Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)

Friday the 13th: A New Beginning arrives as the fifth entry in a franchise that had, by 1985, settled into a reliable industrial rhythm. Director Danny Steinmann shot the picture under the working title Repetition, which is either an act of honesty or an accidental confession. The plot deposits a traumatized Tommy Jarvis at a halfway house for troubled teens near Crystal Lake and then proceeds to kill nearly everyone in the vicinity, twenty-two murders in total, with a mystery assailant in a hockey mask eventually revealed to be a grieving paramedic. The enterprise is grubby, brisk, and entirely without aspiration. Steinmann himself later described what he shot as a pornographic exercise in the woods, and the finished product does not contradict him.

On the matter of social consciousness, the ledger is nearly blank. Shavar Ross and Vernon Washington appear as Reggie and George, giving the ensemble a handful of non-white faces, though the casting carries no programmatic intent. The setting is a facility for the emotionally disturbed, and one resident stammers, but mental difference here functions as set dressing for suspense, not as advocacy. A character named Joey eats compulsively and is mocked for it. The camera leers at its actresses with the enthusiasm of a teenager who has just discovered the genre. Race, sexuality, class, and the climate go unremarked, which is at least consistent.

There is no sermon here, no lesson, no uplift. The film wants only to deliver gore, nudity, and a jolt, and it does so with the enthusiasm of a machine that has not been serviced in years. It opened at number one and was savaged by critics, both outcomes entirely deserved and entirely beside the point. We classify it, we note its emptiness, and we move on to the next one.