Friday the 13th: A New Beginning

*"If Jason still haunts you... you're not alone"*
—Tagline
***Friday the 13th: A New Beginning*** is a 1985 American slasher horror film (combining elements of the psychological horror genre) and is the fifth installment in the *Friday the 13th* franchise. It is the last film to be directed by Danny Steinmann. The film stars John Shepherd as Tommy Jarvis, the heroic boy from *Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter* (1984) who killed Jason Voorhees in the previous installment. 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 in Pennsylvania, 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 gore 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 scenes, 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, the film has obtained a cult following.

## Plot

A young Tommy Jarvis stumbles upon a graveyard while walking through the woods on a rainy night, where he witnesses two grave robbers digging up the corpse of Jason Voorhees. Jason rises from the grave and murders the grave robbers before advancing towards Tommy.

Awakening from his nightmare, teenager Tommy arrives at Pinehurst Halfway House, a secluded residential treatment facility. Pam Roberts, the director, introduces Tommy to the head doctor Matt Letter, and in his assigned room, he meets Reggie, a boy whose grandfather George works as the kitchen cook. Other teens introduced are Robin, goth Violet, shy Jake, short-tempered Vic and compulsive eater Joey. The sheriff brings two more residents, nymphomaniac lovers 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.

Afterward, 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 night, punks Pete and Vinnie are murdered by an unseen assailant after their car breaks down. Vinnie has a road flare shoved into his mouth, and Pete has his throat slashed. The following night, Billy and his friend Lana are killed with an axe. Panic begins to ensue, but the mayor refuses the sheriff's claim that somehow Jason Voorhees has returned.

The next day, more murders occur when Tina and Eddie sneak off into the woods. Ethel's farmhand Raymond is killed while spying on the two having sex. While Eddie leaves to go wash off in the creek, Tina is murdered with her eyes gouged out. Eddie returns to find her dead and he is killed when his skull is crushed. Meanwhile, Tommy and Pam accompany Reggie to visit Reggie's older brother Demon and his girlfriend Anita. While there, Junior has a fight with Tommy, and he runs off when Pam tries to stop it. After Reggie and Pam leave, Demon and Anita are murdered. At the Hubbard farm, Ethel and Junior are both killed as well with a cleaver.

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 and discovers the dead bodies in Tommy's room before running into Pam. The killer, revealed to be wearing a Jason-esque 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 by him. Together, they manage to get Jason to fall out of the loft window and he is killed on a harrow below. It is then revealed that the killer is not 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 adopted Jason's identity to kill everyone at the house. She goes to Tommy's room who awakens and stabs her before Tommy awakens to a hallucination of Jason. Facing his fears, he makes Jason's hallucinations disappear. He hears Pam approaching and throws his bed through the window to appear that he's escaped. When she rushes in, he appears from behind the door, wearing Roy's hockey mask and wielding a knife as the screen fades to black.

## Cast

* Melanie Kinnaman as Pam Roberts
* John Shepherd as Tommy Jarvis
* Shavar Ross as Reggie Winter
* Dick Wieand as Roy Burns/Jason Voorhees
* Corey Feldman as Tommy Jarvis (age 12)
* Marco St. John as Sheriff Tucker
* Richard Young as Matthew "Matt" Letter
* Tiffany Helm as Violet
* Juliette Cummins as Robin
* Jerry Pavlon as Jake
* John Robert Dixon as Eddie
* Debi Sue Voorhees as Tina
* Vernon Washington as George Winter
* Richard Lineback as Deputy Dodd
* Carol Locatell as Ethel Hubbard
* Ron Sloan as Junior Hubbard
* Miguel A. Núñez, Jr. as Demon Winter
* Jere Fields as Anita
* Bob DeSimone as Billy
* Caskey Swaim as Duke
* Rebecca Wood as Lana
* Corey Parker as Pete
* Anthony Barrile as Vinnie
* Mark Venturini as Victor J."Vic" Faden
* Dominick Brascia as Joey Burns
* Ric Mancini as Mayor Cobb
* Tom Morga as Jason Voorhees
* Kimberly Beck as Trish Jarvis (*voice only*)

## Production

According to the *Friday the 13th: Return to Crystal* Lake DVD Box set, Feldman was only able to make a cameo in this film as a result of his filming *The Goonies*. Feldman filmed his *Friday the 13th Part V* cameo on a Sunday, as that was his off day of shooting his other film.

## Reception

*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 squared off against strong genre competition throughout the first half of the year from such high-profile horror releases as *Cat's Eye* and *Lifeforce*.

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."

## 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.

***Friday the 13th***