Friday the 13th: Part 5, A New Beginning (Deluxe Edition) Reviews

I'm seriously considering starting a "Friday 5 is underrated" campaign. If one decides to read through message boards and fan sites, there's quite a bit of hate directed towards this film. Both A New Beginning and Jason Takes Manhattan are the most maligned in the entire Paramount series of Friday the 13th movies.

It's not hard to see why these would be the most disliked, however. Jason Takes Manhattan is virtually goreless; many of the kills were either reshot or hacked to death by the MPAA to secure that coveted R-rating. One of the other big reasons being the title of the movie is quite misleading. About 20 minutes of the movie takes place in New York or Canada doubling for New York, while the other hour or so is set on a cruise ship full of graduating high school students which, needless to say, is headed towards Manhattan.

A New Beginning is always the one that gets me. It is essentially a trashier version of the previous three sequels, but just as entertaining. The kills are very imaginative, but so ridiculous at times that the movie approaches parody. Director Danny Steinmann (who had his hand in the porn industry at one time) throws his influence all over the picture. The flick is gratuitously violent - with a body count over 20 - and features the most T&A I've ever seen in one of Paramount's Friday films. The fans' biggest complaint is the lack of villain Jason Voorhees; an issue I've never quite understood. Up until the end of the third act, we had no idea this hockey-mask wearing maniac wasn't the Jason. The big twist of the film revealed that it was a character named Roy, an ambulance driver, who donned the iconic mask and was cleaning house.

Herein lies the problem. In 1985 no one suspected the third-act twist which must have been terribly disappointing for those wanting to see Jason doing what he does best again. With that said, it would be totally understandable for unsuspecting audience members to be vastly upset with Paramount's decision to not have "Jason" in the film. But after 24 years, I find the stream of complaints of "It's not really Jason" to be superfluous. A big guy wearing a hockey mask and carrying large cutting implements in which to dispatch of horny, pot-smoking teenagers is no less Jason than the iterations seen in the previous films. Just because there's someone "pretending" to be Jason, which isn't revealed until the end anyway, shouldn't automatically negate the fact that there is at least a Jason-like villain in the movie. And besides, Jason's iconic presence is brought to life through very recognizable physical traits; like the mask and trademark machete. This pseudo-Jason walks, moves, acts, and kills like the J-man; therefore it is.

By 1985 Jason wasn't just some cut-and-paste murderer, either; he was the omnipresent poster boy for slasher films and '80s horror flicks. But beyond the imposter problem, this truly is the last of the "realistic" Friday movies. Tom McLoughlin's Jason Lives, for example, had a resurrected Jason Voorhees robotically slashing his way through Crystal Lake accompanied by McLoughlin's gothic imagery. Steinmann's film is rooted firmly in the Jason-can-be-hurt motif of the previous sequels. The character of Tommy Jarvis (played well here by John Shepard) is also the only returning character from personal favorite The Final Chapter. Funnily enough he is the film's focal point yet I don't think he uttered more than 10 words throughout the course of the movie. I also love how Danny Steinmann never took the film too seriously. Many of the kills and expected Friday moments (like the final chase sequence and revealing of the corpses, for example) are injected with a bit of humor. In fact, the entire movie is.

But it's disappointing that there exists no uncut version of A New Beginning. For as violent and unrelenting as it is, there's not a lot of on-screen gore. Most of the kills are cut dreadfully short or relegated to having their gory details revealed in an after-the-fact fashion. On the other hand, the characters are some of the most memorable in any Friday film (especially redneck couple Ethel and her son, Junior) that elevates this beyond simple slasher fodder. Quite true that the movie is utterly ridiculous and many of the kills are just thrown in there so Steinmann was able to meet his quota (the director has gone on-record as saying that Paramount had him toss in a scare or kill every six to eight minutes), but I would rather have a slasher flick do too much than too little.

But as a Friday film and fourth sequel, this couldn't have worked better. The movie has an extremely high body count, a fantastic sense of humor, great characters, tons of nudity, inventive kills, and a quick pace. It also does the fans a service by bringing Tommy back and showing us what has transpired between the events of The Final Chapter and A New Beginning. Too many people, I think, let the five second unmasking at the end of the film completely negate the events preceding it. But watching Friday 5 again after a good four years doesn't make it anymore appealing as a straight-laced sequel. The movie is, in fact, so different from the others tonally that even sequences that were seemingly meant to be taken seriously (like Tommy throwing a character through a table after said character scares him with one of his own masks) had me howling.

All in all, however, A New Beginning is an immensely unique addition to the series. There is so much gallows humor & violence that the picture remains to be one of the most awkward, yet entertaining in the series. The bad rap the movie receives is something I will never be able to look past as I feel it has all of the right Friday ingredients only hampered by a miniscule problem that fans have chosen to beat the flick to death over. The last of the true Friday films and also a damn fine sequel.

*Paramount has released the film in a Deluxe Edition DVD set that is probably the best we'll ever get out of them for such a universally hated picture. The DVD includes a funny, but uninformative commentary with director Danny Steinmann, actors John Shepard and Shavar Ross, as well as self-proclaimed horror guru and Friday 5 fan Michael Felsher. It also includes a making-of featurette (short, but more informative than the commentary), another piece of the fan-made short film Lost Tales from Camp Blood, another installment in the DVD-based mockumentary The Crystal Lake Massacres Revealed, and the ever-popular theatrical trailer.