Friday the 13th Part VII - The New Blood (1988)

Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood arrives as the seventh entry in a franchise that had, by 1988, settled into a comfortable rhythm of diminishing returns. The hook this time is a psychokinetic teenager named Tina, who accidentally frees Jason Voorhees from his watery tomb and spends the remainder of the runtime regretting it. The premise was reportedly pitched as Jason versus Carrie, and the comparison holds only in the most literal sense. A young woman with powers does not a statement make. The film treats her abilities as a plot device, a way to justify a more elaborate finale, and nothing more.

The supporting cast consists of the usual assortment: frisky teenagers, a duplicitous psychiatrist who wants to exploit Tina's gifts, and a socialite named Melissa whose primary function is to be unpleasant before receiving an axe. The kills are inventive in the way that late-period slasher kills tend to be, which is to say cruel and briefly memorable. None of it carries a message. The psychiatrist is a villain because he is greedy and cruel, not because the screenplay has anything to say about the ethics of mental health care. The teenagers die because they are teenagers in a Friday the 13th film.

There is no representation agenda here, no identity politics, no environmental sermon, no critique of capital, and no lecture of any kind. The film is a product of its era and its genre, made quickly and cheaply, and it aspires to nothing beyond a profitable opening weekend, which it achieved. Gene Siskel found a misogynistic subtext in the series; that is a reading, not a program. What we have is a mask, a machete, and a body count. The cultural awareness on display is nil, and the film seems entirely at peace with that.