Sequels

Friday the 13th: A New Beginning

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Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)

Dir. Danny Steinmann

Written by: Martin Kitrosser, David Cohen, and Danny Steinmann

Starring: John Shepherd, Melanie Kinnaman, Shavar Ross, Tom Morga

 

I’ve reached the end of my month of watching and writing about Friday the 13th, and this month is wrapping up with the sequel that’s probably the reason why I didn’t continue collecting more of this franchise. Friday the 13th: A New Beginning is a follow up to the inaccurately named The Final Chapter, and it attempts to move the franchise in new directions hinted at in that film by continuing the story of Tommy Jarvis. Unfortunately, where that film was able to make subtle innovations to a tired formula, A New Beginning chooses to attempt to change things too drastically, while retaining some of the worst aspects of the earlier sequels. It’s a confusing mess of a film, and one that feels wholly unnecessary with regards to the rest of the series. It’s the middle film in an ill-advised trilogy that used Tommy Jarvis as its central character, but it fails to develop his role in the series, or even in one individual film, in any meaningful way. Featuring one of the series’ highest body counts, this entry might please viewers only looking for some gory fun, but for anyone with any higher expectations, A New Beginning totally fails to deliver.

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The film opens with young Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman) sneaking through the woods near his home to find Jason Vorhees’s fresh grave. As he spies on the grave, a couple of grave robbers arrive on the scene hoping to get a view of the legendary monster, Jason (Morga). When they unearth the coffin and remove its lid, Jason quickly and miraculously comes back to life, stabbing both of the grave robbers with his trademark machete. Jason rises from the grave, shaking off dirt and worms, and turns his attention to Tommy, who is still cowering behind a bush. He slowly strides over to the boy who killed him, and raises his machete high over his head, preparing to deliver a killing blow. As the blade descends, adult Tommy Jarvis (Shepherd) awakens, startled, in the back seat of a transport van from the mental institution where he has spent all of his teens. Tommy is being transported to a rural halfway house, in an attempt to ease his transition back into society. At the halfway house, Tommy first meets Pam (Kinnaman), the director of the facility, and Reggie (Ross), a young boy whose grandfather is the cook. He also meets the other patients, including Joey (Dominick Brascia) and Victor (Mark Venturini), two patients who have a dispute shortly after Tommy’s arrival that leads to Victor brutally murdering Joey with an axe in front of the rest of the residents. Joey’s is just the first in a string of murders, as several of the residents and townsfolk in the surrounding area go missing, and Tommy is left wondering if Jason Vorhees could truly be back.

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It’s understandable that the series’ creators and the filmmakers behind A New Beginning would want to shift the focus of the series moving forward. Despite the successes of The Final Chapter, no one could deny that most of the life had been wrung out of the existing formula, and using Tommy Jarvis as the character to bridge the gap between the first few movies and the next batch of sequels makes perfect sense. Unfortunately, the execution of those changes is terribly botched in A New Beginning, with new director Danny Steinmann trying to change too much, too soon, and ending up creating a confusing mess of a movie. Though it stands firmly in the slasher genre, Steinmann attempts to integrate elements of mystery, and even psychological thriller, into the mix, and it just doesn’t work. The film wants to tease throughout that Tommy may in fact be behind the murders, but its narrative is too flimsily constructed to carry this conceit through. Instead, what is presented is a series of kill scenes, many of which feature characters who are introduced into the film for the sole purpose of being murdered later in their first scene, strung together by the sketches of a mystery that also feels largely irrelevant to the film’s outcome. The film features a couple of twists in its third act, with the killer being revealed to be Joey’s estranged father, who works as a paramedic, and who snapped after seeing his bastard son’s mutilated corpse, and with a final shot which features Tommy putting on Jason’s hockey mask and stalking up behind final girl, Pam, with a knife. These sorts of twists revealing the killer’s identity, or hinting at the inevitable sequel, should be familiar to fans of the series by now, but in A New Beginning, neither of the surprises feel narratively warranted or satisfying.

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One of the reasons for this lack of satisfaction is likely that the film doesn’t do anything to make the audience care one bit about any of the characters. Even the trio that ostensibly makes up the core of the cast – Tommy, Pam, and Reggie – are completely underdeveloped. Clearly the idea here was to include a cute kid to replicate the success of casting Feldman as the young Tommy Jarvis, but Reggie’s character is never developed beyond being an excitable, rambunctious little boy. Pam’s character is given maybe a dozen lines in the entire movie, and Tommy is equally mute, with Shepherd attempting to translate his mental scars through a brooding, vacant performance. Ancillary characters fare even worse, with the residents of the halfway house being as typically undifferentiated as the counselors of the first few installments in the series. As I mentioned, several characters are literally introduced just to be killed off, and as a result, the film feels disjointed and incomplete. The film jumps from locale to locale with little logic, and characters pop into the story abruptly, with little narrative import, and are dispatched from the story summarily, with even less. More than any other entry in the series, besides perhaps Part III, A New Beginning feels like its narrative was constructed with the sole purpose of guiding the audience from one kill to the next, with little attempt made to promote satisfying, or even coherent, storytelling. The fact that its creators clearly had a higher opinion of its quality, and had ambitions to introduce new elements into the series, makes it a bigger disappointment than Part III, because at least that movie contained its ambitions to being a campy gorefest.

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I haven’t seen the films that make up the second half of the Friday the 13th series since sometime in the 1990s, so I’d have trouble maintaining that A New Beginning is positively the worst movie in the series, but it can’t be far off. I’m sure it’s a movie that has its champions among fans of the series, but it’s hard for me to look at this movie as anything but a failure, particularly after the relative successes of The Final Chapter in reinvigorating the series. Its plot is a flimsy pretense, its acting is as laughably bad as its dialogue, and it doesn’t even have the good sense to actually feature Jason Vorhees as its masked killer. I suppose that it does feature a few good kill scenes, but if that’s all you’re looking for as a viewer, there are superior watching experiences within the Friday the 13th series, and certainly across the slasher genre. A New Beginning tries to do too much with the franchise, and its attempts to move it forward end up being two steps back. The less said about this bad movie, the better.

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter

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Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)

Dir. Joseph Vito

Written by: Barney Cohen

Starring: Kimberley Beck, Corey Feldman, E. Erich Anderson, Ted White

 

The Friday the 13th series bounces back admirably from its two lackluster sequels in what was initially intended to be its final installment. The Final Chapter attempts to make changes to the stale formula of its predecessors, and actually features a few performances that are worth watching, as well as upping some of the suspense factor, providing actual scares rather than the gruesome shocks of the first few films. The subtle attempts to change the patterns of the series make The Final Chapter feel somewhat fresh, and make it a highlight in the series. This might be faint praise, but it’s certainly the best of the five that I own, and from my memories of the other movies in the series that I’ve seen, it’s likely the best in the series, overall. Its higher production values give it a boost above the original, and its lack of adherence to the established Friday the 13th formula make it unique enough to stand head and shoulders over the other, highly derivative sequels.

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The Final Chapter picks up immediately after the events of Part III, with Jason’s body being taken to the morgue. Presumably, his fight with Chris put Jason (White) down for the count, but you can’t keep a good unstoppable psycho killer down, and, as such, Jason miraculously revives in the morgue. After killing the orderlies on duty there, Jason is back on the loose and headed towards Crystal Lake, where a new family has moved in. Trish (Beck) and Tommy (Feldman) Jarvis, and their mother (Joan Freeman), have moved to the country in search of a quieter life, but the group of teens who have rented the house next door might have other plans. Those teens lead Jason right back to the lake, and he quickly gets back to his old tricks, rampaging through the woods, picking off his victims one by one, in gruesome and shocking fashion. While Jason is stalking his victims, however, there is someone stalking him. Trish meets a young man named Rob (Anderson), whose sister was one of Jason’s victims in an earlier massacre, and Rob has sworn to get revenge on the masked killer. As such, he shows up at the end of the film to help protect Trish and Tommy from Jason. However, Rob proves to be no match for Jason and the two siblings are left as the last pair standing, forced to confront the monstrous Jason in a fight for their lives.

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The introduction of the Jarvis family was a conscious decision on the part of the film’s creators to create protagonists who would be seen as more than just disposable fodder for Jason’s murderous rampage, and that decision pays dividends. The earlier films in the series feature a host of interchangeable murder victims, and, as such, don’t invite any sort of audience identification, but The Final Chapter actually gives us a few characters who are sympathetic and fleshed out enough to make them worth rooting for. Focusing on a family gives the film a feeling of higher stakes than previous entries in the series, and Tommy, in particular, is a notable addition to Friday the 13th lore. More than any other character in the series, Tommy gets actual character traits and a personality that makes him endearing to the audience. Casting an up-and-comer in Corey Feldman also helps this cause. He doesn’t have to do much acting in the film besides being an excitable, cute kid, but his performance stands out as one of the best in a film franchise that doesn’t put much weight in the dramatic chops of its actors. Beck doesn’t fare quite as well, largely falling into the familiar role of the final girl, but she is still very good. She has a bigger screen presence than any of the actresses who preceded her in that role, and she brings a wholesomeness to her portrayal that was largely absent from any of the first three films. Her performance ranges from nurturing and kind to savage and fearsome during her final showdown with Jason, and she shows more depth and range than any actress in the franchise previously or since.

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While much of its plot does, in fact, play out like a paint-by-numbers Friday the 13th sequel, the little differences that I’ve already mentioned in The Final Chapter’s casting and attempts to flesh out its characters do wonders to freshen up the formula. Also, new director Joseph Vito brings a new storytelling sensibility to the franchise. Jason’s assault on the house that the teens have rented feels more purposeful than any of his previous rampages, with Vito blocking the kill scenes out with efficiency and something resembling narrative continuity. The kills are still a random string of gory cut scenes, but Jason moves through the house with something resembling forethought, as if he’s actually on a mission with an achievable end goal in this film. Vito also dispenses with the silly tone taken in Part III, delivering a grimmer, more serious entry into the series. Like any good horror film, there are moments of levity to contrast the terror, but overall this is a darker movie. The stakes also feel heightened in this entry with the decision to introduce a character who already has an understanding of what Jason is capable of, and who has made it his stated mission to kill the monster. Though it doesn’t turn out to be Rob who kills Jason in the end, his foreknowledge seems to even the playing field, even if that advantage does prove to be futile. The Final Chapter takes itself seriously, which could have been disastrous, leading the audience to point out the obvious silliness of this movie and its ilk, but instead the darker tone and attempts at audience identification make for a movie that stands out in a crowded field of B-slashers.

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Vito is also to be credited for creating one of the series’ most iconic final chases. Each movie in the Friday the 13th series invariably ends with its final, usually female, protagonist desperately racing through the woods or some other locale, with Jason and his machete close on her heels. The Final Chapter delivers one of the best chases, with Trish narrowly escaping Jason time and time again as he lays waste to her home, all while she is trying to distract him and protect her brother, Tommy. This final fight scene might represent the most awesome depiction of Jason’s superhuman abilities of any sequence in the series, at least in the films that comprise the first half, with which I’m more familiar. It packs genuine suspense, from the moment that Trish and Rob arrive at the teens’ rental home to find their mangled corpses, until the very last moment that Jason is bearing down on Trish in her own home, after having chased her through the woods in between. It also packs in great jump scares, with Jason casually tossing bodies through picture windows, and crashing through doors and walls like a homicidal Kool-Aid Man. No matter where Trish hides, Jason is right behind her, bursting into frame abruptly and violently. It’s a great sequence, and it’s capped off with a memorable ending worthy of the original’s reveal of Mrs. Vorhees. Tommy arrives just in the nick of time, disguised as a young Jason, and is able to distract and confuse the killer long enough for his sister to get the drop on Jason and knock his mask off, before Tommy jumps on him, hacking away with a machete at Jason’s prone, seemingly lifeless body. It’s a thrilling ending to the series’ most exciting sequel.

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I think it likely goes without saying that The Final Chapter is my favorite of the Friday the 13th sequels. I think I probably even prefer it to the original. It can stand alone as a horror movie, without resting on the laurels of its franchise affiliation. It takes the tried and true formula of the rest of the series, and genre overall, and fleshes it out with slightly more interesting characters and a bit more depth than most of the rest of its ilk. Besides featuring Corey Feldman in a pre-fame role, the film also features a young Crispin Glover in a supporting role, and those casting choices make it obvious that there was some attempt made to make this a higher quality of movie than should probably be expected of a third sequel to a slasher rip off. It all works pretty well, however, and the end result is a totally enjoyable, mildly rewatchable horror movie. The series may have been better off truly letting this be the final chapter, but there were many, many subpar sequels to come. As a result, the Friday the 13th brand has probably become somewhat watered down, but The Final Chapter is well worth another look for its attempts to give the series a much-needed breath of fresh air, while still remaining true to the core dynamics of the franchise. It and the original are likely the only ones that I can recommend someone who isn’t already a fan of the series taking the time to check out today.

Friday the 13th Pt. 2

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Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)

Dir. Steve Miner

Written by: Ron Kurz (based on characters created by Victor Miller)

Starring: Amy Steel, John Furey, Warrington Gillette/Steve Dash

 

The first sequel in the Friday the 13th series marks a decision on the part of the series’ creators to eschew their original plans of making an anthology horror film series and to double down on tales of psycho killer Jason Vorhees hunting lustful teens in the remote woods of New Jersey. Predating the eventual sequels to earlier slashers Halloween and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as well as the entire run of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th Part 2 marks the first movie, that I know of, to introduce the trope of the immortal or invulnerable slasher. The ending of Halloween hints at Michael Meyers’s indestructability, but this sequel is the first that brings us a killer who was, ostensibly, killed off in the first film, in this case as a child, no less. Other than that minor innovation, the film otherwise sticks to the basic slasher template, and provides a handful of satisfying kills, but few real scares. It hews closely to the plot and pacing of the original, and though it’s the first film in the series to feature an adult Jason, it fails to really break any new ground or push the series forward in a meaningful way.

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The sequel begins shortly after the original Friday the 13th left off, with that film’s heroine, Alice (Adrienne King), still haunted by nightmares of her ordeal at Camp Crystal Lake and of the undead boy, Jason, who she dreamt emerged from the lake at the film’s end to drag her to her death. It turns out that her fears are warranted, as a fully-grown Jason (Gillette/Dash) has stalked her to her home and the film’s first scene culminates with him avenging his mother’s death at the hands of Alice in Friday the 13th. From there, the film flashes forward five years and the audience is introduced to a new group of camp counselors who are attending a counselor training program led by Paul (Furey) at a camp adjacent to Camp Crystal Lake. These counselors are young, horny, and stupid, with few distinguishing character traits, much like the group of counselors in the original. As such, it isn’t particularly shocking or emotionally devastating when Jason descends upon the camp, skewering and slashing counselors right and left. Eventually, Paul’s girlfriend Ginny (Steel) emerges as a final girl, ready to do battle with Jason. She discovers a hut in the woods where Jason has apparently been hiding out for years, building a shrine to his dead mother with her severed head and articles of her clothing. Ginny uses these to imitate Mrs. Vorhees, tricking Jason into letting his guard down so that she can attack him, wounding him enough to make her escape. Ultimately, Ginny makes it out alive, but, like Alice, she is robbed of her sanity and sense of security.

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Aside from the first appearance of a mature Jason as the film’s killer, Friday the 13th Part 2 doesn’t offer much variation from the template established by the original film. This sequel exists solely as a cash-in on the popularity of the original film, and it isn’t surprising that most of the creative team behind the original opted not to participate in the series moving forward. Some of the movie’s kills stand out, and the body count is escalated, but there is little innovation or evolution in this entry in the series. In fact, Part 2’s narrative so severely retcons the original’s narrative to facilitate its own existence that it has been widely lampooned by both fans and creatives involved in the series’ initial creation. If, as this sequel posits, Jason had been alive the entire time, hiding out in a hut by Crystal Lake, why didn’t he simply reunite with his mother at some point? And, short of that, how did he survive alone in the woods for nearly three decades without being spotted by some camper, hunter, or other person? I don’t always look for strong narrative continuity in slasher films, particularly in hastily thrown together sequels, but this level of narrative implausibility is really hard to look past. Not only does it not further the Friday the 13th canon, it severely disrupts it, opening up the rest of the series to an escalating chain of narrative disruptions and flimsy excuses to return the infamous Crystal Lake killer from the dead. The film gains points for being the first to introduce Jason, an iconic horror figure who has become larger that the franchise itself, but it’s hard for me not to wonder what the creative brain trust behind the original film could have done together if the series had moved in the originally intended direction and abandoned the Crystal Lake setting altogether in favor of a new tale of terror. As it stands, however, Part 2 moved the film in a direction that would see it largely recreating the same scenario over and over again with slight variations on the setting.

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There isn’t much else to say about the film. Its cast of characters is largely indistinguishable, even more so than in the original, serving only as fodder for Jason’s homicidal rampage. Characters stand out for a few physical traits, perhaps, such as one counselor who is confined to a wheelchair, and another who is obviously cast as the camp clown, but they’re otherwise simply bowling pins set up to be knocked down in, admittedly, entertaining and clever ways by Jason and his array of sharp and pointy objects. The dialogue and performances in the film are laughable, as should be expected for a slasher of its type. Overall, this sequel has the feeling of being scraped together quickly to cash in on the success of its predecessor and to establish the long term viability of a franchise centered on the character of Jason Vorhees. In those respects, it’s a film that is successful. It pays some fealty to the original with its extra-long precredit sequence involving Jason returning to murder the heroine from the first film, and then splits off on a new, if nonsensical, parallel track from which the ensuing sequels would spring. For better or for worse, Friday the 13th Part 2 established the now familiar paradigm in slasher franchises that the killer can be brought back from the dead for any reason or no reason at all, as long as audiences seem willing to plunk down their hard-earned cash at the cinema box office. It certainly isn’t the worst film in the franchise, but it doesn’t hold up favorably to the original for me, simply because it hews so closely to the structure and plot of that film. It gains a few points for introducing Jason, albeit without his iconic hockey mask, but it’s largely too redundant of a movie for me to want to give it much time or attention. The original packs a similar amount of scares and has an air of novelty about it, and Jason would be given better films to terrorize later in the series, so despite its importance in changing the direction of the franchise, Part 2 feels largely extraneous to me.