Friday the 13th Pt V: A New Beginning (1985)

“Jason Voorhees is dead! His body was cremated. He's nothing but a handful of ash.” - Mayor Cobb

Jason was dead. Friday the 13th Pt IV – The Final Chapter had seen him perish at the hands of pre-teen Tommy Jarvis in the final reel, as he defended his older sister. In reality, Paramount had seen box office takings slump during the third film’s release and figured that the slasher film bubble had burst. But there was maybe enough gas left in the tank to squeeze one more and to use that to finally kill off cinema’s most prolific serial killer.

What Paramount hadn’t quite banked on was that Pt IV became quite profitable on its release. But Jason was dead. Time for a radical rethink then when it came to the following year’s instalment subtitled “A New Beginning”. And to be fair, it is in many ways. If we can call 1980-84 Jason’s first phase, then that’s over. As I’ve mentioned, parts 2,3 & 4 all happen on three consecutive days, and it’s time to move on. But you’d never think that from the film’s opening sequence, where a young, bespectacled pre-teen Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman returned for a day’s filming of a scene with no dialogue when he had a day off from filming The Goonies). It’s a stormy night as Tommy makes his way to Jason’s grave just in time to see two rednecks dig up the body. As soon as he’s unearthed, Jason returns to life. Luckily for him, his machete was buried with him and he dispatched both idiots before confronting Tommy…

… who wakes up from a recurring nightmare. Time has passed. Tommy is now in his late teens and is played by John Shepherd. Tommy is haunted by dreams and visions of the deceased Jason and has been spending the last several years undergoing psychiatric care. No mention is made of the siter he was defending, so I guess she just abandoned him to the system and went on with her life, forgetting all about him. Tommy is on his way to the Pinehurst Halfway House as he works his way towards recovery.

Unfortunately, Pinehurst is in the vicinity of Crystal Lake, which never bodes well in these films. It’s home to a catalogue of teenagers with problems, but these problems aren’t actually discussed in the main. We know from their behaviour that Eddie and Tina are a couple of nymphomaniacs who can’t keep their hands off each other, all we know about Jake is that he stammers. Joey seems to be a compulsive eater with learning difficulties and Vic who has a problem managing his anger and aggression. The rest, Tiffany the Goth and a girl named Robin (??) all seem pretty normal. Young Reggie is only there because his grandfather works on the site as a cook. Early on in the film, Vic gives full rein to his anger by slaughtering Joey with an axe for being an annoying nuisance and getting himself arrested. (You’d think that the counsellors Matt & Pam would know better than to have HIM, of all people chopping up the firewood.)

That killing comes from nowhere, and was pretty shocking the first time I saw the film, in the heady days of VHS, Halloween 1990. Sheriff Tucker, the local lawman attends and ascertains that Joey has no family. Mother died giving birth, father unknown. He hands over custody of the body to paramedics one who’s sarcastically mouthy and unprofessional, the other is more sensitive and seems shocked by the brutality of the murder. As soon as the body has been removed, enter the comedy relief of the film, crazy hillbilly Ethel and her intellectually challenged son, Junior who live on the next farm along. They’re complaining that Eddie and Tina have been trespassing and having sex on their property again. Meanwhile, Tommy is having visions of Jason being around.

Now, that’s just scene setting. Now the killings start. Two fifties style greasers with a broken-down car are murdered with apparently no motive. The mouthy porn reading attendant who dropped Tommy off at Pinehurst is killed while picking up his girlfriend from the diner at the end of her waitressing shift – she dies too. Then, Eddie and Tina are murdered just after having sex – again. As is a Peeping Tom onlooker. Little Reggie wants to go and see his big brother, who seems to live out of a van. As soon as Reggie leaves with Pam, both his brother and his brother’s girlfriend are killed. (He meets his end in an outhouse while getting rid of a bad enchilada and as far as I can tell, is another Crystal Lake unfortunate who dies on a toilet without having time to wipe. That’s no way to go!) Junior loses his head – literally, Ethel is drowned in a cauldron of her own stew. Jake, Robin and Tiffany are all killed, just in time for that traditional last reel storm and just before Reggie and Pam get back to discover the bodies and that of Matt, and the chase is on.

Bear in mid that all these killings have been perpetrated by an unseen killer – it’s only when Reggie and Pam return that they’re confronted by “Jason” in a blue boiler suit like Michael Myers wears in the Halloween movies. Running away, they discover the ambulance from Joey’s killing, with the creep paramedic dead and “Jason” standing beside him – so back to Pinehurst they run. Despite being run over by a tractor and having a machete vs chainsaw fight with Pam, it’s Tommy who turns up in the nick of time to kill Jason again… Or has he?

No, he hasn’t.

Jason’s dead, remember?

The killer (in true Scooby Doo fashion) is revealed as Roy, the sensitive paramedic. It turns out he was Joey’s father and he lost his sanity when he saw his son’s slaughtered body. He decided to disguise himself as Jason to kill those he held responsible. Now that, to me at least, explains some of the killings – but not all. Roy could well be responsible for the deaths of the other paramedic because of his disrespect when Joey died, Matt (the head counsellor) for allowing it to happen, and maybe even the other patients at the halfway house. But why the greasers? They didn’t do anything. Or the orderly and his girlfriend? Or Reggie’s brother and his girlfriend? I think that Tommy himself was responsible for some of these. Particularly as we see him wearing the hockey mask and brandishing a knife in the final scene. This element was left open, and never followed up. It may well be that Roy killed everybody with some random ones thrown in to keep the illusion up that Jason was indeed back. Sharp eyed viewers will spot a difference between the “real” Jason in Tommy’s visions and the fake one, doing the killing. Real Jason has the customary red marking on the forehead of his mask, while the impostor has blue markings on the sides of his.

In the final analysis, despite its hostile reception by critics in ’85 and the disdainful comments of a lot of the cast, my overall reaction is more upbeat. I think this is a brave move in a different direction for the series. The first and only film in the franchise where the usual killer has been killed in the previous film and stays dead for the entirety of this one. Whatever else can be said of this one, that approach is both creative and original and it deserves kudos for that.

A New Beginning made a respectable $22 million at the box office – a good return on its $2 million budget and reaffirmed Paramount’s faith in their killer. So much so that there would be no coyness n Pt VI’s title. They said it upfront, Jason Lives!