#11 - Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)
(dir. Danny Steinmann)
Tommy Jarvis was only 12 years old when he killed Jason at the end of the previous film, and the experience left him traumatized. It's not clear how much time has passed, but the actor who plays him here was 25 at the time, and depending what fan site you read this film takes place anywhere between four and eight years later. Since Part 1 takes place in 1979, and Parts 2-4 take place 5 years later in 1984, then this movie must be set in the late 80's/early 90's? The timeline for this series isn't very clear. Anyway, Tommy is now in a sort of halfway house located off in the middle of nowhere, where he is supposed to learn how to re-enter normal society. When a series of brutal murders occur in the area, though, he begins to question whether or not Jason is really gone for good.
This entry in the series is not so great. It's not an outright bad film, but it doesn't do anything particularly memorable either. The plot is thin and mostly serves as filler between kills, of which there are many, although almost all of them are dull and uninspired. The dialogue and characters are mostly poorly written - I guess Tommy isn't a bad character really, but he says maybe like 10 words throughout the whole film so it's hard to tell. There are tons of dumb characters who serve no purpose other than to get killed and up the bodycount.
The biggest flaw, though, is that the ending is absolutely terrible. I'll spoil it here because it's dumb and I don't recommend watching this movie at all anyway - the killer is actually a guy named Roy who had maybe 2 minutes of screen time the whole film. He was apparently a big fan of Jason, and after his son (who we didn't know was his son) is murdered at the beginning of the movie (by a different character) he goes on a homicidal rampage for some reason. The very final scenes are extra stupid, where Tommy has a nightmare about killing a friend, and then wakes up, puts on a hockey mask, and does it for real (at least, the final shot is him holding up a knife over her shoulder).
So yeah, this isn't good. I give it a little credit for doing something slightly different with the story, but overall it's just a forgettable movie.
Comments
Post a Comment