Review #396: Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)
October 2026 Horror Reviews #24 - Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)
Allegedly starting in the writer's room with the premise "What if Jason fought Carrie", Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood takes place... some indeterminate amount of time after the previous movie (more on that in a bit) and follows Tina, a teenage girl with psychokinetic powers who accidentally killed her abusive father out on the edge of Crystal Lake when she was a young girl. Her psychiatrist, Dr. Crews, takes her and her mother back out to the lake house under the premise of helping Tina work through her guilt and trauma- but in truth, he's trying to force her into a heightened emotional state so that he can study her powers. While in one of these heightened emotional states, Tina accidentally awakens the trapped zombie Jason Voorhees, who escapes from the lake and goes on a killing spree. Will she be able to learn to use her powers and send Jason whence he came, or will she find unexpected help along the way?
This is an interesting movie. Generally speaking I found myself really enjoying this one, but by the end of the movie I began to realize that I think the majority of my affection for it comes from the fact that in a lot of ways it feels like a (completely reimagined) rehash of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. What I mean is, obviously that movie didn't have a girl with psychic powers or anything, but there's a LOT of small story elements that appeared in both this one and that one, almost as if both movies started out with a similar framework and they just filled in a bunch of the details Mad Lib-style. For example:
Both movies feature two houses right on the edge of a lake, one belonging to a girl and her mother and the other populated by a group of college kids having a party.
Several of the friend dynamics in the group of college kids felt very similar to me, maybe not exactly, but like if you took half of one character and mixed it with half of another character, you would get an exact copy of one of the characters from the other movie. (No I do not have a good example and please stop asking.)
Both movies feature a number of similar kills, and/or similar set-ups for kills. Like the girl that gets thrown through a second-story window in both movies, the guy who gets killed in the kitchen looking for alcohol right after having sex in both movies, the guy who gets turned down for sex so he sits in the living room amusing himself until Jason shows up to kill him in both movies, and so on.
I suppose all of these examples could be just considered generic slasher fodder, but I dunno, it really felt like The New Blood was trying to achieve a similar vibe to The Final Chapter. Which isn't a bad thing! I really liked the vibe in both. And it gave the characters in this movie a much stronger and more distinct base than, say, Jason Lives, where I couldn't list one single character trait for half of the characters.
As is my wont I do have some nitpicks about this movie, though, so here they are in no particular order:
1. I am very confused when this movie is supposed to take place. The opening scene (with Tina as a little girl) takes place on a Friday the 13th, which is something only a couple other films have bothered to do, but everything after that is several years later, which is where this gets confusing. The area around the lake (the lake that is TEENY TINY compared to the size it was in any of the previous films) is completely different, which is weird because this is the one movie that can't use the excuse of "it's a different part of the lake" because Jason got chained up like thirty feet from the shore in the previous movie, and he's still there in this one. By the time we see Tina as a little girl, the entire camp from the previous movie is gone and in its place are two two-story houses, all directly in front of the spot where Jason was left at the end of Jason Lives. Now maybe the Forest Green camp got torn down after Jason Lives (a bunch of people being killed and children getting scarred for life will do that), but how long would have to pass before the houses get built? (And they don't look like new houses, they look pretty weathered.) So I guess you could rationalize that this is many years later, but (spoilers for tomorrow) the next movie gives a specific timeline for the series and there isn't room for "many years" to pass between Jason Lives and The New Blood.
2. It is ABSURD to me how Jason manages to be stealthy in this movie. Not only would he stink to high heaven (he's literally a walking waterlogged corpse, dude would be smelled from a mile away), but there's no way he's not making a ton of noise. We audibly hear his boots squelching every time he takes a step, and he has a freaking heavy metal chain hanging from his neck. He's loud, he's stinky, and he's huge- this was the first entry with Kane Hodder as Jason, who has quite an imposing figure, plus the costume adds some considerable extra bulk to him in an attempt to make him look decomposed. (They can't exactly cut out sections of Kane Hodder's body to make it look like his skin has sloughed away, so they just added a visible spine and tons of rotting flesh onto his body. If this movie were made today it would have been really neat to use CGI or something to actually make it look like parts of Jason had been eaten away.) But throughout the film, he CONSTANTLY walks up behind people and they mistake him for one of their friends until he's within arm's reach. I guess the takeaway here is all of these college kids stink like a rotting corpse and make clanking, squelching noises with every step.
3. There's a weird plot point that keeps coming back up that I simply don't understand. Tina has a vision of one of the college students (Michael, I think- the guy whose birthday the party was supposed to be celebrating) getting stabbed through by Jason, so she runs back to her mom and psychiatrist and is hysterically raving about how she saw someone get stabbed. Along the way, she notices there's a metal spike or something sticking out of the outer door frame of their lakehouse, which she fixates on for a moment, and then when she tells them about her vision she insists that Jason put the spike there, and/or it's connected to the vision of the man being impaled. But when she goes out to show them the spike, what's this? The spike is gone! So maybe Tina imagined it- except later, we learn that Dr. Crews has the spike in his desk, so either he put it there to scare her (?) or he snuck out ahead of her to take the spike so she would look crazy telling them about something that wasn't there (?). I'm not sure which, I'm also not sure why this spike is significant at all, because... did Jason put it there? If so, I don't know when or why. If not, it's quite a coincidence that he stabbed Michael with a similar spike, but that spike is still in or near Michael's corpse, so I really don't understand why this second spike is relevant at all. Was this perhaps a remnant of a plot point that got scrapped in an earlier version of the script? Because it gets a LOT of screentime in here and I swear I don't have a clue what it's supposed to mean or why it's supposed to be a big deal when Tina finds the spike in his desk.
4. It's strange to me how hostile the college students are to Tina from the moment she shows up. She pulls up in her car, and the college students (primarily Melissa, the stuck-up rich girl) immediately starts scoffing at her for being low class. Except most of the college kids aren't particularly high class (there's Melissa herself and the guy whose uncle owns the lake house they're staying at, but everyone else seems to be a stock standard 80s stoner, bad boy, or weirdo) so that strikes me as needlessly antagonistic, and the movie already has a perfect moment for everyone to start being rude to her (when she shows up at their party and then freaks out because she sees the vision of Michael getting killed). I don't understand why they didn't just have them disregard her until that point, and THEN everyone starts being outright rude or hostile because she's shown herself to be unstable.
5. And I can't end this review without talking about the ending. Is the movie trying to say that Tina's dad's corpse is still down there under the collapsed dock (like ten feet from the shore)? Why wouldn't they have retrieved his body in the several years after his death? Or is his (spoilers) rescue at the end of the film supposed to be a mental projection rather than his corpse getting reanimated (both of which are utterly bonkers but one of them has to be true)?
Anyway, I really did enjoy this movie and it gave me a lot to think about, so I would definitely recommend it to all of you!
Overall Rating: 8/10 Dates With A Soap-On-A-Roap
Well, It WAS A Silly Question: According to the IMDB trivia, during filming, Kane Hodder's dressing room was a quarter of a mile down a dirt road. One night, filming ended at 2 a.m. and while still in the Jason costume he decided to walk through the woods on the path to his dressing room. As he was walking someone approached him and asked if he was with the movie. He didn't reply, because he thought it was a pretty stupid question to ask, as he was standing there in full Jason costume. When the man asked again, Kane took a little lunge at him and grunted. The guy took off, tripping and running. The next day director John Carl Buechler told Kane that the local sheriff was supposed to stop by, but he never showed.
Next Up: Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)!
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