Review #394: Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)
October 2026 Horror Reviews #22 - Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)
Taking place five years after the apparent death of Jason Voorhees in The Final Chapter, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning starts with a sequence where little Tommy Jarvis sees a couple of cowboys (?) dig up Jason's corpse, and he comes back to life and kills them both. This is a dream sequence of course, because this series would never do something as silly as have someone dig up Jason and watch him reanimate as a zombie, right? (Right?) So we cut to the present, where Tommy is a troubled teen suffering from horrible PTSD and has been shuffled from mental institute to mental institute. In this film he arrives at Pinehurst, a halfway house where everyone hates everyone else. Shortly after he arrives, one of the teen residents kills another, and soon people all over the area start getting murdered in ways that seem shockingly similar to the modus operandi of the presumed-cremated Jason Voorhees. Tommy is seeing Jason everywhere- is he just an illusion? Or is Tommy himself more involved than he realizes?
Fair warning, this movie does have a twist or two and I'm going to be spoiling it, because there's some weird quirks about it that may or may not work. But before then I'll get out my general thoughts: I really like this movie. I didn't like it on my first watch, fifteen years ago, because it felt like a filler episode where nothing really had anything to do with the overarching plot of the franchise (and that's not entirely inaccurate, as this is definitely an outlier in a lot of ways). But on this rewatch, it's actually pretty good! Sure it changes up the setting and style and villain quite a bit, but it was trying to do something different and I really appreciate that. Apart from the fact that most of the characters hate each other and most scenes with more than two characters end up as just random screaming and violence, the characters and dialogue in here are pretty well-written, and this one tries to be a whodunit in a way that only one other movie in the series did (that being the first one). The solution of the whodunit is bonkers and kind of nonsense (which I'll get to in a bit), but I at least appreciate and enjoy what we got. There's a lot of care put into this movie, a lot of little easter eggs if you know what to look for, and although they abandon this direction immediately in the next film, I really liked what this movie was going for and I kind of wish they had stuck with it instead of just bringing Jason back.
If you want to avoid spoilers I think I'm gonna give this one an 8/10 Pots of Watery Stew, and I'll see you tomorrow with Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives.
Spoiler time!
So, Jason isn't physically in this movie. (Obviously. He died in The Final Chapter, and slasher villains don't just get up and keep going after they've been killed. That would be silly.) Tommy sees him lots of times in a hallucinatory form (you can always tell it's an hallucination by his mask- it's got red chevrons and the bloody crack along the left-hand side, which is how it looked at the end of The Final Chapter) but whenever there's actually a physical "Jason" running around (who wears a mask with blue chevrons, and no battle damage) it's not actually Jason, it's Roy, one of the paramedics from the beginning of the movie who (I guess) is taking revenge for the death of his son, the dweeby autistic guy who gets axe-murdered early on in the film. That's the explanation the movie gives, but what my viewpoint presupposes is, that this explanation is... stupid, and nonsense.
If Roy is taking revenge for the death of his son, why are his first five kills people who had nothing whatsoever to do with the death of his son? His son was killed by Victor, one of the other halfway house residents, who immediately is taken away to jail. So why kill anybody other than Victor? (It would have been a neat touch if a line of dialogue mentioned Victor being killed during transport or even dying in his cell, implying Roy DID kill him first, but we never get that.) And if somehow the other troubled teens are responsible by proximity or whatever, why kill the two greasers whose car broke down? Or the waitress and her boyfriend at the nearby bar? Or the weird drifter who was working for the hillbilly family next door? Or Demon and Anita? None of those make any sense no matter how you look at it (unless he was just itching to kill somebody and picked them all at random, and some of his random victims just happened to be loosely associated with the halfway house). I suppose there's some argument to be made that maybe Roy was trying to use the fact that Tommy Jarvis had recently moved in to hide his killing spree (since Tommy is the guy that killed Jason, so either Roy can convince people Jason is back, or maybe his goal was to frame Tommy as the killer by making everyone think he's started posing as Jason himself) but I feel like that plan would only work if Roy was intentionally letting people see his Jason disguise. If he leaves enough clues that point to Jason, then he's got a solid diversion, right? But he kills all of the people that see him and his handiwork, and even Tommy only sees Roy in Jason cosplay at the very end of the film. I just feel like this plan would have been absurdly difficult to pull off (whether it was meant to frame Tommy or not), if that was even his plan.
And for that matter, I should say: I really, REALLY liked the idea that maybe Tommy was going to become the next slasher. They already laid the groundwork for that plotline at the end of The Final Chapter, with the ending stinger about how he went berserk or something and Trish was super worried about him. And then for this movie, it seems like half of the runtime seems to be trying to trick the viewer into thinking Tommy might turn out to be the killer (which would have made WAY more sense than a random paramedic whose backstory only got revealed after the climax of the film) and once again, the ending stinger of A New Beginning basically promises "Tommy will be the killer in the next movie". But, spoilers for the start of the next one- this plotline gets abandoned 100% by the start of Part VI, and instead Tommy is a virtually unrecognizable, well-adjusted dude who has no homicidal tendencies and no overt trauma issues whatsoever. I get that they desperately needed to get back to the status quo to keep the money machine running, but I would have much rather the rest of the series be about Tommy Jarvis as the next killer rather than Jason's corpse being struck by lightning and him coming back as a zombie.
Anyway, this was a fun movie, and I highly recommend it.
Overall Rating: 8/10 Pots of Watery Stew
A Man of Few Words: Without counting any laughing or yelling, Tommy Jarvis only says 24 words throughout the entire film!
Next Up: Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)!
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