Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning
(1985) 92 Min.
Rated: R (Gore, nudity)
Country: USA
Director: Danny Steinmann
Stars: John Shepherd, Shavar Ross, Melanie Kinnaman, Corey Feldman
Links: IMDB | Wikipedia
Rating: ★★☆☆☆
Tommy Jarvis cannot escape Jason while he terrorizes a home for kids with mental issues.
Synopsis:
We return to the Jason Vorhees saga as little Tommy Jarvis (Feldman) from the previous movie is at Jason’s grave. He watches two grave robbers try to dig up the body, but Jason springs to life and kills them both. He then turns his attention to Tommy who screams.
It seems to have been all a dream and an older Tommy (Shepherd) wakes from his nightmare startled. He is being transferred from a state mental hospital to Pinehurst Halfway House. He’s welcomed by Pam Roberts (Kinnaman), the assistant director of the halfway house. He meets the director Matt and gets put in his new room.
Once in his new room he gets scared by a young boy who calls himself Reggie the Reckless. Tommy shows Reggie his own monster masks he made (as shown in the previous film). A siren wails in the distance and Reggie and Tommy look to see what the commotion is.
The sheriff arrives with two of the kids from the halfway house that were screwing around on Ethel’s property. Ethel Hubbard shows up with her adult son, Junior, and lectures the group that she will shoot anyone who goes on her property and promises to have the entire halfway house closed down. After her rant she leaves and the sheriff wishes Matt good luck with Tommy.
Later, some of the girls are putting up laundry outside on a wire and a man named Joey is pestering them trying to help. He’s covered in chocolate and stains a blanket. The girls shoo him away and he moves on to pester a guy named Vic who is chopping wood. Vic gets very angry with Joey and murders him with his ax.
An emergency team and the sheriff arrive on the scene with Vic locked up in the sheriff’s car. Matt informs the law enforcement that Joey was an orphan and had no next of kin. His mother died while giving birth and the father was nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, the paramedics go to the body and one paramedic named Roy pauses as he sees the bloody corpse, the camera lingers on his expression. The other paramedic, while chewing bubblegum, laughs at the kids disgust.
A pair of greaser characters get killed off by a mysterious man during the night while trying to fix their broken down car.
Later during breakfast. Everyone is eating and Tommy appears. Matt asks Tommy to get Eddie who is missing, but Eddie appears in a mask and scares Tommy. Tommy’s reaction is to beat the shit out of Eddie, breaking a table with Eddie’s body. Matt has to separate the two boys.
A wandering man starts to work on Ethel’s farm for her. Meanwhile, the sheriff investigates the murder of the two greasers. That night, Billy, a man from the state mental hospital, plans to take a waitress, Lana, from a diner on a date but the two get murdered.
The next day, Tommy hallucinates seeing Jason outside his window. As the murders start to stack up, the Mayor confronts the sheriff who blames Jason believing he’s not dead.
Tina and Eddie decide to have sex out in the woods. Ethel’s handyman decides to peep on the lovers, but he is quickly stabbed by the mysterious killer. Soon Tina is killed by having her eyes gouged by hedge trimmers. Eddie is murdered by a leather strap tightening around his skull, crushing it.
Night falls and Matt is worried because Tina and Eddie haven’t shown up. Pam takes Reggie and Tommy over to the nearby trailer park so Reggie can visit his brother Demon. Reggie introduces Pam to Demon and his girlfriend Anita in their trashy van.
While at the trailer park, Tommy wanders off to stare at a flickering neon sign and have PTSD flashbacks. Ethel’s son Junior shows up and Tommy beats the hell out of him with fancy fight moves that he will in no way use again in the film. Pam tries to stop the fight and Tommy runs away. Reggie and Pam go off to find Tommy.
Demon feels sick and uses an outhouse nearby. His girlfriend, Anita, goes out to check on him. Anita is murdered by the killer outside the outhouse while Demon gets skewered by a pole inside the tiny building.
Pam and Reggie arrive at the halfway house, but Matt has gone off to look for Tina and Eddie and not returned. Pam warns them to be careful and takes off to “find everyone”.
Meanwhile, Junior gets beheaded by the mysterious killer and Ethel gets stabbed in the head.
Pam’s truck breaks down and she walks off into the night.
At the halfway house two kids, Jake and Robin are watching a film. Jake tries to confess his feelings for Robin and she laughs. Jake wanders off hurt and gets a meat cleaver to the face. Robin goes to bed to find Jake placed in her bed. She soon gets stabbed through her gut. Violet is alone listening to music as the killer comes upon her and murders her.
Reggie wakes up and finds the bodies piled in Tommy’s room. Pam comes to the house and sees the bodies. Both Reggie and Pam flee as they see Jason appear. They flee into the woods, find an ambulance but inside the Bubblegum paramedic is dead. Jason appears and Reggie runs off on his own.
Pam gets chased for a while and ends up running around before Reggie appears on a large tractor and hits Jason who falls over. Jason grabs Reggie and he and Pam run off again towards a barn. As Jason enters, Pam tries to hit him with a chainsaw, but it runs out of gas. Tommy appears and eventually cuts off Jason’s hand as he’s hanging off a hayloft. Jason falls onto spikes below and his mask falls off revealing it’s not Jason but Roy, the paramedic, from much earlier in the film.
Roy, it seems, was Joey’s father who decided to exact his revenge after seeing his son die. Except he never bothered to kill Vic, Joey’s murderer.
While in the hospital recovering, Tommy dreams he stabs Pam. He envisions seeing Jason at the foot of his bed and pulls out a hockey mask from a drawer by the hospital bed. Pam starts to walk toward Tommy’s room but hears a crash. The hospital room window is shattered and Pam thinks Tommy has escaped. Tommy appears behind her wearing the hockey mask and wielding a knife as the film ends.
Review:
The fifth entry into the Friday the 13th franchise is probably one of the low-points, at least for some of the 80’s films. The film tries to be a mystery slasher but it places emphasis on all the wrong people and gives the actual murderer a ludicrous motive. So not only is Jason not actually in this movie, Roy, the killer, doesn’t even seek revenge on his son’s actual murderer Vic. Roy instead decides to kill all of Joey’s probable friends at the halfway house.
Another complaint is that the majority of deaths are committed by a hand without a body. The audience doesn’t even get to see Roy’s Jason until the final act of the film.
The deaths, for the most part, are standard slasher fare, most of the characters are fun if not a bit one-note with the exception of Ethel and Junior who come across as shrill annoying cartoon characters. I don’t know if they were added for humor, but it doesn’t work.
Tommy as the protagonist is laughable if only because he’s silent for the majority of the movie and doesn’t do much. He has two fight scenes in which he seems to be able to handle himself but when Jason appears in the finale he can’t fight him. It feels like Tommy is just a specter in the film.
Overall, there are more clever Jason films and this one just isn’t it. It isn’t the worst of the films, but it’s flaws are pretty bad. A few of the highlights of this film are Violet with her fun clothes and music choices, Demon and Anita, also a glimpse of a better movie: A Place in the Sun.
