Friday the 13th Part 5: A New Beginning

Friday the 13th Part 5: A New Beginning

Released: 1985

Rating: R

Genre: Slasher

Nuts and Bolts: Little Tommy Jarvis is all grown up and is a patient at a small psychiatric clinic. But he still has nightmares of the late serial killer Jason Voorhees. Before long, a new string of murders begin cropping up. Has Jason returned from the dead or is Tommy Jarvis hiding a secret?

Summary: We start the film off with a dream sequence in which little Tommy Jarvis is standing over the shallow grave of Jason Voorhees. Upon hearing a noise, he retreats back into the woods. Two losers with shovels come out thinking it would be fun to dig up Jason’ remains. But as soon as they do so, Jason emerges stabbing both of them with a machete.

Tommy wakes up. He is now twenty years old and has spent the last eight years at the Unger Institute of Mental Health. But Tommy’s not nearly the crackpot that he used to be, so they drive him out to a small recovery center at nearby Pinehurst. The driver Billy (Who will be seen again later) drops him off and he is greeted by Pam Roberts, the assistant director of Pinehurst. Pam introduces him to the director Doctor Matthew Peters and Tommy is given a room.

From there, we meet Reggie the Reckless. Reggie is the adolescent grandson of the clinic’s cook, George. We also meet the rest of the patients of Pinehurst. There is: Victor Faden (The Whacko), Joey Burns (The Retard), Tina (The Slut), Violet (The Rebel), Robin (The Quiet One), Eddie (The Stud) and Jake (The Geek).

The local Sheriff Cal Tucker pulls up to the clinic. He is bringing back two of the afore mentioned whack-jobs, Tina and Eddie. He caught them screwing over in Ethel Hubbard’s backyard and he warns Matt to keep his patients in line. Before anything else can be done, crazy-ass Ethel Hubbard and her dipshit retarded son Junior roar up on their motorcycle. Ethel berates the sheriff and tells him that if she ever catches anyone on her property again, she’s going to kill him or her. Ethel is one whacked-out crazy ass foul-mouthed little bitch.

The following morning, a tragic incident occurs at Pinehurst. Joey the retard tries to help Robin and Violet hang laundry up. He gets chocolate sauce smeared all over the clean clothes and the two tell him to fuck off. He then offers to help out Vic who is angrily chopping wood. This does NOT bode well. Vick is obviously disturbed but this little mongoloid just keeps bugging him anyway. Vick finally can’t take any more of the fat fucker’s shit and he goes after him with an axe. He manages to hack him up into several pieces before being restrained. The paramedics come in to remove the corpse. As Joey’s body is put onto a stretcher, a paramedic named Roy is visibly sickened by the sight. He has probably never seen anything this gruesome before. Victor Faden, needless to say, is taken away.

Later that night two greasers named Pete and Vinnie are stuck on the side of the road with car troubles. Pete goes to take a shit in the woods while Vinnie works on the car. An unseen killer approaches and rams a lit flare into Vinnie’s mouth. Pete comes back from wiping his ass only to be greeted by a machete across the throat.

The next day at Pinehurst, everyone sits down for breakfast. Jake berates Violet for setting too many plates down at the table. Tommy comes downstairs to find that Eddie has taken one of his masks. (Remember, Tommy used to make his own Halloween masks when he was a little kid) Tommy doesn’t take too kindly to this and proceeds to beat the shit out of Eddie. The fight is broken up, but it is now revealed that Tommy has a LOT of pent up anger inside. He just can’t seem to get that Voorhees character out of his head.

Meanwhile, some really ugly looking dude approaches the Hubbard farmhouse looking for a job. Ethel tells him she’ll feed him if he cleans up all the chicken shit in the pens. (Okay, I REALLY have no idea where they are going with this.)

That night, the killer finds his next two victims. Billy (the van driver from the Unger Institute) meets his girlfriend Lana (the token dumb whore) for a date. He is picking her up from the diner where she works. While the token dumb whore is preening over her own tits in the bathroom, Billy is out in the car snorting some coke. The killer approaches and drives an axe down on top of Billy’s big ole bald head. The token dumb whore comes out and makes a bunch of dumb whore remarks before finding Billy’s body. Before the tragic intensity of her mind-numbing blondeness can infect the rest of the world, an axe swings about chopping her in the gut. (I’m starting to LIKE this guy!)

The next day, Pinehurst patients Eddie and Tina decide to go out to crazy-ass Ethel’s property again to fuck. What is WITH these two? As they get into the heavy petting stage of the game, the weird old chicken shit man spies on them from the woods. The killer appears and rams a machete straight through the dirtball’s stomach. I guess our boy don’t take kindly to dumb whores and voyeurs eh? And speaking of dumb whores, guess who’s next? Yup. While Eddie the white trash stud goes down to the lake to skip pebbles (???), dumb whore #2, jiggles her tits all over the blanket she’s laying on. The killer comes by, but this time he just HAPPENS to be armed with a pair of garden shears! (Where does he carry all of this stuff?) Anyway, he rams the shears down upon the face of whore #2 gouging out her eyes. Pretty cool huh? Eddie the white trash stud comes back and the killer takes care of him as well. Finding Tina’s massacred face, Eddie backs into a tree. The killer whips a leather strap around Eddie’s eyes and begins tightening it. The strap becomes so tight that it actually begins sinking into his skin! It finally breaks and Eddie falls over dead. Shweet.

Later that night, Pam decides to take Reggie and Tommy to visit Reggie’s big brother Demon. Demon is a Michael Jackson wannabe who lives in his van with his Janet Jackson wannabe girlfriend Anita. And I don’t mean a custom-made sex machine style van with a bar top and TV, no no no. I mean, a chunk-of-shit-Chevy-hey-Scoob-lets-go-solve-a-mystery type of van. As Reggie talks with Demon, Tommy is outside. The crackpot Junior rides up on his motorcycle and starts giving Tommy shit. This lunatic is so aggravating that he would make Mother Theresa open up a can of whoop-ass. Tommy pretty much beats the snot out of Junior and the fat greasy dirtbag takes off whimpering.

After everyone leaves, the killer stalks Demon and Anita. Anita has her throat sliced open while Demon gets killed on the shitter. Pardon the pun, but that really is a crappy way to go.

Now we cut back to Mom and her dirtbag retard son. Junior is tearing ass across the front yard on his cycle. He’s bleeding from the nose and screaming, “He hurt me ma!” over and over again. On about his thirteenth spin around the yard, the killer lops his nugget off with a machete. He then attacks Ethel through the kitchen window and crushes her head. Ethel’s face plops down into her own stew pot. The gene pool is much happier now.

Pam, Tommy and Reggie get back to the clinic. Tina and Eddie are missing and she learns that Matt went to go look for them. Reggie goes inside, and Pam decides to join the search. Inside the house, Jake hits on Robin, but Robin is clearly uninterested. The stuttering little geek goes upstairs to contemplate his woes. In the upstairs hallway, Jake somehow fails to notice the big ass butcher knife-wielding maniac standing in front of him. Do I need to mention what happens next?

In the next room over we find Violet. Violet is the epitome of everything that is BAD about the 1980s as we see her in her room doing the robot dance. Not only does our killer hate dumb whores, rednecks, voyeurs and stuttering geeks, but apparently he doesn’t have much tolerance for Madonna look-alikes either. He grabs Violet by the throat and pins her to the wall while ramming a machete through her gut. (Didn’t he just have a butcher knife two minutes ago?)

Anyway, Robin comes up stairs to go to bed. She finds Jake’s severed head lying on her pillow Godfather style and she begins to scream. In classic Friday the 13th fashion, a machete comes up from under the mattress ending Robin’s life.

Pam comes back to the house. Now we see the imposing visage of Jason Voorhees in all his ugliness. Jason smashes through the door and attacks Pam and Reggie. The three run around playing a game of cat and mouse before Pam decides to run outside. From here we segue into the whole ‘piece of shit truck won’t start’ angle. Pam also finds the slaughtered bodies of Matt, George the cook and an ambulance driver along the way.

The killer chases her to the south 40 of an old barn. Just as she’s getting ready to get her head lopped off, Reggie bursts from the barn driving a bulldozer. For some inexplicable reason, the killer just stands there like a deer caught in the headlights and lets the stupid thing hit him. Jason is looking pretty fucking dead right about now. Pam and Reggie embrace one another and the ‘danger is over’ music cues up. But the killer ain’t done yet. He gets back up and chases them into the barn. Jason lunges after them and Pam comes at him with a chainsaw. She screws up the killer’s arm pretty badly but eventually the thing runs out of gas. Pam and Reggie scurry up the ladder into the hayloft as Tommy appears at the door. Jason goes to attack Tommy but Tommy manages to skirt past him with minimal injuries. He too goes up the hayloft. (I don’t know about you, but I would think it would make more sense to run outside the big fucking whole in the wall that Reggie made with the bulldozer. But that’s just me.)

To make a long story even longer, Jason follows them up into the hayloft and attacks them again. Tommy manages to fight him back with his own machete and the killer falls out the hayloft window onto a big bed of spikes. As we look down we see that the killer is NOT Jason Voorhees at all! It’s actually Roy Burns the ambulance driver. Roy was apparently the father of the fat retard Joey who got hacked up in the beginning of this flick. The shock of seeing his son butchered drove him over the edge and he mimicked the Jason Voorhees motif in order to get revenge on everybody that he came across whether they wronged him or not. And he would’ve gotten away with it too if it weren’t for those darned kids! Not only was Roy slick enough to wear a hockey mask, but he also wore a second mask underneath to give him that bald-head fat-neck Jason look.

Later on, the three are taken to a hospital. Tommy finally snaps from this most recent trauma and eight years of therapy goes straight down the shitter. Donning Roy’s hockey mask, Tommy kills Pam Roberts.
Acting/Dialogue: The acting isn’t bad per se, but it is really over accentuated by many of the characters. The most notorious culprits of this are Ethel Hubbard and her son Junior. Ethel is a foul mouthed screeching harridan who makes Bruce Lee noises whenever she is cutting up a chicken for her stew. Her son Junior is even more ludicrous and acts like something from a demented cartoon. I do believe that Junior is Wes Craven and Mel Blanc’s illegitimate love child. The dialogue is especially atrocious in this film. Most of the crap dialogue comes from the satellite characters however; the two grave robbers, the greasers, Michael and Janet Jackson, Billy the truck driver and the token dumb whore.

Gore: There’s some really nice stuff in here. Weirdly enough, although there are numerous death scenes, some of the gore seems really subdued. I guess the MPAA wouldn’t allow too much excessive gore given the already exceedingly high body count. Be that as it may, we get examples of: Lit flares in the mouth, decapitations, gut stabs, garden shear stabbings, butcher knife chops, and a nice albeit bloodless impalement. Not George Romero level of gore, but pretty impressive nonetheless.

Guilty Pleasures: BOOBIES! I think director Danny Steinmann was more concerned with showcasing T&A than he was with creating a genuine horror flick. Within the first three minutes we see an ambulance driver paging through a stroke book. We later get to see the token dumb whore flashing her tits in front of a mirror. Dumb whore #2 exposes an extremely impressive rack and they even show off her ass as well. The character of Robin reveals that she doesn’t believe in wearing pajamas to bed and we even get to see Pam looking fairly perky in her soaking wet all-white blouse.

The Good: This movie is all about eye candy. Most of the film’s most triumphant elements have already been touched upon in the Gore and Guilty Pleasures sections. But I guess we can expand on that. I believe that Friday the 13th Part 5 may boast the highest body count out of all the other Friday films.

We have:

1. Grave robber #1: Killed with machete. Tommy’s dream only
2. Grave robber #2: Killed with unidentifiable bladed weapon. Tommy’s dream only
3. Joey Burns: Killed with axe by Victor Faden
4. Vinnie the Greaser: Killed by lit flare
5. Pete the Greaser: Sliced throat
6. Billy the balding stud: Axe to the head.
7. Lana the dumb whore: Axe to the stomach
8. Ethel’s handyman: Blade to the gut
9. Eddie the white trash stud: Leather strap across the eyes
10. Tina the big-tittied girlfriend: Garden Shears to the eyes.
11. Demon: Impaled by iron spike
12. Anita: Throat sliced by unseen weapon
13. Matt Peters: Railroad spike to the forehead
14. Junior Hubbard: Decapitated by machete
15. Ethel Hubbard: Head crushed
16. George the cook: Cause of death-unknown
17. Ambulance driver #1: Cause of death-unknown
18. Jake: butcher knife
19. Violet: Bladed weapon to the stomach
20. Robin: Machete through the back
21. Roy Burns: Impaled on farming equipment
22. Pam Roberts: Knifed by Tommy Jarvis.

Wow! That’s a lot of fucking corpses!

Harry Manfredini also returns with a gripping film score. Although not as engaging as the music supplied in the first couple of films, he manages to evolve the Friday rhythms to a new level that adds a certain strength to the movie.

We also have Corey Feldman reprising his role as the young Tommy Jarvis in the introductory dream sequence. Feldman was originally intended to be the main character of this film but prior commitments to other projects forced him to refuse the role.

Ironically enough, the actress who played dumb whore #2 is named Debi Sue Voorhees. The actor who plays the adult Tommy Jarvis is John Shepherd. John Shepherd is also the name of the father who dies in Crystal Lake in Friday the 13th Part 7: A New Blood.

The Bad: There are a lot of films that center on style over substance. But this flick doesn’t even have THAT going for it. The most obvious let down of this whole movie is the identity of the killer. As you no doubt realize by now, Jason Voorhees is NOT the killer in this movie. In fact, other than a few hallucinations, Jason isn’t even IN this film. The town Mayor makes reference to the fact that Jason was cremated shortly after Jarvis killed him. The Mayor is obviously misinformed on this since we will see the one true Voorhees back in action the following year. No the killer in this flick turns out to be the father of the squealing little bubble boy who gets butchered in the first quarter.

Now anyone who has read my reviews before should know that I am really big when it comes to the motivations behind the villains. So here we have a guy who thinks so lowly of his son that he hasn’t made contact with him in years. But his death strikes such a chord in ole Roy that he goes totally freaking bug-fuck!. But he’s not so looney that he doesn’t take precautions. Roy is sharp enough to play up the whole Jason Voorhees angle before committing his murders. A serial killer that plans ahead? Who woulda thunk it? In the end, Roy manages to kill off everybody EXCEPT for the asshole that actually butchered his son! Talk about not having your priorities in order.

Dan Steinmann really has no idea what he wants to do with this movie. The killer seems to want to slice up anybody who happens to live in town. He even goes out to diners and trailer parks to find fresh victims. There is absolutely no rhyme or reason to Roy’s rampage and Steinmann harbors an obsession towards upping the body count no matter how senseless it may seem.

There are a lot of characters here who serve no other purpose than potential cannon fodder. The dirty homeless guy offers nothing to the story. And the Hubbards likewise are simply there to provide us with a few more corpses. The scenes with Reggie’s brother Demon are equally pointless and by this time you begin to get the impression, that Steinmann became desperate to increase the overall running time of the film.

Then we come down to the character of Tommy. At different moments in the film we see that Tommy is an ass-kicking martial artist. He uses his skills to beat the snot out of white trash Eddie and he later whoops the shit out of that fuck-rag Junior. All of this foreshadowed an impending throwdown between he and the killer whom we believed to be Jason Voorhees. But do we get this final slam-bam knuckleduster? NO! Tommy just stands before him, his lip quivering like a goon! The only thing he manages to do is stab Roy with a fucking pen knife he had concealed in his pocket.

And speaking of Roy, I have to bash this clown some more. Okay, now I understand that the audience is meant to be tricked into thinking that we are watching Jason Voorhees. But upon a second viewing, we come to discover that a lot of Roy’s actions don’t make a hell of a lot of sense. Whereas Jason was a supernaturally strong serial killer, Roy is just a middle-aged over weight paramedic. However, there’s something about that hockey mask that just seems to fill him up with more energy than a vat full of Wheaties. At one point, Roy comes smashing through the front door shattering it to pieces. How in the name of sweet fuck did he pull THAT one off? Roy would have average strength at best and there is no way he would be able to pull off such a feat! He later gets mowed down by a bulldozer! Although he does illustrate to us that the vehicle knocked the wind out of him, he gets back up and comes after Pam and Reggie anyway. Let me reiterate the ludicrousness of this point one more time. HE GETS MOWED DOWN BY A FUCKING BULLDOZER! I’m sorry, but you ain’t coming back from that. I don’t give a fuck HOW crazy you may be.

There is also the matter of gratuitous nudity. (Yer probably wondering why I’m listing this in the BAD column, eh?) Now while I am not offended in the slightest by exploitation scenes, Steinmann really concentrates on showing as many pairs of tits as possible. Lana the waitress admires her own breasts in the bathroom mirror for no real reason at all whatsoever. He also really concentrates the camera on Tina’s breasts at great length as well. There’s a shot showing Tina lying on the blanket enjoying the sun. Now while Tina is quite well endowed, this shot seems to go on forever. Steinmann also gives us a needlessly long scene of Robin preparing for bed. She pulls off her top and walks around topless for a few minutes before climbing up into the sack. Then we get to watch her lying there in bed for a few minutes before she discovers Jake’s severed head lying next to her. (I don’t know about you, but I think I would notice a severed head on my pillow almost immediately.) I guess my biggest complaint with these scenes is that Steinmann makes it obvious that he is trying to up the T&A score. So while I enjoy watching an oily set of perky flopping boobies as much as the next guy, I find that Steinmann’s motives for the camera shots are about as transparent as Pam’s watered down white blouse.

Great Lines:

“Are you afraid of spiders? Are you afraid of rubber spiders? Are you afraid of rubber spiders on strings? Man, you are one scared cat.” --Reggie the Reckless after scaring Tommy with a fake spider.

“He hurt me ma! He hurt me real bad!” --Junior blubbering over having the shit kicked out of him by Tommy.

“I w-w-w-would l-l-like to m-m-make love with you.” --Jake t-t-t-trying to h-h-hit on Rrrrr-R-R-R-Robin.

Overall Rating: 5 out of 10 severed heads. This one is really only worthy of a four but the lavish amounts of gore and boobies help to push the rating up a notch.

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