So, last time out, we had Corey Feldman, Crispin Glover and the first appearance of Undead Jason. This time, our favorite Hockey Zombie returns....OR DOES HE??? *dun dun DUNNNNNNN* Yup, this week's funfest is Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning(but really, the only thing "new" here is the subtitle).
The film opens with a quick scene that bridges the previous sequel with this one, showing Corey Feldman as Tommy Jarvis once again, making his way through a forest during a storm. He's trudging along on his little chubby preteen feet, until he gets to a crude-looking grave marker: JASON VOORHEES. He hears 2 people coming towards his location, and he quickly finds a hiding spot behind some bushes.
Two unknown doofuses show up. Let's call them Archie and Jughead. They want to dig up Jason's grave to get a look at the legendary killer. They dig down to the coffin and use their shovels to pry open the lid. One guy calls the other one Neil, but I'm sticking with the names I gave 'em. They're not going to live long enough to care, so it's all good, right?
Anyway, Jughead bends down to get a closer look once the lid of the coffin is pried off. Archie just looks disgusted. There's a quick glimpse of Jason's wormy leg, as well as his machete, and he comes to life. He swiftly dispatches both Archie and Jughead(one gets it in the gut, the other gets stabbed through his throat), and climbs out of his grave to stare at Tommy's hiding spot. He pulls his machete out of one of the corpses and walks right up to Tommy, who makes no move to run at all. Dumbass. As Tommy begs for his life Jason raises the machete over his head, and--
He wakes up, looking like a guy in his early 20's. He's in a vehicle belonging to the Unger Institute of Mental Health, which I assume is run by a neat freak named Felix with roommate issues. The credits do their explode-y thing, and I pray for at least one recognizable name in the cast this time. I've seen this one before, but all I can recall is the mediocrity and the VERY '80's style of everything. Shavar Ross is in this, he sounds familiar. Maybe after I expunge this from my memory, I'll look him up on IMDB and see where I might know the name from. Jesus H. Monkeyballs, there's someone in this movie named "Caskey Swaim"! Seriously? That's a name? Sounds like a losing round of Scrabble, if ya ask me.
Nope, besides Feldman and Ross, no other names ring any sort of bells in my head. Damn. Well hopefully this one at least continues the tradition of having a cute chick as the Final Girl. All right, movie, amaze and delight me!!
As the credits end, we get to Pinehurst Youth Development Center. Sounds like a Nazi Daycare Center. Tommy looks like he might be turning into the OTHER Corey, Haim. I know, I know, bad taste and all, but he does look kind of like him. Or kind of like the "Daniel Jackson" character from the Stargate franchise, that sort of bookworm nerd character type.
The van pulls to a stop and one of the workers try to coax Tommy out, but he refuses to move, nor does he acknowledge the guy. A hot blonde named Pam comes out to see if she can help, and introduces herself as the asistant director of the facility. Ohpleaseohplease make her the Final Girl. She's VERY easy on the eyes!
Anyway, she does get him to exit the van, but he doesn't say a word. I think I read somewhere online that this guy has the least dialogue of any of the "Tommy" portrayers, and based on what I've seen so far, I believe it! He makes Marlee Matlin seem chatty. So, Pam takes Tommy to meet Matt, a doctor at Pinehurst. He tells Tommy a little bit about the facility, the staff, where his room is blahblahblah...and Tommy leaves to go find his room. He's had one word of dialogue since this thing began, and I think it was "Sure." Stellar. How bad does a movie have to suck to make me miss the acting finesse of Corey Feldman?!?
So Tommy finds his room, and begins to unpack his stuff. He takes out a picture of his mother and sister, and the film is so lazy that it doesn't even TRY to make it look like anything other than a publicity still. I'm surprised that they didn't stamp it with a PROPERTY OF PARAMOUNT label while they were at it. They were probably just too cheap to pay the 3 actors from the last movie to pose for a picture.
Oh, and Tommy also pulls out a knife. He plays around a bit with it, before hiding the knife under his mattress. Maybe the Knife Fairy will give him a dollar. He starts to put his clothes away, and is frightened by a toy spider on a string. The toy belongs to a kid who looks alot like Dudley, the boy who was molested on that one episode of "Diff'rent Strokes".(and, boy oh boy, were THOSE some pretty different strokes!! YIKES...hey, maybe HE'S Shavar Ross???) Y'know, by the guy who was the boss on WKRP. Yeah, I know, I watch WAY too much tv. Hey, it keeps me outta trouble!
Anyway, the kid introduces himself as Reggie, a local kid whose grandfather works at Pinehurst. He starts to make fun of Tommy's reaction to the spider, and Tommy returns the favor by wearing one of his trademark masks from the last movie. (see, in that one, Tommy was a horror-film nut who liked to make his own monster masks...). As Reggie watches, Tommy begins to reveal quite an impressive mask collection, probably courtesy of Rick Baker, who made all the masks in the last movie.
The sound of a police siren interrupts their conversation. Two local cops have arrived to deliver a horny ten couple who left the facility to trespass on a neighbor's property. The neighbor, Ethel Hubbard, and her son ride up on a motorcycle straight out of a beach party movie from the 1960's. After she threatens to kill all of the teens and blow up the place, she and her son Junior leave in a cloud of dust. From the look of them, I'm assuming none of the dust was caused by the motorcycle spinning away.
In the next scene, we meet some of our new victims: There's Joey, a simple-minded fat guy who gets more food ON him than IN him; Violet, a punky looking blonde who is absolutely hilarious later in the movie(it involves dancing, and is a great cheesy moment); Robin, a cute brunette who seems to be an uptight preppy chick; and Vic, a tough guy who enjoys chopping wood with a very sharp-looking axe.
So Joey offers to help the girls, who are hanging laundry, and proceeds to ruin a sheet because his hands are covered in chocolate(at least, we HOPE it's chocolate...). When the girls get angry, Joey approaches Vic, and ruins the firewood with bloodstains after Vic chops him in the back. The siren from the Naked Gun franchise shows up, but it turns out to be 2 paramedics, Roy and an unnamed guy we'll call "Bubba". Bubba sees Roy get upset when he views Joey's corpse, and mocks him. REMEMBER THIS SCENE!!!
Anyway, the scene cuts abruptly to 2 greasers having car trouble on their way to the same beach party movie the Hubbard motorcycle came from. One of them, Pete, is horsing around behind the steering wheel while the other guy does all the work. They get into an argument, and Pete goes off into the woods to take a dump. Charming.
As Pete wanders around, he starts hearing noises nearby. He swings his flashlight around and comes face to face with.....oh, it's just a bunny. Great, thanks for building up the suspense for nothing.
The other guy removes his leather jacket, turns around when someone behind him lights a flare, and gets it shoved in his mouth. Ouch! I wish I had taken note of his name. I feel bad now. Anyway, when Pete gets back to the car he gets behind the wheel. As he tries to get it started again, A hand shoots out from the backseat and grabs him by the hair, and another hand uses a machete to slice through his neck. What is this franchise's obsession with throat-slashings???
Back at Pinehurst, the new Tommy's not doing so well. He's having flashbacks to the day he stabbed Jason to death, brought on by the sight of Joey getting butchered. He gets out of bed to take some of his meds, and sees a vision of Jason in the mirror! The killer, of course, IS just an hallucination...but Tommy is still understandably shaken by the incident.
Downstairs, Reggie is helping to set the table, and he asks his grandfather if he can visit with his estranged big brother, who will be in town. The old man doesn't seem to like the idea, but knowing Reggie, I'll bet he still gets to have his visit. Oh, and we see a few more characters I don't remember being introduced earlier: a female who is kind of quiet and mousy, and a guy who resembles a sort of B-movie Jon Cryer who has a bad stutter.
The group gathers for breakfast, and there's an argument over how many places are set at the table. Apparently, Violet set 2 extra places, and it creates some sort of convoluted problem. Of course, since Tommy hasn't come down yet, and Eddie is still not at the table, I'm not sure that there IS a problem, but I also don't care enough to rewind this dull crap just to count the places at a friggin' dining room table.
Anyway, when Tommy walks in, he makes about as much of an impression on the group as The Invisible Man would at an orgy. Matt asks him to see what' holding up Eddie, but Tommy doesn't seem to like that idea much. As Tommy turns to leave again, Eddie pops up wearing one of those rubber masks, and scares the holy terror out of him. When Eddie sees that Tommy is reacting to the incident badly, he keeps playfully punching him in the shoulder, and that causes Tommy to blow off some steam by flipping Eddie over his head and onto the floor. HI-YAAAAA! He continually assaults Eddie with punches until Matt pulls him away.
Moving right along, we return to Ethel and Junior Hubbard, the dumb rednecks. She's slaughtering chickens for yummy grub, and he's eating "slop" like Babe the pig. When she hears the other chickens in their coop making a mothercluckin' ruckus, Ethel grabs her shotgun and nearly blows away a drifter who is looking for some work and a warm bed. She offers him a warm meal, but only if he cleans all of the chickenshit out of the coop first. After a largely pointless and unfuny conversation betwen her and Junior, the scene finally ends. Thank heavens.
Next, we get the crime scene where the 2 greasers died. Police have arrived, and are attempting to gather as much evidence as they can. Those same 2 paramedics arrive to take the corpses, and Roy exchanges words with the sheriff in an awkward attempt by the film-makers to remind us that these guys always seem to be the only ones who ever show up at every crime scene. *HINT HINT*
The next scene exists merely to pad the movie's victim roster and running time. We meet Lana, a cute-as heck waitress, and Billy, a hospital worker with an uncanny resemblance to Luigi, Mario's video-game sibling. After they flirt for a bit, she rushes back in to close up the diner and get ready to go out with him. She bares 2 spectacularly large breasts, and the scene ends there as I begin to weep.
While Lana's trying to keep me interested in watching the rest of the movie, Billuigi's getting high. By the time we see Lana again, she's already ressed up and finishing with her makeup. Damn. She hears something break in the diner, and goes out to investigate. We get a generic cat-scare, and then go back to Billy. He gets impatient, honks the car horn a few times, then gets an axe to the head as he begins to get out of the car to fetch her. Lana pets her pussy(sorry, I mean "cat") a few times and then walks out to the car, where she discovers her date's fate after she gets into the vehicle. She's murdered as she attempts to get away, with the axe being buried deep into her chest. Oh Lana, we hardly knew ye.
The following morning, Tommy watches from his upstairs window as 2 of his horny housemates chase each other around the yard, then suffers another vision of Jason. He rubs his eyes until Jason vanishes, and we get a scene straight out of Jaws. The mayor gets on the sheriff's case about finding the killer quickly and quietly, and the sheriff replies that he believes that the killer is actually Jason.
This scene is not just derivative of a far better film, but it creates a major plothole: the mayor rants at the sheriff that not only is Jason dead, but he's been cremated as well. Now, since we know that Jason is up and killing for about 7 more films, why did they throw in the line about cremation? I mean, I'm all for the attempt to have a new killer in the franchise and all, but why was this never mentioned or used again in any of the sequels that followed(except, arguably, Jason Goes To Hell)? Hanging or stabbing a zombie is one thing, but I don't see a pile of ashes going on too many murder sprees. Heck, they could just defeat him with an oscillating fan!
Well whatever. That same day, Eddie and ? run off for a bit to have some rough forest sex. As we're watching, so is the drifter Ethel hired. He gets a knife in the gut for his voyeurism. Eddie and ? finish up, and Eddie leaves her to go skip stones by the lake as she sunbathes in all of her nude, beautiful glory. As I start drooling on my laptop, she gets her eyes cut out with a pair of gardening shears. Oh well, at least he didn't mess up her rack!
Eddie returns, after wasting precious film time throwing rocks and whipping tree branches at nature. He finds ? and when he sees her eyes, he backs away in shock and horror. Too bad for him, he backs against a tree, because the killer winds a leather strap around his head, pulls the 2 ends together with a stick, and winds the strap so tight it crushes Eddie's eyes right through their sockets. What is it with throats and eyes? Weird fetish, if you ask me.
At Pinehurst, Matt is getting pissed off by all the troubled teens vanishing into thin air. A rocket scientist Matt is not. Reggie and Pam are leaving the house for awhile so that Reggie can see his brother, a gang member named Demon. With some coaxing, Tommy agrees to go as well. Matt and Gramps wave them off, looking as happy as clams that they've sealed their fates by staying behind. Oh, and we get 3-4 shots of the pickup truck Pam's driving going down the same road. MST3K would have had a feild day with this turd.
They pull into a trailer park, and Tommy stays by the pickup while Reggie and Pam go to meet up with Demon. Demon has more Jeri Curl in his hair than Vanity. He's wearing more leather than Leather Tuscadero. He gives Reggie a burrito, then introduces him to his hooker-girlfriend, Anita. Anita also looks like she stepped out of a cheesy '80's music video. Reggie then introduces Pam as HIS girlfriend. Oh, you wacky movie, you!
Back at the truck, Tommy is fascinated by the buzzing neon sign advertising the trailer park. He shambles toward it, and when he's right beneath it, he starts freaking out again. Man, someone should start a drinking game around the scenes where Tommy starts going apeshit! He sees a white light moving in his direction and gets scared, until it turns out to be Junior, out for a joyride.
At first, Junior just mocks Tommy for not getting out of the way, but then he sees and recognizes the pickup. He turns hostile, and threatens to kill Tommy. He gets as far as hitting Tommy once or twice, and that sets Tommy off. Tommy turns into Chuck Norris and proceeds to beat the snot out of the big lummox, until Pam shows up and calms him down again. Tommy runs away, and Pam quickly ushers Reggie back into the truck to find him.
Alone at last, Demon and Anita settle in for a night of unbridled crap-producing. Hey, maybe they can write scripts for Friday the 13th! Nah. It turns out that all of the greasy food Demon's been eating is giving him the runs. Great. At least this isn't the movie that was shot in 3-D! He runs into a tin shack(another outhouse...these movie writers find the stuff they like and run with it, don't they???) and proceeds to take a massive dump.
While Demon's getting his ass exorcised, the outhouse's corrugated walls start shaking. He yells out in alarm, and it turns out to be Anita, who apparently wants him to go all Rick James on her. They start singing to each other(ON A TOILET? REALLY???), until Demon hears her gasp and suddenly go silent. The walls start shaking(the earth was quaking, and my mind was aching...it was you, shook me ALL NIGHT LONG!!!), and Demon gets off the toilet to go bitch-slap his ho.
The door only opens partway, and he sees Anita blocking it with her dead body. How thoughtless! As he slams the door to hide in the toilet, the killer uses a spear-like metal pole to begin stabbing through the walls at random places. The first stab misses, but the second one jabs Demon in the leg. The idiot leans up against the wall for safety, and the spear enters his spine and pokes through his gut. Buh-bye, Demon. See you in about 20 years, in Juwanna Mann!
When Pam, Tommy and Reggie return to Pinehurst, Jake the stutterer informs Pam that pretty much everyone but he and the 2 girls he was with are all missing. Pam tries to reassure him that everything is just fine, but the only real piece of new information she gets is that the reason Matt left was so that he could look for Tina and Eddie. Heck, even Gramps went missing!
Pam puts Jake in charge of the group staying at the house, which means it'll probably take him an hour or so to call 911 for help. (Every time he speaks, I get a flashback to A Fish Called Wanda: "Oh, c-c-c-c-c-rap, K-k-k-k-k-en's c-c-c-oming to k-k-k-k-ill me!") She leaves the soon-to-be crime scene as fast as she can. Can't say I blame her.
Junior speeds home on his cycle, and starts doing doughnuts in the front yard. He screams and hollers for his mommy, but over the noise of the motorcycle Ethel can't hear what he's saying. She thinks he just wants his dinner, and she yells back that it's cooking. As they're shouting back and forth, Junior speeds up to a tree that the killer was hiding behind, and a machete cleanly decapitates Junior Hubbard. Thank GOD. Movie, I owe you one.
In the Hubbard kitchen, Ethel thinks that the lack of ruckus means that Junior must have finally decided to stop riding around the yard like a fat ninny. She hears the front door open, and tells him to wash up and get ready to eat. As she's mixing more stuff into the boiling pot in the stove, the killer smashes the window in front of her, plunges a meat cleaver into her face, and watches as she falls face-first into the stew pot. Dinner is served!
Pam is still out, looking for Tommy on that one stretch of road we've seen about 9,000 times in this flick. I swear, I almost think at this point that they're spoofing old "Scooby-Doo" episodes. Remember in those, when Scooby and Shaggy would get chased by the "monster" each week, and end up passing the same background walls over and over again. Same thing here.Only, I doubt the people behind this franchise could be that clever or witty. Compared to this the average episode of "Scooby-Doo" looks like it was based on Shakespeare.
Jake is busy guarding Pinehurst by watching an old thriller on tv with a girl named R-r-r-r-obin(heh, couldn't resist. My apologies to any real-life stutterers out there.) who has 1980's big hair and a crooked nose. Jake tries to flirt with her, but she ignores him to watch the movie. When he mistakes her apathy for coyness, he confesses to Robin that he'd like to lose his virginity to her. She responds by laughing in his face. Just to recap: A guy who stutters and looks like Jon Cryer just got rejected by the second-least attractive female in the movie(I was going to say LEAST attractive, but then I remembered Ethel...and I'm not saying Robin isn't cute. She is, but not as cute as any of the other female characters we've seen so far...). What could possibly make him feel any worse?
Well, for starters, he gets cock-blocked a SECOND time, this time by Violet. When he leaves her room, he gets a meat cleaver to the neck. Hey, aren't the virgins usually the ones who SURVIVE this shit? I guess not.
Robin's next. She finishes watching her movie, and tries to get Reggie off the couch, so that he can sleep in his bedroom instead. When he just rolls over, Robin covers him with a blanket. Then she goes upstairs, strips her clothes off, and admits out loud that she should have treated Jake better. Robin then proceeds to climb into the top bunk of the room's bunkbed, and comes face-to-face with Jake's bloody body before getting a blade plunged up through her back and out of her chest.
Then we get the greatest scene in the movie: a quintesesntial '80' breakdance sequence featuring punky Violet. She robots her cute little ass off, even as we watch someone stealthily enter her room. In a great bit of irony, when the camera shows the door opening, we also get a closeup of a poster that reads "STOP THE SLAUGHTER".
Anyway, as Violet's poppin' and lockin' to her hearts' content, she hears something and turns around. Nope, nothing's there. She resumes dancing, only to be grabbed by the neck, thrown up against a wall, and stabbed in the gut. This guy ain't the most creative killer, is he?
Reggie wakes up. MJaybe all the giggling from the camera crew filming Violet's dance routine woke him up. He drags himself off the couch and trudges upstairs to see if Tommy's back yet. He's not, but all of the folks killed during the past 10 minutes or so are piled up in his room. Reggie loses his cool and backs into Pam as he attempts to make a hasty exit. She sees how frightened he is, checks out the room, then grabs Reggie and makes a mad dash for the backdoor...wow, a smart decision!
Before they get to the door, Reggie trips, sending them both tumbling to the floor. The door explodes open, and Jason enters the house. Wasn't he already inside? I mean, if he just finished killing everyone upstairs, why would he leave the house, shut the door behind himself, then break it down a short time later?
Well, no one else pauses to give this any thought. Pam and Reggie run to the front door, fumble with the knob, and eventually get outside, where it's raining. The hapless pair make it through the woods and emerge onto a road where they find an ambulance parked. Reggie screams for help, but they discover Roy's co-worker inside, with his throat cut. Jason pops up on the other side of the emergency vehicle, so they start running again. Reggie has a head start, so he and Pam get separated. Reggie tries to go back and find her, and gets turned around and lost. Pam, meanwhile, stumbles into Matt's body, pinned to a tree.
She runs back to the house and locks the door, apparently deciding that the little kid can fend for himself. As Pam hides next to a window, the body of Reggie's grandfather is thrown through the window, and it lands at her feet. Pam screams when she realizes that his eyes have been removed.
She runs back outside, and Jason pursues her in all his bald, masked, armed glory. As he corners Pam and raises the machete to kill her, Reggie bursts out of a barn on a bulldozer or steam shovel vehicle, ready to ram it into the killer. He sends Jason flying, then rushes over to Pam. After she assures the boy that she's fine, they both approach the unconscious killer on the ground. Jason suddenly grabs onto Reggie's leg, and the duo manage to run away after a brief struggle. Jason checks himself for injuries(???), then follows them into the barn.
He looks around, hears a noise behind a door, and comes face-to-face with Pam, who is holding a chainsaw. They duel for a bit, until Pam gouges his arm, near the shoulder. At that exact minute, the chainsaw goes dead. As Jason prepares to get his revenge, Pam throws the heavy chainsaw at him, knocking him off-balance. As the future looks grim, another player enters the game.
Tommy! Jason turns to face his nemesis, and Pam uses the distraction to climb into the hayloft, where Reggie has been hiding. They both urge Tommy to run away, but he hesitates long enough for Jason to slash him in the chest. Before Jason can deliver the fatal strike, Tommy uses his little pocketknife to stab the psycho in the leg. As Jason is clutching his leg, Tommy uses the diversion to climb up to Pam and Reggie.
Jason eventually recovers enough to stand up again, and he follows them up to the hayloft. He sees Tommy face-down in the hay and turns over his body. He walks past the body to search for the other two victims, and spots something moving behind a bale of hay, so he walks toward it.
It turns out to be Reggie. Jason makes a few threatening gestures, but before he can do more than stab a wodden plank, Pam emerges from her hiding place and clus him with what looks like an oar or an axe handle. As Jason gets closer to her, she sees that the ground outside has a wooden crate-thingy with tons of spikes sticking up. She leaps out of the way as Jason lunges at her, and Reggie pushes the killer through the hayloft's door.
He doesn't fall, of course. They never do. No, he just waits for the 2 dumbasses to get near the window, and grabs onto Reggie's ankle. As Pam and Jason each grab onto the kid, Tommy wakes up and snatches up the machete. He swings hard enough to make Jason fall, and they all watch the killer get several spikes through his body. This leads to the dumbest twist in the movie, just to warn you ahead of time.
It's not Jason at all, it's Roy the paramedic. He somehow got a head-covering bald guy mask, wore a hockey mask on top of it, and put on the same kind of jumpsuit Jason always wears. The sheriff meets up with Pam at the hospital to explain: Apparently, Roy's son was Joey, the fat kid who was chopped up by Vic. When he saw the body, he supposedly snapped and went on a killing spree. He even kept newspaper clippings about Jason, so that he could get away with the killings and get the costume to look accurate.
None of that last paragraph makes a lick of sense...First of all, why wouldn't such a small comunity know about Roy having a son, especially one who was living so close by? And how would Roy have changed his height and physical build? How does he keep teleporting in and out and in all of the locations he gets to? Oh, and why bother with going off on the Pinehurst kids? Wouldn't Vic have been a more sensible choice for a victim? Most of the folks Roy killed(Lana, Billuigi, the two greasers, the majority of the kids) had no reason to be on his radar. And why name the female lead after Jason's mother if they never planned to do anything with that reference? The more I think about the twists, the less any of it makes sense on any level.
Ah, screw it. Let's just see how they end this turkey. Pam enters Tommy's hospital room to see how he's doing. She wakes him up, and he pulls a large out from under his pillow to stab her in the gut. Wow, bold way to end the movie.
Nope, it's a dream sequence. Tommy wakes up in the hospital, and he looks kind of feverish. He lays back against his pillow, and sees a vision of Jason standing at the foot of the bed. I guess we're to assume that Tommy is possessed, because the more intense and evil Tommy's expression looks, the more the vision fades.
Anyway, Tommy detaches his IV, opens the nightstand next to his bed, and pulls out a hockey mask. Weird, most places just put a bible in there. Pam enters the room, sees the window wide open, and assumes that Tommy has escaped. He hasn't. He's right behind the door, wearing the mask. He raises a knife. THE END Wait, what?
Man, I've had straws that sucked less than this movie. The killer made no sense, most of the kills were ridiculously staged, and the ending is never followed up in any way, shape, or form in the 7 sequels that followed. The gore was all right, the nudity was pretty steamy, but this movie seems to embrace being mediocre. I'm glad part 6 is the next one in the franchise, because I remember that one being a guilty pleasure. 2 killer trees this time around. See ya next week! Oh, and if you haven't seen "The Walking Dead" on AMC yet, go watch it. That show ROCKS!
