Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning

 

Friday the 13th Part IV ended with Jason Voorhees dead, killed by twelve year old Tommy Jarvis. He’d been seemingly mortally wounded twice before, but this time there was an air of finality – I mean his head was just about cut in half and you don’t really walk away from something like that. But here we are with another F13 movie, released only a year later. How would they deal with the death of Jason?

Let’s get this straight right off the bat: Jason Voorhees isn’t the killer in this one. He’s actually not even in the movie at all, barring a nightmare sequence in the beginning, with the killer instead just being a regular guy who just puts on a hockey mask and goes on a revenge killing spree, pretending to be Jason. The film keeps Part Iv's ending as canon, meaning Jason is dead. The movie attempts to make the killer’s identity vague (is it really Jason again or somebody else?) and also tries to make it psychological (is it Tommy Jarvis?), but it fails on both accounts because you know it’s not Tommy and it ends up making it clear it’s not Jason. What’s strange is that it attempts to move away from Jason while also not moving away at all – everybody constantly talks about Jason, the main character is obsessed with him and the villain even takes his identity. It’s such a strange film in that respect, wanting to move away from Jason but being too lazy and incompetent to do so. If anything the strangeness in what they tried, and ultimately failed, to do makes it interesting to watch in a weird way, even though the movie is largely more of the same once again.

It begins with a dream sequence with a cameo by Corey Feldman as young Tommy Jarvis once more – on a dark, stormy night he trudges through the woods and finds Jason’s grave. Two hunters turn up and unearth Jason, who comes back to life and kills them before turning his attention towards Tommy. It’s all just a nightmare though (and a massive tease).

Tommy Jarvis, now eighteen years old, played by some other guy and with serious psychological issues, is sent to a halfway house for troubled youths. The other teens there are weird, and some of their problems aren’t exactly therapy worthy. There’s a pair of nymphomaniacs, a guy with extreme rage issues, a goth chick, a guy who stutters and a simple minded fat guy named amongst a few others. Tommy struggles to fit in, still haunted by his experience with Jason Voorhees, though he manages to befriend therapist Pam and little black kid Reggie. After a violent incident at the halfway house where the rage issues guy snaps and kills the fat guy, it seems as though Jason has returned as a hockey-mask wearing serial killer begins to kill the troubled teens and everybody else who gets close. As the bodies pile up, Tommy begins to fear he may be the killer.

One thing the film tries to do is to create ambiguity over who the killer is. More specifically, it tries to make it seem as though Tommy might be the killer. He’s never around when the killer is going on his rampage, has a few violent episodes himself, sees visions of Jason and goes missing for long stretches of the film. He’s also absent for most of the finale, where the killer attempts to murder Pam and Reggie, only reappearing right at the very end to help finish the killer off, but before then they tried to put a little ambiguity in there. I don’t think that it worked as intended though, since I think most people watching would have just assumed it was Jason the entire time, meaning they’d feel betrayed or confused when it’s revealed to be somebody else (and really just a random nobody) at the end. The attempts at being psychological are also half assed. They certainly had the intent, but didn’t put the effort into it.

The killer turns out to be Roy, a paramedic whose son was the fat kid who got hacked up. Seeing the corpse of his son, who he had disowned, made him snap and so he dressed himself up like Jason and starting killing in revenge. It feels a bit cheap. Interesting to note, the only person Roy didn’t kill in his revenge rampage was the one person who was directly responsible for killing his son. It makes a little sense (the dude was sent to prison for murder, and it’s kinda hard to get into prison and kill somebody without getting caught) but it’s so weird to see somebody go on a revenge killing spree and not actually get revenge on the one person responsible. Roy even kills a whole bunch of other random characters that have nothing to do with the halfway house. Roy eventually meets his end when Tommy ends up pushing him out a window and he lands on some farming equipment. His mask even conveniently falls off for the revelatory twist.

The end twist has Tommy wearing a hockey mask and wielding a knife about to kill Pam, apparently now completely insane. Just prior to that Tommy has a dream about killing Pam, and wakes up in his hospital bed to see a vision of Jason at the foot of his bed. The vision fades away, and then Tommy gets out of bed and puts on the mask and lays in wait for Pam. It’s a strange ending, trying to continue an ‘anybody could become a killer like Jason’ thing that the entire movie seemed desperate to convince the audience of, as well as giving a weird sort of conclusion to that final shot of disturbed 12 year old Tommy in the ending of Part IV.

It’s not great. The fact that the killer is pretty much just some random, ordinary guy kind of diminishes the legacy of Jason Voorhees and the franchise overall and sort of just makes this like almost any other slasher film ever. In a lot of ways it can be seen as something of a true sequel, in that it moves on from Jason as the killer and instead looks to the lingering effects surviving a killer has on its characters (Tommy Jarvis’ mental issues and the effect Jason has had on him). Unfortunately it doesn’t try to move on as a sequel, remaining stuck to the template of its past entries and banking on familiarity, almost as a trick. It still has a hockey-mask wearing killer, he’s still referred to as Jason and it all just plays out like another F13 movie, barring the ending bait and switch. It’s comes across as lazy, as though the makers wanted to move on from Jason but didn’t know how so they just defaulted.

They make it pretty obvious that Roy is the killer when he’s first introduced, as his name is dropped and he gets a lot of camera attention, which is weird for what would otherwise be a random background character (basically ‘Paramedic #2’). When he shows up he’s completely horrified about seeing the fat kid hacked up like that. His expression of horror eventually turns to one of anger, and he even looks around at the halfway house kids almost accusatorily. The camera even lingers on his expression before a fade to black. It’s noticeably weird, and immediately after that the killings start. They even weirdly have him pop up again in a scene where another character name drops him again, just to remind you about him.

 

Tommy is messed up here, mostly being silent and neurotic, but prone to violent snaps. He pops pills to control his issues, and sees vision of Jason around. It’s a bit weird having a protagonist who is so strange and awkward, and honestly he’s not particularly likeable here, but it’s not too much of an issue since the movie doesn’t spend that much time with him. Pam is terrible at her job and exists to talk to Tommy about his issues. Little black kid Reggie, who befriends Tommy, is another decent kid character. He thinks Tommy’s costume effects and masks (the one holdover for his character from Part IV) are cool and he’s scared of the killer running around in a realistic way, but then he comes to the rescue towards the end driving a tractor and knocking the killer over momentarily which is a bit silly.

The characters are the most ridiculous they’ve ever been but at least they’re varied. Besides the group of overly exaggerated troubled teens (rage issues guy is so intense) and the halfway house employees, there’s a police force for the first time, complete with a detective trying to hunt down the killer. He’s ineffective, and most of his ‘investigating’ involves standing around at the scene of a murder and saying “It couldn’t be Jason because Jason’s dead. Or is he?”. The most ridiculous of the lot are the angry hillbilly lady and her idiot son, who spend their screen time being loud and stupid.

The halfway house is run really poorly. They pretty much just let the teens run around with no supervision. They don’t seem to have any set rules or even a curfew, with half of them just freely wandering off to their deaths. I mean how and why they would let a guy with massive rage issues be allowed to get his hands on an axe I’ll never understand. The guy running it doesn’t seem to know/care where they are, and he basically ups and disappears for no reason whatsoever (later found pinned to a tree). Pam is strange in that she basically only ever deals with Tommy, leaving the rest of the kids to their own devices.

The kills are fairly varied but I think they’ve been heavily edited, with a lot of them occurring off-screen. It cuts away from a lot of the murders instantly, and a lot of the deaths and violence aren’t shown at all. That being said, in terms of raw numbers, faux-Jason Roy hacks through a hell of a lot of people. Besides the halfway house kids he also kills the employees, the neighbours, and several other completely random people who just happen to be in the vicinity. It has a higher number of kills than the first four, though a fair few are off-screen and some are fairly bland. There’s the requisite number of stabbing and a lot of bodies found either impaled on something or with their throats cut. More memorable is a guy getting his head slowly crushed against a tree with a belt but it’s edited before any gore happens. Weirdly one of the most violent isn’t even by the killer, it’s when the fat guy gets hacked up. It’s the first time in the entire series where somebody other than the killer has murdered somebody. It also must be said that by this point a lot of the kills lack impact since they’re happening to characters with no names or personalities. This is a problem with slasher films in general, but it’s especially apparent in Friday the 13^th movies – you don’t care about the people who die so unless the deaths are gory, freaky or funny you won’t care.

So Part V, a New Beginning, ends up being a bit of a wash and a weak, half-hearted attempt in trying to move away from Jason. It’d say it’s at least interesting in some curious way, since it’s so strange overall. The ridiculous characters, the number of deaths (even if they’re not particularly inspired), the lukewarm attempts at continuing Tommy Jarvis’ psychological journey, the weak attempt at having another killer (by basically being the same killer as before) and the ending with Tommy Jarvis donning a hockey mask all make it oddly watchable. Part V didn’t do as well as hoped and the fans were annoyed and disappointed at the lack of Jason. But what happened next? Jason was canonically dead, Tommy was crazy and perhaps a new murderer; is this truly a ‘New Beginning’ or would they scrap all that, renege and bring Jason back somehow to appease the angry fans? Take a guess.