Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (also known as Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning) is a 1985 American slasher film directed by Danny Steinmann and the fifth installment in the Friday the 13th film series. The film stars John Shepherd as Tommy Jarvis, the boy who killed Jason Voorhees in the previous installment, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984). Shepherd replaces Corey Feldman, who played Tommy in The Final Chapter, although Feldman makes a cameo appearance in the film's prologue.
A New Beginning departs from the Camp Crystal Lake setting and Voorhees-themed mystery of the previous four installments and instead acts as a psychological horror film set at a fictional halfway house, where Tommy begins to fear again as a new series of brutal murders have been occurring by a new hockey-masked assailant. The film was initially going to set up a new trilogy of films with a different villain for the series. However, after A New Beginning's disappointing reception from fans and steep decline in box-office receipts from The Final Chapter, Jason Voorhees was brought back for Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives and has been the main antagonist in every entry in the series since.
The frequency of graphic violence and blood is expedited in A New Beginning, with a then-series high body count. Aside from its gore, the film has also become known for its explicit nudity and sex scene, as well as frequent drug use. Peter Bracke's book Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th details that behind the scenes, the production was plagued with hardcore drug use. Produced on a budget of $2.2 million, A New Beginning grossed $21.9 million at the box office in the United States, making it the second poorest performing film in the Friday the 13th series at the time with a steep decline from the previous two entries, both of which had made well over $34 million in the US. In addition to weak box office returns, most critics gave the film negative reviews. In later years, much like the series in general, the film has obtained a cult following.
Video Friday the 13th: A New Beginning
Plot
A few years after the demise of mass murderer Jason Voorhees, the youngest survivor Tommy Jarvis awakens from a nightmare of him witnessing two grave robbers digging up Jason Voorhees's body. Jason rises from the grave and murders the grave robbers before advancing towards Tommy. Upon arriving at Pinehurst Halfway House, a secluded residential treatment facility, Tommy is introduced to director Pam Roberts and Dr. Matt Letter. In his assigned room, Tommy also meets Reggie, a boy whose grandfather, George, works as the kitchen cook. Other teens introduced are redhead Robin, Goth Violet, shy Jake, short-tempered Vic, and compulsive eater Joey. The sheriff brings in two more residents, Eddie and Tina, after catching them having sex on neighbor Ethel Hubbard's lawn. Ethel Hubbard and her son Junior show up and threaten to have the house closed down if the teens do not stop sneaking onto their property.
Later that day, Vic kills Joey with an axe and is subsequently arrested. Attending ambulance drivers Duke and Roy Burns discover the body. Roy is saddened by the death, but Duke believes that the murder was a harmless prank. That evening, greasers Vinnie and Pete are murdered by an unseen assailant after their car breaks down. The following night, Billy and his girlfriend Lana are killed with an axe. Panic begins to ensue, but the mayor refuses to believe the sheriff's claim that somehow Jason Voorhees has returned.
The next day, Tina and Eddie sneak off into the woods to have sex. Ethel's farmhand Raymond is killed while spying on the two. While Eddie leaves to go wash off in the creek, Tina is murdered. Eddie returns to find her dead and is also killed. Meanwhile, Tommy and Pam accompany Reggie to visit Reggie's brother Demon and his girlfriend, Anita. While there, Junior has a fight with Tommy. After Reggie and Pam leave, Demon and Anita are murdered. At the Hubbard farm, Ethel and Junior are both killed as well.
Pam leaves Reggie at the halfway house to look for Tommy. After Reggie falls asleep, the killer enters and murders Jake, Robin, and Violet. Reggie awakens just as Pam returns before they discover the dead bodies in Tommy's room. The killer, revealed to be wearing Jason's hockey mask, bursts into the house and chases them out into the rain after discovering the bodies of Duke, Matt, and George. Pam rushes toward the barn, chased by Jason, but he is struck by a tractor driven by Reggie. They run into the barn and hide as Jason comes to find them. Tommy comes shortly after and believes Jason to be a hallucination until he is attacked. Together, they get Jason to fall out of the loft window, and he is killed upon landing on a harrow below. The killer is revealed to have not been Jason but was Roy Burns all along.
At the hospital, the sheriff tells Pam that Joey was Roy's son, and after seeing him slaughtered, he lost his sanity and adopted Jason's identity to kill everyone at the house, apparently blaming them all for the death. Tommy, after waking up from a nightmare where he kills Pam in his room, awakens a hallucination of Jason, but he faces his fears which makes Jason's hallucination disappear. He hears Pam approaching and throws his bed through the window to appear that he has escaped. When she rushes in, he appears from behind the door, wearing Roy's hockey mask and wielding a kitchen knife.
Maps Friday the 13th: A New Beginning
Cast
John Hock appeared as Jason Voorhees in the opening dream sequence because Morga was unavailable when the scene was shot. He also performed the stunt where Roy fell off the barn.
Production
Friday the 13th: A New Beginning was cast under a fake title, Repetition, and many of the actors in the film were not aware it was a Friday the 13th installment until after they were cast in their roles. Among the unaware cast was lead actor John Shepard, who spent several months volunteering at a state mental hospital to prepare for the role, and that he felt "really disappointed" to discover that Repetition was actually the fifth entry in the Friday the 13th series. Actor Dick Wieand stated that "It wasn't until I saw Part V that I realized what a piece of trash it was. I mean, I knew the series' reputation, but you're always hoping that yours is going to come out better", and director Danny Steinmann stated that he "shot a fucking porno in the woods there. You wouldn't believe the nudity they cut out."
According to the DVD box set Friday the 13th: Return to Crystal Lake, Corey Feldman was only able to make a cameo appearance in the film as a result of his involvement as an actor in The Goonies, which was released the same year as A New Beginning. Feldman filmed his cameo on a Sunday, as that was his off day of shooting his other film.
The film is the only entry in the Friday the 13th film series to feature a hockey mask design with two blue triangles pointing downwards, as opposed to the more common variant of three red triangles, with the lower two pointing upwards.
Soundtrack
On January 13, 2012, La-La Land Records released a limited edition 6-CD boxset containing Harry Manfredini's scores from the first six Friday the 13th films. It sold out in less than 24 hours.
Track listing
All tracks written by Harry Manfredini, except where noted.
Release
Friday the 13th: A New Beginning opened on March 22, 1985, on 1,759 screens. The film debuted at number 1 on its opening weekend with a gross of $8,032,883, beating the teen sex comedy sequel Porky's Revenge, the biopic Mask, Berry Gordy's martial-arts action musical The Last Dragon and the Disney dinosaur fantasy Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend. By the end of its run, the film would earn $21,930,418 at the domestic box office, placing it at number 41 on the list of 1985's top box office earners. The film faced competition throughout the first half of the year against horror releases Cat's Eye and Lifeforce.
Critical reception
Review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reports that 16% of 19 surveyed critics, both contemporaneous and modern, gave the film a positive review; the average rating is 3.2/10. Variety wrote, "The fifth Friday the 13th film reiterates a chronicle of butcherings with even less variation than its predecessors." Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote, "It's worth recognizing only as an artifact of our culture."
Steve Davis of The Austin Chronicle criticized the film's redundant violence, noting that the film consisted of the "Same screaming, same endless chases, same breasts, same blood, same axe, same lack of explanation, same ending primed for another sequel. Is there a pattern emerging here? In short: same as it ever was, same as it ever was." Scott Meslow of GQ called the film "the bloodiest, most deranged" installment in the series, noting its total of 22 murder sequences.
Writing for Slant Magazine, Jeremiah Kipp wrote: "There's more plot than usual, involving Jason survivor Tommy Jarvis wondering if the pileup of corpses can be blamed on Jason, a copycat, or himself. But Agatha Christie this ain't. The tone is crude, raunchy, and leering, with kill scenes combined with more nudity than usual."
In popular culture
Jon Lajoie's 2016 song "A New Beginning" describes his loss of innocence after watching Friday the 13th: A New Beginning at a friend's house.
References
Works cited
- Bracke, Peter (2006). Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (First ed.). Titan Books. ISBN 1845763432.
External links
- Friday the 13th: A New Beginning on IMDb
- Friday the 13th: A New Beginning at Box Office Mojo
- Friday the 13th: A New Beginning at Rotten Tomatoes
Source of article : Wikipedia
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