FRIDAY THE 13th PART V: A NEW BEGINNING (1985)

Friday the 13th is an iconic title, but they’ll always be truncated as “the Jason movies”. Big guy in a hockey mask. The one he didn’t wear until Part III (1983), the guy who went from a man to a zombie, to Manhattan to space, there’s a little more to it, but we get the gist. The infamous mass murderer adapted to each sequel’s premise and was most often played by different stuntmen with varying levels of acting experience. The ability to swing a machete better be on the résumé. Performances appreciated by the horror fans able to name each one, like the Bond actors, and might well have met one or two at the conventions. They can’t talk behind the mask, but they all bring their own walk. All that said, Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning isn’t a Jason movie.

All those who’ve seen the opening minutes to Scream (1996), of course, know Jason wasn’t the killer in the first Friday the 13th (1980). A similarity with the first and fifth films is that he does ‘cameo’ in dream sequences; the first was an obvious cash-in on Carrie (1976) and the fifth was an obvious cash-in on the audience that technically did pay to see Jason. There is a killer in a hockey mask, but like Scream 2 (1998) onwards, this is a copycat bogeyman instilling fear into the already troubled teens at the Pinehurst Halfway House. Friday the 13th Part V stumbles out of the gate for A New Beginning, but lacking the real deal is not why this entry ranks low in the Jason movies.

As Paramount were washing their hands of Jason with The Final Chapter (1984), the UK government was banning 72 ‘video nasties’, with Friday the 13th and Part 2 (1982) falling into the non-prosecutable section. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert would’ve gladly added the “immoral and reprehensible piece of trash” that was Part IV to that list, along with Part III for good measure. But when their ‘Final’ film draws $33M on a $2.2M budget, that trash is still treasure to Paramount. Executive producer Frank Mancuso Jr made no pretences about his franchise as he disguised pre-production screenplays under David Bowie track titles. Young actors and their agents wouldn’t turn their noses up at Crystal Japan, which when produced was Final Chapter. Producing the fifth slasher entry and self-deprecatingly dubbing it Repetition starts as you mean to go on.

Mancuso Jr was taking a hands-off approach from here on; approve the writers and director, sign off on their story and wish them luck. Given the real title, one would assume a fresh start to restore some reputation for the franchise and Paramount. Yet A New Beginning doubles down on what they thought made Friday the 13th successful; responding to the critics and giving them a video nasty.

Part III writer Martin Kitrosser returns and joins co-writers David Cohen and director Danny Steinmann. They bring us back to Crystal Lake in the near future—that is, every sequel took place in one week of 1984 and this is set five years later in 1989. That excuses the age jump in recasting our ongoing protagonist in the middle of the ‘Tommy Jarvis trilogy’. The happy-go-lucky child Corey Feldman never quite recovered after taking down Jason, and after filming the prologue in his backyard between days of The Goonies (1985), he regenerated into new actor Mark Shepherd.

The writers save themselves the trouble by keeping him quiet; Shepherd stretches the usual 92-minute runtime with long awkward stares, only speaking 24 words the entire film. Mad Max he is not, and traumatised Tommy is the least lauded performance between Feldman and Thom Matthews in Part VI (1986). A reception that stung all the more after spending months volunteering at a state mental hospital for his vaguely-described role for “Repetition“. Along with “counselling kids at a church up in Los Angeles”, the Christian Shepherd was pretty disappointed and remained true to his character, refraining from partying with the rest of the cast. A divisive performance with audiences commending the unexpected nuance, yet bemoaning the speed bump his sulking presence clashes with the rambunctious slasher formula.

“Friday the 13^th is basically a morality tale. A person of faith learns that if you reach down deep enough, you’ll find that you’re bankrupt and you have to look outside, and that’s where God is. Somebody takes their clothes off you get killed. You smoke dope you get killed. Tommy was simply a guy caught in the crossfire.”—Mark Shepherd, Tommy Jarvis in Friday the 13th A New Beginning

Sending a disturbed kid with “a brain that should be fried with all the drugs” to the woods that resembles the place of his trauma may seem a bad idea, but this halfway house is also filled with the same brand of horny teens that got slaughtered around Tommy. Stefon from Saturday Night Live would be honoured to read off the silliest cast of characters thus far: we’ve got a chocoholic, an axe maniac, a robot-dancing goth, a stutterer, a redhead, nymphos, a redneck biker family, 1950s scatting greasers, and a guy called Demon who duets with his girlfriend while shitting out “those damn enchiladas!”

And that’s not the half of it. There are 22 kills in this film alone which sounds impressive only for the sheer number. The charming naturalistic approach of the first has been replaced by loud caricatures making the most of their scant screen time. Most are introduced in the very same scene where they die. A midpoint scene in which the remaining victims start spouting off missing people like a school register is laughable, who the hell are any of these people? As editor Bruce Green so eloquently put it, “We didn’t set any of the characters up. In porn, it’s all about the penetration shot. And Part V is structured like a porn film.”

Two characters we know nothing about who share a handful of lines total: Joey (Dominick Brascia) the annoying fat kid and Vic (Mark Venturini) the lumberjack with anger issues. Joey offers a chocolate bar which Vic cleaves in twain, if only it was a Snickers otherwise Vic might not freak out and brutally murder Joey! 20 minutes in, our first real kill, and we’ve only had Jason in a dream. The Final Chapter was the first Friday the 13th not to feature momma Voorhees as murderous motivation, leaving Jason to kill out of obligation to Paramount. A New Beginning was a fitting opportunity to reconfigure some meaning behind the mayhem. Scream sequels relish every moment to build distrust and intrigue in who might be the killer, and A New Beginning takes the Scary Movie (2000) approach in how little it matters.

In blatant red herrings, we have Tommy hiding a knife under his bed, the hillbillies making bomb threats, and Vic raising suspicion on account of murdering someone in front of everyone. That might clinch it but attentive audiences will pick up on clues like Joey being an orphan and one of the paramedics (Dick Wieand) milking every close-up with wide-eyed blistering distress. Short of a YouTube red circle and arrow, his reactions earn not one but two ominous stingers in the score. Granted everyone is naturally appalled when the second paramedic (William Caskey Swaim) throws off the sheets to expose the chopped-up remains and calls them a “bunch of pussies.”

With all these unmistakable hints and every modern critic, including the Crystal Lake Memories book, accentuating how dead and buried Jason was, I was no different than the original audience in asking why wouldn’t he come back? Isn’t he already a monster man? The answer came with the successive title Jason Lives, but he had taken trauma to the head in every finale, some people still debate if he was made an unstoppable revenant after his childhood drowning.

Stuntman Tom Morga portrays the man behind the mask here and he does double duty also playing Jason in the opening nightmare sequence; the masks are different but the physicality is the same despite being two separate characters. Morga is also doubling for the real man behind the mask, Roy (Wieand) the vengeful paramedic who abandoned his son Joey but looked over him from afar like Ben Kenobi. What could be a complicated nesting doll of performances is reduced to both of them copying the styles of previous Jasons, including brushing off a chainsaw and tractor collision as if Roy was going method. A criticism that carries through to their direction ruining the climactic reveal of Roy masquerading as Jason. Thrown to his death, the mask falls off but Wieand is lying face up in the pouring rain, his hair underneath a fake bald cap, and his steely blue eyes closed. Cinematographer Stephen Posey relinquishes, “We had to do it twice because no one was happy with the final image. I remember going, ‘Well, who is that!?’ Even the crew were laughing.”

The whodunnit certainly never helped Posey as the direction for all the kills is restrained to a pair of hands stabbing and grabbing people from off-screen. Steinmann is no Argento and this has none of the creativity of a giallo mystery: almost every death is a yawn-inducing throat slit or stomach prod, all lacking any semblance of suspense. Enough time is wasted with the rednecks when a random stranger offers handiwork for food, he exists purely to perv on the young nymphs before getting knifed a single time and falling dead. Utterly pointless and only exists to pad an arbitrary body count, confirmed by the director himself, who “had to deliver a shock, scare or kill every seven or eight minutes—preferably a kill.”

A disastrous mandate which reduces a video nasty to a video banality. Only the nymphs’ deaths which feature back-to-back eye destruction courtesy of Reel EFX even come close to the grisly heights of Tom Savini. Prime evidence of quantity over quality which erodes even a slasher sequel’s credibility; why are two random greasers the first targets for Roy? Why does he never go after the man who actually murdered his son? How does an ordinary paramedic summon the incandescent rage to massacre 22 people?

Those go unanswered as Steinmann is far more interested in filming sex and nudity. More than once a woman exposes herself in the mirror because looking at your own boobs clearly isn’t exploitative. No puritanical judgement here; a key psychological factor behind the killings in Friday the 13th is that nudity is crucial for the equation of sex = death. When the cast expresses discomfort is what sours enjoyment and the fifth film’s chapter in Crystal Lake Memories underscores the gratuitous sleaze. Steinmann himself boasts that he “shot a fucking porno in the woods. You wouldn’t believe the nudity they cut out”, referring to the reported three-minute sex scene slashed down to a few scant seconds to avoid an X-rating.

Producer Tim Silver notes this was the very first day of shooting and when Bruce Green received the dailies, “off screen, Danny is yelling, ‘Fuck her! Fuck her!’ I went white. And everybody in the room was silent.” The scene involving Debbie Sue Voorhees took an entire day to film, while Juliette Cummins was requested to add nudity to her scene while shooting at 1 AM. Behaviour that bleeds through into the film itself, each nude scene lingers an interminable length as if the director is whispering off camera “Just a little longer… almost there…” That’s libellous, what he actually said looking back was, “I’m a big fan of tits.”

“I’ve been described as a paranoid, tense, out-of-control sex pervert and cocaine addict; desperate, crude, incompetent and an asshole with no talent.”—Danny Steinmann, director of Friday the 13th: A New Beginning.

All vices are usually excused in Hollywood as long as the film draws a box office, and A New Beginning did achieve the expected returns of $21.9M for a $2.2M budget. Paramount had reduced the budget of this from The Final Chapter only slightly, but going cheaper in taste resulted in a total gross one-third lower than the last film. Either audiences were more eager to pay for the franchise ending or they were finding more impressive beginnings elsewhere.

Four months prior, A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) provided a wholly more imaginative slasher with dream sequences that mattered. Steinmann delivered on one other demand from Paramount: that Tommy was to become the next Crystal Lake killer. Leaving it until the protracted epilogue, which stuttered with a dream fake-out and a hallucination, it only took two massacres for Tommy to snap and don the hockey mask conveniently left in his hospital room. Truly, the worst reputation A New Beginning can hold is repelling audiences from fully appreciating the meta Scream predecessor Jason Lives, which drew in less money than this.

USA | 1985 | 92 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Danny Steinmann.
writers: Martin Kitrosser, David Cohen & Danny Steinmann (story by Martin Kitrosser & David Cohen; based on characters created by Victor Miller).
starring: John Shepherd, Melanie Kinnaman, Shavar Ross, Richard Young, Die Wieand, Marco St. John, Corey Feldman & Tiffany Helm.