Kong vs. Godzilla, or Mothra vs. Godzilla, or Godzilla vs. Hedorah, or Godzilla vs. Gigan, or Godzilla vs. Megalon, or – Look, it goes on like that! Basically, Paramount birthed the sickly notion of a Freddy vs. Jason, a good 1.5 decades before the actual thing. But New Line Cinema ran the still-promising Nightmare on Elm Street series, and were at that point uninterested. Besides, the legal foofarah of engineering such a crossover would be beyond a production team that could barely maintain their own series’ continuity. Thus a 1988 Freddy vs. Jason was scrapped, though the barest bones of that idea found their way into The New Blood, which can alternately be titled Jason vs. Carrie.


Sucks does The New Blood, and this is does for a variety of reasons. Of course there’s always the series’ legacy, which has demanded unvaried reiterations of the same generic formula for nearly a decade now. The MPAA doesn’t help, with its demands that every example of ultra-violence – the only thing now that the filmmakers are even interested in – be excised completely, to the point of incomprehensibility. And director John Carl Buechler, the man so concerned with that ultra-violence in the first place, ain’t too great either. Okay, Buechler is a good makeup man, his first love. As a director, he – oh my God! – he did Troll! Those refrigerator poetry magnets tell more cohesive stories than he does.

The Carrie rip-off premise hurts The New Blood too. It refocuses all effort upon the final 12 minutes, where the standard Final Girl may break out her bizarre telekinetic powers. Also, Jason’s admittedly loving makeup finally comes into focus by now, which is where all the unexcised makeup work went. That’s all well and good, but the climaxes were always the better parts of these exercises. To lavish more attention upon them at the expense of the previous 76 minutes makes for perhaps the most tedious, standard slog until then.

In that, The New Blood most resembles The Final Chapter (which it wasn’t, just as this isn’t). We get to watch undifferentiated teenage non-characters run through a low-energy party for one goddamned hour. With character ignorance, and general unlikability, this is a slasher-wide problem, but one certain Fridays cultivate. For fear of doing anything new beyond that Carrie thing (which doesn’t alter the overall fabric as effectively as Jason Lives’ welcome humor), it’s just cipher, cipher, cipher, cipher, cipher. Only more of ‘em, owing to a need for ever more massive body counts (sixteen here). And with Jason Lives effectively destroying realism, these ciphers cannot even approximate humans, but maintain a sort of stylized (only not) movie talk.

They are a tedious bunch, which I’ll have to address, seeing as we’re back to the “house of teens die too late” structure. Let’s talk the ersatz Carrie, the lone interesting thing The New Blood pukes out. We open on a characteristically tasteless note: spousal abuse. Stay classy, Friday franchise! One…Mr. Shepherd brutalizes his wife Amanda (noted squealer and voice actress Susan Blu). Then drunkenly turning upon his prepubescent daughter Tina, out there on the latest nouveau Crystal Lake, she uses her nascent psychic powers to collapse a dock upon him. And kill him.

A death is just as well, because among The New Blood’s other sins, it takes ages to get Jason reanimated and tromping around. In fact, it’s…however many years later now, as Tina has aged into Lar Park Lincoln (of House II). Let’s arbitrarily say seven years later – and since we saw Jason bound to the lakebed before Tina docked her father for drinking, it’s been a substantially long time since this community (re-renamed Crystal Lake again, perhaps for the idiot tourist dollars) had a bloody killing spree. Too long, in fact! As a mortal, Jason offed like fifty people in a single week! That’s three entries! Now as a zombie, practically zilcho!


That’s to change soon. Tina has returned to the site of her patricide (a word no Friday writer is literate enough to use), part of a psychological attempt to make her “get over her guilt.” Or an excuse to unleash a psychopath, either way. Here is her shrink, Dr. Crews (Terry Kiser, most famous as the titular corpse in Weekend at Bernie’s, a role he’ll get good practice for towards The New Blood’s end). Though ostensibly trying to cure Tina, Crews in fact wishes to harvest her psychokinetic abilities to his own end, presumably to sell them to the Taliban – or so I guess. Of course, Crews’ motives disintegrate with time.

Naturally, this being the sort of movie it is, there is a house twenty feet next door, right here in the isolated center of the woods. And it’s infested with teenagers. Yup, it’s the Final Chapter setup, prodded back into service. Hell, I’d wager these are the same two houses as in that one. For all of Crystal Lake’s consistent biome switches, an upheaval in architectural styles and layout barely registers.

But enough fart-knocking around! At long fucking last Tina goes all distressed, and opts in her diseased mental state to go and resurrect her father from the lake. Because his corpse is still down there, rotting away, some seven or whatever years later. Come on, guys! Oh, and Jason’s body is down there too, naturally. And d’oh!, it’s that one which Tina reanimates. … Then she passes out.

Okay, there’s one interesting thing about The New Blood beyond its desire to ape an old Stephen King movie. That’s motherfucking Jason! Visually, he is a thing of beauty (that is, he’s hideously ugly): All exposed ribcages and oozing wounds and other deliciousness. This marks Kane Hodder’s first (of four) excursions behind the hockey mask, somehow defining the role most wholly despite this being Part Seven. Friday fans love this guy. Actually, it’s a little dispiriting, since Hodder’s Jason reminds me most of a roided-out wrestler, like the stupider variations on Batman’s Bane (that is, like Bane in Batman & Robin). What is it with wrestling fans and glomming onto the most willfully tasteless entertainment they can? Oh, they’ll cite little grace notes in Hodder’s persona, like his heavy breathing (a zombie?!), or his brutality. Indeed, Hodder starts off quite strongly, with a kill considered the series’ best – Bashing a sleeping bag-wrapped girl against a tree repeatedly. Or…not repeatedly, not on home video. Way do undermines yourselves, Paramount! If you’re so moral, why’d you distribute these in the first place?!


Now, Jason Lives didn’t have to explore what Zombie Jason, Jasonzilla, would do when left in his home environment, since it gave Jason a vision quest instead. Now we get to know. First, Jason walks five miles away. She’s motionless and all, but he doesn’t harm a hair on Tina’s head – not now, and not ever. Apparently Jason knows his own formula, that he must murder the outliers first, lurk around a bit, and only then assassinate the multitudinous nearby participants. And so with unerring exactitude, Jason strolls to the forest’s edge, to kill Michael and his girlfriend.

Pause! Michael?! DAMN it! Seriously?! Look, Fridays, stop intentionally calling attention to Halloween, okay! For what it’s worth, Michael is the birthday boy (happy fucking birthday!) headed for that sickening teenage party near the death lake. This means when his “friends” are being stalked later on, they repeatedly call out “Michael?” again and again. As if they were in the wrong slasher movie! It burns!

And despite Michael’s absence the night of his birthday, the excess meat sticks around and persists in their low-gear fiesta for the next day and a half. They’d possibly go even longer, except by then they’re all deceased. This makes no sense, except in a meta way. Perhaps they know they’re all minor characters in a late-‘80s slasher movie (a truly Kafkaesque concept). As such, they indeed have no outside purpose. They’ve no homes, no lives (as it were). They exist simply as consciousnesses meant to navigate their physical bodies into a machete.


I’m getting to a consideration of those assholes, I swear! Sticking with Tina, well… Jason Lives made the wise call to make Tommy Jarvis an active protagonist from the outset, knowing that Jason perambulates. Tina could’ve been in the same boat. But given her mental instability, and Dr. Crews, she spends most of the movie doubting Jason’s existence. So while Tommy’s inability to convince others about Jason manifested itself as car chases, The New Blood instead gives us Lar Park Lincoln acting. Imagine a girl, not attractive enough for pornography, but at that level actress-wise, attempting to rehash a decade-old Sissy Spacek performance. She’s also the best performer in this.


The rest, mostly consisting of the doomed teenagers, are barely able to inflect their voices. And that’s as good an excuse as any to consider them all individually (for as much good as it does).

Nick (Kevin Spirtas, another Friday alum destined for daytime soaps) is the designated Final Boy, which has now become a genre necessity, as we must always have a Final Couple. The fact of Nick’s obvious survival defines him completely, so moving on to the to-dies…

Melissa (Susan Jennifer Sullivan) is the first genuine manifestation of the Rich Bitch, a horror movie hallmark. She lusts after Nick, unjustifiably, and operates under the unclear assumption that pissing him (and me) off will make him (and me) horny. Because she’s the most hateful member of the group, she’s the last to die – A horror effort to earn audience cheers, like Rhodes in Day of the Dead. But lacking a bravura kill, it’s all quite undermined.

Robin (Elizabeth Kaitan) is redheaded. And not even the first series redhead named Robin (see A New Beginning, if you dare)! She takes on whatever sluttish characteristics Melissa shuns, which leads to her – eventually – satisfying one half of the Horny Couple.

The other half would be David (Jon Renfield), who is otherwise the token Stoner. Amazingly, this characterization doesn’t even means he acts stoned. We just see him smoke a joint on occasion. Scintillating!

Robin’s ineffectual rival for David’s affections is mousy Maddy (and I shan’t list any more actors, for I am as arbitrary as this movie). Her arc: Act nebbish, put on a clownish amount of makeup to appear “hot,” inexplicably seek David out in the forest rather than the house, die.

Eddie, the closest thing here to the Prankster. Rather, Eddie is the Unsuccessful Amy Jacket-Wearing Sci-Fi Writer. You know, that old standard. And picture a bad screenwriter’s example of a bad writer. It compounds!

Russell. The Other Male. Lacking in other characteristics, apart from (weirdly) a half-assed impersonation of Cary Grant, Russell’s death is more imminent than most.

His counterpart: Sandra. The Other Female.

Oh, and also the Token Black Couple: Ben and Kate. Race is enough to qualify as a personality in these unironically shitty horror movies. Still, that’s enough “personality” to keep them safe from the “black guy dies first” rule. But not for very long…


So many characters, each less interesting than the last! Buechler hasn’t the directorial capacity to even establish the houses’ geography relative to each other, so tracking these dozen philosophical zombies around isn’t possible. Alleviating the problem, most of them cease moving early on, because it’s easier for Jason to murder everybody when they don’t ever leave their designated room.

Examining Buechler’s profound inability to get an idea across clearly, allow me a particular example. Tina starts having these hallucinations of Jason’s murders, both before and after. Good enough. So she sees Michael killed with a tent spike (I picture Jason furtively scanning the forest floor for something spiky and manmade). Thus freaking out, Tina discovers the same tent spike in her front porch, as though Jason has left a sign. This is complicated when we then see Jason far away from the houses killing some more random jerks, but that was an extra reshoot (to up the body count), so ignore it.

Okay, so Tina’s found a murder weapon. After a few confusing edits, Dr. Crews has it. From then on, every so often someone will snoop around Crews’ office, and find the spike. Each time, it lets ‘em know immediately that Crews wants to harm Tina. Um…how?! It’s JUST a tent spike! How this reveals Crews’ motives (but somehow his collection of Jason-themed newspaper clipping do not), I do not follow.

It gets worse! Crews heads out apropos of nothing on a random nighttime forest stroll. A really long one, as he finds Michael’s body artfully arranged in a tree – and we know Mike was spiked a good five miles away! Oh, and here is the tent spike which killed him. Just as Amanda Shepherd finds Crews’ spike in his desk. Um, so… Honestly, I don’t follow! Did Tina manifest Crews’ spike, and if so, what does it have to do with anything?!

In fact, as Crews now clearly knows Jason is out and about, it’s totally unclear why he decides to stay, and persist in antagonizing Tina. All it earns Crews is an electrified tree lopper in the gut (which should be more exciting than it is). Maybe again it’s that fabulous ennui of a self-conscious slasher victim. I dunno.


Oh, and that moment of Crews randomly strolling the forest, that ain’t an isolated incident. The word “random” appears literally a dozen times in my notes, usually the exact same phrase: “[Person X] randomly runs off into the woods.” Hell, every time Tina’s Jason Vision™ acts up, this is her response. Even when she’s in the woods, she somehow manages to “run off into the woods.” And that death tree, with its Michael piñata? She too finds it! Oh, and so does Nick. Separately! In such a massive forest, how does they keep finding things so easily?! (Jason finds what he wants – fresh meat – with equal ease, but that’s normal.)


Such is how it goes for the vast majority of The New Blood’s running time, barely making even the most rudimentary sort of sense. Admittedly, the finale does make up for some of that, as it’s unique to see Jason up against a supernatural force – Tina’s sub-Professor X routine. Overall, though, it puts the “apathy” in “telepathy,” except that’s a misspelling.

Rather, there’s the issue at the end too, that Tina is never in any danger. She’s content to just mentally hurl televisions and decapitated heads from across the room, never lifting a finger. What a bear this must’ve been for Lar Park Lincoln to film! Kane Hodder does his all to elevate the material, carrying the fight with his physical acting when Lincoln appears to be suffering from a Botox treatment ahead of history. Jason looks pissed.

And that’s to say nothing of the asinine conclusion. Jason Lives established that Jason is now basically indestructible. And yet he still must be returned to the bottom of Crystal Lake in time for the next sequel. Here’s The New Blood’s solution. Tina does resurrect her father, who is somehow stronger than Jason [“bullshit” covered as a sneeze], and able to drag him back to the lake. “Dada?” Tina says. I couldn’t agree more.

So things end as though this entry barely even mattered. Jason’s back underwater, only now without Tommy Jarvis’ stylish chains. Which is something, I guess.

Oh, and if Tina can resurrect the dead, it’s a great disservice that she neglects to revive anyone slaughtered in last night’s killing spree. I mean, sure, I’d leave most of ‘em to rot, but c’mon, girl!, your mom’s dead now! There’s no way you’ve gotten over the guilt of killing your father by becoming indirectly responsible for over a dozen more deaths.

Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood isn’t even anywhere near the worst of the series, which is telling. Nonetheless, despite a nice appearance for Jason, and some other nifty details, it may well be my least favorite so far. It’s just so unwilling to move beyond what didn’t work before, excepting that barely-there Carrie thing. I do abhor stagnation, and this is just rotten with it.


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. 5 Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)
• No. 6 Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)
• 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)