Yes that's right kiddies, Jason's back once more. He's getting to be like a pocket of diarrhea in your large intestine: just when you think it's safe to wipe your crack, pull up your Speedo™ and head back out to the porno shoot, you're squeezing your ass cheeks together and waddling toward the crapper once again. Okay, maybe comparing the old "the wet, squishy shit just keeps on comin'!" analogy doesn't exactly fit this scenario, as I actually enjoy the Friday The 13th for the most part, but you get the idea, albeit graphically depicted. Anyway, yes, Jason Vorhees returns for another round of mutilated teens and a few more notches to add to his machete handle. That's right, not even being chained to a boulder, set on fire, drowned and having his chest and throat area shredded by an outboard motor, the vengeful goalie's back, begging for more... looks like Tommy Jarvis's retarded theory of "returning him to the lake will finally put him to rest" was just as inane and half-assed as it sounded. Well, enough lingering on insolence and stupidity, and let us instead sally-forth on to Friday The 13th Part VII: The New Blood.

After the standard cheap clip from Jason Lives! to bring us, the viewers, up-to-date... in case you forgot Part 6 (and I can't, no matter how many cyanide pills I munch) or you didn't see it and decided to just skip to Part 7. Either way, it's there, it's over, so I'll move on. Our first scene of new material is a flashback for young Tina Shepard (played at this juncture by Jennifer Banko, who would play the little girl of Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III and Spike in the Pam Anderson cavalcade of silicone Barb Wire), recounting an unfortunate incident her family went through at the dark waters of Crystal Lake many years ago. Pissed at her father, young Tina "accidentally" drops a dock on his head, knocking him stupid into the empty reflective pool of evil, leaving him drowned and Tina with a whole lot of psychological problems that future boyfriends and therapists will be forced to sit through until Tina drops a dock on her own head... oh yeah, that whole thing about dropping docks on people, Tina's not the Incredible Hulk, nor does she have the ability to create docks from thin air over peoples' heads. Explanation? Tina's got telekinetic powers, meaning she can move shit with her mind in times of high emotional stress. In other words, piss her off and you'll wind up like her dad, scare her and you'll wind up with a scalp of napalm, and bring her to the ultimate orgasm and you'll wind up with your dick in your ear and an oversized decorative lamp trapped in your rectum... not an easy girl to have a good time with.

Our story takes place years later after this fatal "accident" of the supernatural, as little Tina with the whacked-out TK (telekinesis) has grown into an awkward teenager with whacked-out TK, not wholly unlike Carrie White... oh come on, every reviewer to ever touch this flick has made the obvious comparison between Tina and Carrie's title outsider with crazy brain powers. We all know it, but I personally don't care. Shit, do you think Sissy Spacek was the first broad with telekinetic powers? HELL NO! Look back at Marvel Comics and their original "X-Men" line-up, featuring Marvel Girl Jean Grey, whose mental powers included telekinetics. I'm sure there are hundreds more examples I could use that supersede Brian DePalma's 1972 flick about the pains of high school with a superhuman twist, but I don't have time for that.... who's making up excuses? As I was saying, Tina's all grown up now, looking pretty good for a shy and mousy type with a veritable cornucopia of "abnormal" brain problems. In other words, I'd go wildcatting in her fertile creasant until I struck oil. Tina's making a comeback tour to Crystal Lake though, at the request of her head shrinker, Dr. Crews (Terry "Bernie from Weekend At Bernie's and Weekend At Bernie's II" Kiser) who believes being exposed to the place where she killed her own father with her freak powers will somehow help her come to terms, and maybe get a better grasp on her TK abilities... somehow I think putting a girl like Tina, whose potentially dangerous abilities hinge on her emotional state, into a situation that's bound to drag all kinds of razor fanged emotional trauma to the surface, isn't the greatest of master plans... oh well, Crews just wants to harness her powers for himself and exploit her anyway, so we all know he's going to get a weed whacker to the jugular later, which, in the realm of cheap horror movie sequels, makes everything okay! Too bad real life isn't so accommodating... well, for anyone other than me that is...

Her time at Crystal Lake isn't a picnic, to say the least. Dr. C's continued pushing of Tina in his effort to force her to master her powers really gets to her pretty damn quick, leaving her to run off frustrated and angry. Depressed and swimming in the joys of self-loathing, Tina tries to use her powers in a new venue: raising the dead... I'll give everyone a chance to get the laughs out now, so I don't need to be interrupted by you for this next part.......... Okay then, Tina heads to the lakeside in an effort to makes everything right and bring daddy back from the dead. Two pangs of common sense barb their way into my spinal chord at this point:

(1) If he's been festering in that lake for all this time, what are the chances that Tina's going to have much of anything to bring back to begin with?! Does she intend to bring daddy back as a zombie with neither the mental or physical capacity to exist as a functioning human being? For what, to talk to him and say she's sorry? For that to happen, first of all, his ears would have to function, provided the drum and anvil and such weren't all eaten by sucker fish. Unless of course she intends to make a spiritual connection, though if his spirit really does exist, I doubt it'd be hanging around his resting place after a decade. If watching reruns of "Crossing Over With John Edwards" has taught me nothing else, it's that the dead have nothing better to do than hang around their friends and families, not their own decaying bodies... imagine that, me, Anubis, learning something about the dead from a Sci-Fi Channel Original Series.

(2) How does Tina even know there's a body in there to resurrect? The local law authorities must be the laziest fucks in the world. Not only is Mr. Shephard still in there, but so is Jason Vorhees. The cops actually got involved with Jason Lives!, so we know that there must've been at least a couple of pigs who survived the slaughter. You'd think something like a murder spree would prompt somebody, local or federal, into getting the killer's corpse out of that murk and onto an autopsy table. The same goes for Tina's dad. I'll bet that if you were to go through the files of the Crystal Lake PD, you'd find several filing cabinets FULL of murder reports that read "Cause of Death: coronary complications" or "automotive accident" or "uh, he/she died from something", all because these guys are too lazy to do any investigations. Every one of Jason's sprees probably get filed to the F.B.I. as "UFO encounters". That'd be something to see, Mulder and Scully investigating the deaths of over a hundred Crystal Lake locals, all from "natural causes", with the local legend buried conveniently in the silt of the lake itself... I'm starting to complicate myself, but you get the idea: there shouldn't be a body there to begin with.

So, Tina focuses her powers to bring her dad back from the dead. It's no surprise when she fucks up (being her first attempt at BRINGING THE DEAD BACK TO THE LAND OF THE LIVING after all) and awakens the sleeping corpse of, you get the $50 million question right if you said, "Jason Vorhees". Yes, she gets the power of necromantic reanimation right, but her aims a little off and she's just doomed everyone in walking distance... you know, since Jason can't drive... well, I don't think he can... I know Michael Myers can, but that's beyond this point... After witnessing her handiwork, Tina faints while Jason wanders off somewhere. When she awakens, our heroine is in the arms of Nick, her knight in shining teeth, who invites her to join him and his pals at the cabin they're partyin' at nearby. When she tries to socialize with the F13 mandatory "partying teens" faction, she finds competition and bitchery from the crew's alpha female, who doesn't like Tina sniffing around territory she's figuratively pissed on, i.e. Nick, the "popular-yet-sensitive hunk". Tina's status with her fellow teens doesn't improve any either, when she's suddenly overwhelmed by a Jason related hallucination. The only thing worse than a gushing torrent of crimson exploding from between your legs in a social situation such as this, is having hallucinations involving brutes in hockey masks killing your mom... Tina understandingly freaks out and runs back to her cabin, leaving everyone at the party with a bewildered look on their collective mugs. Those looks turn into visages of pure horror though later on, as Jason will start popping off the naked teens left and right, splittin' skulls, drowning them, spiking them and hacking the party-goers into kosher cutlets... what, you didn't know Jason was Jewish? More's the pity for you then...

Anyway, while Jason goes about his daily workout, Tina's mom finally uncovers the plot of the sinister Dr. Crews, leading to a big argument that finds the two in the forest, running for their lives from a certain masked murderer. Being the selfish slime that the script requires him to be, the doc breaks his Hippocratic oath and instead of trying to save the woman from Jason's wrath, instead practically pushes her into his path, a sacrificial lamb so that he might live a little longer to run around in a panic, pissing himself and crying for his momma. As for Tina, she fears she'll be committed after these recent hallucinations and outbursts, so she snags the keys to the car and makes tracks for Mexico... which might be a very long drive depending on where exactly Crystal Lake is located. This ingenious plan is foiled before it has a chance to bare fruits, as Tina's trips into unreality result in her wrecking the car, after which she decides to stumble off into the forest... okay. Crews too finds his end in what could be called Jason's Weekend At Bernie's, as Vorhees pulls out my favorite weapon of his entire cinematic arsenal: a weed whacker with a buzzsaw at the end, for that REALLY thick underbrush... or for those annoying victims who center their diets around calcium enriched food stuffs... With everyone pretty much corpsed up at this point, it's time for the obligatory final showdown, not that that's a bad thing. Using all the emotionally charged TK powers she can muster, Tina gives Jason the fight of his life... and afterlife for that respect. Not to be outdone though, the super zombie goalie monster fights on through electrocutions, strangulations, burnings, smashings, pile drivers, body slams, steel chairs to the head, speeding buses, kamikaze fighter pilots, a 15 hour interview with Barbara Walters and a week of non-stop Jerry Lewis movies!!!! Okay, so everything after the smashings was my doing, though not to take anything away from the entertaining battle of the century of the week.

Tina even gets personal with the big lug, using the straps of his own beloved hockey mask in an effort to crack his skull open like a ripe honeydew. It's a noticeable pain for Jason, but the worn out old mask splits over his mangled, slimy face before it can smush his gooey black brains into jelly. I'm sure Jason will be taking up a consumer complaint with the manufacturers... and when I say "consumer complaint", I of course mean he'll be mailing a machete to them with a note that says "this go in your brain next time", scrawled in a victim's blood and excrement. I did that to Columbia House™ once when they billed me for a collection of Starland Vocal Band CDs I never ordered and before you knew it I was getting complimentary White Zombie CDs almost daily! Though what I'm going to do with 147 copies of “Le Sexorcisto” has yet to be figured out… With all previous assaults as yet ineffective in the destruction of her pursuer, Tina goes with her tried and true method of killing “by accident”, and drops a large wooden structure on Jason, namely the front porch of their cabin! But, we all know that a super zombie kill machine is much different than a middle class yuppie father in a bad sweater, so its no surprise when the beast that walks like a man just keeps coming. He's like the after taste of an onion and ass cheese sandwich, there's no getting rid of him! Of course there are ways to keep him down between sequels though, as Tina pulls off finally when she gets her resurrecting powers on aim this time, brining her daddy back from the dead to drag Vorhees back down into Crystal Lakes not-so-crystal depths with a big chain for leverage. Yes, it takes a super zombie to restrain a super zombie, and this is the end of the mayhem… for now. As for Tina, she gets to walk off into the sunset with her new boyfriend Nick, probably only to wind up killing him in a domestic dispute 3 months later, when an argument over her inability to “get over her dead mom” leads Tina to make Nicks head go all Scanners. I pity the cops who have to show up and walk through the puddles of brain and blood to gun down Tina before she can use her powers on them.

Well, we all know the story now, so how about a dish of criticism? One thing this flick has over previous installments in the F13 series is it's story structure and split character focus. You've almost got two different movies going on here. Up to this point, there's been little to care about with the heroes of the flix. Friday The 13th was more or less a "whodunit" of graphic violence with no real character development. Neither Part 2 nor Part 3 had any strong leading roles either, as the focus was turned to Jason, what he's been up to and what his motivations were, developing into a matured and properly ripened movie baddie. Parts 4-6 gave us Tommy, pushing Jason a little to the background, though still making him the focus of Tommy's efforts, moreso after his killing of Jason in Part 4 turned him into a borderline lunatic. Though young Mr. Jarvis was the center of attention, his part still revolved around the character of Jason. Here in The New Blood however, that streak in uninteresting characters in broken, as Tina is introduced with her own agenda. She's not looking for anything to do with Jason, as her life instead revolves around her father's death and her supernatural mind powers... and of course her ability to awaken the dead... Hell, she didn't even know Vorhees was in there until she accidentally resurrected him! While Jason does quickly become the center of her problems, she originally started with her own motivations and continues to have her own problems even after he's introduced into the picture. Aside from this enjoyable side note in the realm of supporting characters to the Vorhees legacy, it's also cool that she's got those Carrie-esque powers. Shit, Jason's a killer super zombie now, so it's about time he was beaten by some real competition, not just some chick with a machete or a curly haired wiener guy with oddball theories and unhealthy obsessions! I've said it before, one of the things that keeps the F13 series interesting for me are the little additions and changes with each installment. It's never the exact same formula twice.

As for everything else, well… Not only was this flick directed by FX guru John Carl Buechler, but it also features the first of four roles for mister Kane Hodder as the series' most recognizable Jason. And what a fine Jason it is too! No other Jason since has lived up to the gruesome, horrifying and jaw dropping mask used on Mr. Hodder to make him the subject of many a bad dream to this day... not mine mind you, as I don't get scared... unless we're talking about Candice Bergen or Jesus... Hodder made Jason the most menacing yet, with nothing more than body language to convey his evil. As for Buechler's direction, it worked on some levels, but it wasn't really spectacular… though this is an F13 sequel after all, so I wasn't expecting it to be. Buechler's strong point was in his make-up FX. The amazing work he did on Jason is a testament to the mans skills and dedication to making people sick! As for the cast, not one of these actors deserves work after this, unless its washing my windshield at the intersection of Hell Ave. and Torture St. Not even Terry Kiser could make an impression on me other than the ulcer in my stomach from all the pitiful groaning I had to do. But, again, F13 movies aren't memorable for their incompetent actors, but for their senseless slaughter and favoring of gore and sex over story and execution. Speaking of which, here's where the movie gets the royal sodomizing of a horror movie lifetime, courtesy of those feather fluffers in the MPAA. Those bastards not only piss me off, but they terrorize me with the unholy powers they wield, especially in concerns to this flick. The New Blood could've been a high contender for the top of my "Best Friday The 13th Movie" list... were it not for all the edited gore. You can tell when these edits were made, due to the bad and obvious sudden cuts in action and skips in soundtrack. Anything that wasn't cut was pushed off screen so we couldn't watch that juicy footage either. Fans have been snarling like pitbulls with mouths full of angry bees since this movie's release, threatening studio execs and DVD producers with severe bodily harm and property damage if somebody doesn't release the movie in an uncut format to right this horrible wrong brought about by the motherfuckers and cocksmokers of the MPAA... and that's just what I've been up to, I can't even start telling you what my Evil Dead Bride Krissy has been up to... at least not without a lawyer present. She's a real fan of the series! As for me, its time to sum this sick puppy up and get out of here. As the 7th installment of the F13 movies, it holds well, despite its loss of most of its graphic violence thanks to you-know-who. Buechler has some work to do on his directing, but his make-up FX are dead on as usual. Kane Hodder is, and forever shall be known as the real deal in concern to Jasons, no matter who may take up the mantle after his eventual departure. As for how the flick holds up as a horror movie in itself, its mediocre… but a mildly higher mediocre than say, something like Witchboard: The Possession, the definition of what it means to be mediocre.

Sequels: Friday The 13TH Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan; Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday; Jason X

If You Liked This Flick, Check Out: Carrie or Halloween: The Curse Of Michael Myers