The Beginning of the End? Friday the 13th Part 5: A New Beginning

A New Beginning or the Beginning of the end? VHS Revival looks at one of the most divisive entries in the Friday the 13th series

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Generally speaking, Friday the 13th fans fall into two categories: those who dig the dead-eyed Jason of earlier instalments and those who embrace his sillier meta incarnation. Personally, I have fun with both, but what happens when Jason is removed completely? Can it still be considered a Friday the 13th movie? Many will tell you, “No! Absolutely not! Are you out of your f*cking mind?!” Even if a masked killer of an uncannily similar build and appearance spends the entirety of that movie slaughtering teens in a plethora of violent ways, if it turns out to be somebody else doing the business it’s a total cop out, a sacrilegious act worthy of Jason-style retribution. I certainly felt that way the first time I saw A New Beginning, a title whose origins will soon become clear. Even though the movie’s villain looks and acts like Jason, it still isn’t Jason, and for fans of the franchise that in itself is enough to inspire apathy.

Here’s the thing: I’ve seen A New Beginning a dozen times since the initial shock of discovering Voorhees substitute Roy Burns, a soft spoken introvert who undergoes the kind of transformation that makes The Incredible Hulk, Bruce Banner, look like an adolescent growing his first pimple, and I must admit, it’s kind of grown on me. In fact, I find myself reaching for the fifth instalment more than most during my adulthood; I’ve commenced re-watching it almost as a compulsion. Is this because I had abandoned it for so long, for many years refusing to revisit a film that pulled down our proverbial pants Paramount style? It certainly played a part. For the longest time A New Beginning had been cast into the shadows of creative ignominy like a wounded imp from a malformed dimension, but when I finally rescued it from out in the cold it was almost like a new discovery, an extra instalment with that 80s Paramount vibe that has since become something very dear to me.

Those who are familiar with the series will know that there was never supposed to be A New Beginning, or so we had been left to believe. By 1984, the same year that the UK government introduced the Video Recordings Act, banning a list of 72 movies dubbed ‘The Video Nasties’ by a tabloid media looking to exploit affairs, Jason Voorhees had become the poster boy for moral outrage over in the US. This was thanks in large part to influential critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, the latter labelling Friday the 13th Part IV an “immoral and reprehensible piece of trash” that was a “depressing commentary” on modern teenage culture. So wary of public scrutiny were the honchos at Paramount that they refused to release any footage of The Final Chapter prior to its opening. Ebert was dubious of the studio’s series-ending proclamations, as were many slasher detractors looking to curb the creative violence, but as far as audiences were aware, The Final Chapter was set to be Jason’s final outing. Period.

It took Paramount a whole year to renege on its promise that Friday the 13th Part IV would indeed be The Final Chapter, and the $22,000,000 that it raked in at the box office ― more than ten times its allocated budget ― tells you exactly why. Paramount may have been ashamed of their product, but as long as budgets were meagre and a demand for the franchise remained, they were more than happy to reap the rewards, even if it meant culling much of the violence, and, in the case of some of those later sequels, destroying the footage entirely. Unlike the majority of slashers that ran into trouble with the censors, films like 1988‘s Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood can never be seen in the way that they were originally intended thanks to Paramount’s utter disregard for the property, which is a shame when you see some of the raw footage that still exists. Many, especially those who prefer Jason’s more serious incarnation, felt that the series should have stopped at The Final Chapter, but few truly believed it was the end for the madman in the hockey mask. Paramount may have claimed as much, even thought as much, but there was simply too much money to be made from what had proven a consistent, low-risk property.

You talking to me, Sheriff? I thought you were talking to me.

Roy Burns

In all likelihood, Jason’s demise was nothing more than a cynical marketing gimmick, a trend that continued as the character was resurrected time and time again, his unlikely regenerative capacities and ability to teleport making fickle fare of the Voorhees legend as the series fell headlong into self-awareness. So surreptitious was Paramount’s eventual backtracking that A New Beginning was cast under the fake title ‘Repetition’, a tradition that began in 1982 as a means to swerve the attention of unions looking to castigate horror flicks with brand recognition or violent-sounding titles. Even the movie’s stars were given the runaround, many of whom unaware that they were starring in a Friday the 13th instalment until after they had signed up. The series had developed such a stigma that Paramount even resorted to misleading cast members.

Of Paramount’s creative subterfuge, producer Frank Mancuso Junior would recall, “We started creating fake titles for the Friday movies around Part 3. Most of the time they were old David Bowie song titles—just innocuous enough that the unions would leave you alone. Because a union was far less likely to go out and try to bust a movie called “Crystal Japan” than they were Friday the 13th Part 3. They knew that the train went back to Paramount and they knew the Friday the 13th films were successful, so they would come at you much harder. As for “Repetition,” I just thought it was a funny joke.”

Actor John Shepherd, who spent months volunteering at a state mental hospital in preparation for his role in ‘Repetition’, was most disappointed that the movie turned out to be little more than an extension of a moribund franchise, one that would prove the death knell for a plethora of young hopefuls haunted by the slasher stigma. Shepherd, who does a memorable job as the beleaguered Tommy Jarvis amid the film’s comical eccentricity, was described as being standoffish by fellow cast members during various stages of the shoot. The guy wasted months of his life preparing for a film that didn’t give two hoots about acting ability. You’d expect him to be at least a little miffed.

A New Beginning was a production built on lies, but technically speaking Paramount did stick to their commercial promise (at least temporarily) because this time Jason isn’t the culprit, only appearing through the twisted mind of our returning protagonist. A New Beginning is the second part of what fans lovingly refer to as the ‘Tommy Jarvis trilogy’. Portrayed by three different actors in Shepherd, Corey Feldman, and Return of the Living Dead‘s Thom Matthews, the character appeared in a total of three instalments. Aside from Jason and mother Pamela, he’s more synonymous with the Friday the 13th series than anyone else.

Of those actors, Shepherd is the least lauded, partly because he had the least notable onscreen career outside of the series and partly because fans generally adore The Final Chapter and Jason Lives ― the Black Sheep A New Beginning not so much ― but his turn is just as rewarding thanks to a quite ludicrous screenplay, the emotionally scarred Jarvis leaping from broody introvert to frenetic savagery in the frenzied blink of an eye. The moment in which a seemingly subdued Tommy obliterates a fellow patient for the sake of a friendly practical joke is an absolutely priceless moment in the series and a fine indicator of A New Beginning‘s irresistibly wanton silliness.

The fourth sequel in the Friday the 13th franchise plays out like an X-rated Scooby Doo mystery in which a masked killer roams with a level of nonsensical camp that is really quite astonishing. A tonal variation on the usual summer camp slaughterhouse, it is actually a goofy bundle of fun, a film with so many plot holes and narrative oversights that identifying them becomes a key part of the whole experience. It also features arguably the quirkiest bunch of characters in the entire series, some of whom belonging nowhere near a traditional Friday the 13th movie. Even the prerequisite red herring, a drifter who offers to work in return for food, is almost a parody of himself, winding up dead before we’ve even got a proper look at him. It’s all so perfunctory and without any real purpose, some would say endearingly so.

A New Beginning is so unashamedly dumb and throwaway that it reveals the killer’s identity mere moments after the demise of our first victim with two consecutive vengeful-eyed close-ups. Looking back, it is so obvious I’m astonished I didn’t see it the first time around, especially when, later in the movie, the character randomly pops back up again, mistakenly believing that the sheriff is talking to him when he clearly isn’t. It’s so strikingly unnatural it’s as if the film’s writers forgot that Roy was even the killer and threw in a quick reminder. He may as well have the word Guilty tattooed on his forehead.

Equally amusing is the fact that, other than those moments, there’s very little reason to suspect a character with such minimal screen time. Despite being the killer, Roy is little more than an extra hastily shoed-in for narrative convenience with the sole intention of pulling the rug out from under us. There’s no effort to convince us of this man’s transformation from doting father to insatiable, and surprisingly competent, mass murderer, which makes events even more bizarre. Did an entire cast of teens really deserve to get the chop for an incident that they had absolutely no control over? It seems like something of an overreaction for a seemingly normal guy, however devastating the tragedy.

Something else that tickles me is the fact that the whole murderous affair is triggered by a chocolate bar. A chocolate bar! Had it not been for the insufferable Joey’s offer of a tasty treat, or the fact that the decidedly lax institution that is the Pinewood Home for Delinquents allows the more deranged of its residents to wander freely in possession of deadly weapons, all of this could have been avoided. For a movie that was inevitably committed to the cutting floor, Joey’s murder is rather brutal. You don’t see much of it barring a few stacked-up entrails, but the sheer explosion of violence, however implied, is startling to say the least ― though not exactly surprising given Joey’s excruciating nature. I’m not saying I agree with Victor’s act of wanton insanity, but part of me understands.

A New Beginning, for reasons that were originally intended and otherwise, is all about Jarvis. After a brief prologue starring a returning Corey Feldman, we’re brought up to date with affairs… kind of. Why Shepherd’s Tommy is a fully grown man after being only twelve a year prior is anyone’s guess. We know the reason why Feldman only returned for a small cameo (he was tied up with Richard Donner’s The Goonies and even shot the scene in his back garden for convenience), but the character’s leap in age is more than a little baffling. The most logical explanation is that the movie jumps forward a half-decade. I’ve read that the film is actually set in 1989, though to my knowledge there’s no literal indication of this. The new wave fashion and general aesthetics tell an entirely different story, and I didn’t hear a single diegetic song released after 1984.

The film at least stays true to the Tommy character, who is understandably not doing so well after the events of The Final Chapter, suffering from horrific nightmares in which Jason attempts to enact revenge having had his head impaled on a machete. Though Tommy takes meds to calm himself down — the kind that don’t need digesting and for some reason work instantly — he continues to have visions of Jason, and unabashed acts of violence have us suspecting him as one of the movie’s possible culprits as local law enforcement fumbles around in search of clues. As luck would have it, A New Beginning features the only sheriff in the entire series who actually puts two and two together and suspects that Jason is in fact responsible for the community’s spate of murders instead of immediately dismissing any such notion, a refreshing concept for a Friday the 13th sequel if not for the fact that this is one of the only instalments that doesn’t take place at Camp Crystal. These kids just can’t catch a break!

Two more cretins ripe for the choppin’ are local yokels Ethel and Junior, a salt-of-the-earth duo whose dissentient ravings about dangerous delinquents threaten to have the institute closed down. Ethel, mother to the excruciatingly puerile Junior, has a particularly sharp tongue. If she’s not hitting kids with heavy doses of blind hatred, she’s in the kitchen cookin’ “slop” or calling her son “a fucking dildo”, which, to be fair to her, he absolutely his. Even the sheriff gets a mouthful when Ethel turns up at Pinewood threatening all kinds of retribution. Strange then, that she later fails to capitalise on Joey’s brutal and very public murder. Not only does Pinewood go unpunished for its fatal act of negligence, its workers barely receive a telling off and are allowed to continue on in a manner that will spell the end for a whole bunch of spuriously indifferent teenagers. I guess kids really were tougher back then.

That is one fucking ugly man that goes there.

Ethel

Unlikely killer Roy Burns and our backwoods pairing are not the only cult characters to emerge from A New Beginning‘s cack-handed chaos. No one will ever forget Kool and the Gang clone Demon’s toilet-bound run-in with “them damn enchiladas”, and peewee prankster Reggie (Shavar Ross) is the human equivalent of Scrappy Doo, the plucky young sucker who helps unravel the whole sordid mystery. Melanie Kinnaman’s Pam is a rather unique final girl too; an older, more maternal figure who is somewhat at odds with her peers (she was thirty-two when she starred in A New Beginning). She and Reggie’s dynamic is closer to that of Laurie Strode and Tommy Doyle in the original Halloween, though the real-life Kinnaman wasn’t half as prudish, the actress later claiming that her favourite scenes are those in which she’s wearing a see-through T-shirt. Who am I to argue?

Personally, I think the movie’s finale, a rain-swept battle between Pam, Reggie and Roy, is one of the most enjoyable in the series. Despite Jason’s absence it very much feels like classic Friday the 13th once Roy turns up looking decidedly bigger and balder in a blue variant of the iconic hockey mask that for me is the coolest of the lot. Despite a distinctly Scooby Doo Mysteries unmasking of Roy portrayer Dick Wieand, Jason was actually played by uncredited stuntman Tom Morga after previous Jason, Ted White, turned down the role, something that he would later admit to regretting.

Unfortunately, A New Beginning is one of the most heavily cut instalments of the entire series, and once again the original footage doesn’t exist anywhere in the world. The film features the second highest kill count in the series (22). It’s just a shame that we barely get to see any of it, especially an infamous scene that sees a poor youngster’s head strapped to a tree and crushed to what would have been an almighty splat. The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) cut a total of 56 seconds before expanding that amount to 1 min 22 secs for VHS releases. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) cut a frame of blood splashing (Joey’s death), a wide frame shot of Vinnie having a road flare shoved into his mouth, a machete throat-slicing (Pete), and an excessive flow of blood that was originally included during the scene in which Billy takes an axe to the skull. Lana’s entire death was cut and recreated, resulting in a painfully bloodless scene. There was also a knife-twisting omission, a significant trimming down of the aforementioned head crushing… well, you get the picture.

Steinmann also shot a couple of extremely graphic sex scenes (one a hardly believable 3 minutes long). The first was whittled down to only ten seconds, the other cut in its entirety. The movie’s most graphic sex scene, in its edited form, isn’t that graphic at all, but it did get star Deborah Voorhees (no relation) fired from her job as a teacher many years later after some of her students passed around naked images of her from the movie. Wieand would later suggest that Steinmann filmed the sex scenes knowing that the MPPA would cut them, something that he thought might appease them enough to allow some of the gore to sluice through, which, if accurate, is a plan that very clearly backfired.

Ultimately, the MPAA didn’t have to get involved at all; Paramount axed those scenes before the film was even submitted to them. “I shot a porno in the woods there,” Steinmann would explain. “You wouldn’t believe the nudity they cut out”. By all accounts, Steinmann had a huge influence on A New Beginning‘s madcap presentation. Kinnaman, Wieand and Morga have all claimed that the director spent most of the shoot riding the wave of a cocaine binge, so out of his mind that cinematographer Stephen Posey was forced to fill in and direct certain scenes. Who would have thought that cocaine was responsible for the incoherent madness that is A New Beginning? I’m guessing a fair few of us. Due largely to a near-fatal bike accident that he spent several years recovering from, A New Beginning was the last film that Steinmann, most notable for Linda Blair exploitation flick Savage Streets, would ever direct.

A New Beginning was met with a tumultuous critical backlash, not only from the usual highbrow naysayers instigating the kind of moral panic that proved infinitely more dangerous than any of Jason’s fictional antics, but from a cheated fanbase who paid to see Jason and instead got someone else entirely. Many fans still hold a grudge against the movie, viewing it as the instalment that triggered the demise of Jason’s golden age, but the truth is that the original slasher template had run its course by 1985. There were a few notable exceptions, but early-80s oversaturation had left audiences tired of the same old schtick; what was once an anarchic outlet for teenagers was now a heavily-censored parody of itself. Despite such underhanded commercial tactics, Jason still had an audience, but if you’re to bring back a cult franchise less than a year after your series-ending declaration, you best bring the goods. Paramount, they didn’t even bother to bring their marquee attraction.

It’s them damn enchiladas!

Demon

There was also the rather significant stumbling block of a character named Fred Krueger. Four months prior to the release of A New Beginning, Wes Craven’s sleeper hit A Nightmare on Elm Street breathed new life into the sub-genre, forging a slasher villain with a supernatural twist. People who were sick of seeing the same vacuous beauties making the same stupid mistakes were given a dream world concept that newly legitimised the formula. When one of Jason’s victims ran senselessly into the woods, you looked upon them with derision. When one of Freddy’s victims did something similar, you could relate to them completely because the pursuing monster inhabited a realm in which conventional rules no longer existed, where mistakes were beyond a person’s control. It was such an ingenious sleight of hand.

Paramount, like numerous other slasher purveyors, couldn’t compete with the kind of once in a lifetime concept that went from strength to strength as Friday the 13th fumbled blindly in the proverbial woods, transforming Krueger portrayer Robert Englund into horror’s first bona fide rock star. Creatively, the meta approach of 1986’s Jason Lives came closest to revitalising the series, but despite its relative wit numbers remained low, mostly because of the damage inflicted by A New Beginning‘s narrative subterfuge and the increased impositions of the censorship powers that be.

Sensing that the series had finally run its course, Paramount would approach New Line Cinema the following year with the idea of a money-spinning Freddy vs Jason crossover ― a novel idea back in 1987, but one that New Line weren’t particularly in need of as Krueger’s popularity neared its apotheosis. The project was considered, but a deal never materialised, a development that Paramount were no doubt less pleased about by the end of 1988. While A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master posted record highs for the series, Paramount’s hacked-to-pieces, soap-opera-with-a-death-toll, Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, posted record lows. Jason still had his loyal fanbase, but there was a new commercial king.

Earlier, when I suggested that Friday the 13th fans fall into two categories ― those with a taste for golden age Jason and those who embrace the character’s sillier, meta incarnation ― I neglected to mention that A New Beginning falls into neither category. With all the cuts, ludicrous characters and various narrative oversights, it certainly doesn’t belong to the ‘video nasty’ era, and though it’s plenty silly ― arguably the silliest of them all ― it doesn’t belong to the post-Jason Lives, Universal monsters era either. Instead it inhabits a peculiar void, a kind of Twilight Zone alternate universe where everything seems as normal until you look just a little closer, until you reveal what’s hiding beneath the mask, both figuratively and literally. The film is audaciously underhanded, almost negligent in its treatment of the Voorhees character, and its black sheep status will likely never wane.

As is apparent from the movie’s equally left-field twist, the original idea was to set up a trilogy of Friday the 13th films with a different villain at the helm, namely Tommy Jarvis. Paramount gave Steinmann two provisos when offering him the directorial chair, the first being rather obvious: that the film shock, terrify and deliver at least one kill every seven or eight minutes. Paramount’s other demand was that Steinmann transform Tommy into the next Jason. The film’s ending, which sees Tommy kill a hospitalised Pam, wasn’t originally intended as a dream, but plans changed and Tommy was later recast and installed as the next instalment’s protagonist.

With money still to be made, Paramount found increasingly dubious ways to bring Jason back from beyond the grave, something they would continue to do until New Line bought the rights to the series with a view to creating their own Freddy vs Jason spin-off after the A Nightmare on Elm Street series had suffered a similar commercial fate. The box office only got crueller for Jason, and when he failed to take Manhattan thanks to the kind of budgetary restrictions that confined the kids of Part VIII to a long, laborious boat ride, the writing was on the wall. In truth, it had been for years.

Though A New Beginning has achieved a certain level of cult status all these years later, it was still a monumental blow to the series going forward. It did decent numbers, and the absent Jason would live to fight another day, but it was never the same. Despite flirting with the dawn of a new era, in many ways A New Beginning was the beginning of the end for Jason as horror’s marquee attraction, but what a weird and wonderful way to go out.

Director: Danny Steinmann
Screenplay: Martin Kitrosser,
David Cohen &
Danny Steinmann
Music: Harry Manfredini
Cinematography: Stephen L. Posey
Editing: Bruce Green