ON THIS DAY IN HORROR - March 22nd
"FRIDAY THE 13TH: A NEW BEGINNING"
released in 1985
released in 1985
Still haunted by his past, Tommy Jarvis - who, as a child, killed Jason Voorhees - starts to lose his sense of reality when a series of brutal murders start occurring in and around the secluded halfway house where he now lives, in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning!
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Five years after the demise of mass murderer Jason Voorhees the youngest survivor Tommy Jarvis (John Shepard), awakens from a nightmare of him witnessing two grave robbers digging up Jason Voorhees's body in which Jason rises from the grave to murder the grave robbers before advancing towards Tommy (Corey Feldman). Upon being transferred to Pinehurst Halfway House, a secluded residential treatment facility, Tommy is led by the director Pam Roberts (Melanie Kinnaman) to head doctor Matt Letter (Richard Young). In his assigned room, Tommy also meets Reggie (Shavar Ross), a boy whose grandfather George (Vernon Washington) works as the kitchen cook. Other teens introduced are kind-hearted Robin (Juliette Cummins), Goth Violet (Tiffany Helm), shy Jake (Jerry Pavlon), short-tempered Vic (Mark Venturini), and compulsive eater Joey (Dominick Brascia). One day, in a fit of rage, Vic kills an irritating Joey with an axe and is subsequently arrested. Attending ambulance drivers Duke (William Caskey Swaim) and Roy Burns (Dick Wieand) discover the body, with Roy appearing deeply saddened by the death, while Duke believes that the murder was a "prank gone wrong". That night, two nearby punks Vinnie (Anthony Barrile) and Pete (Corey Parker) are murdered by an unseen assailant after their car breaks down. The following night, Billy (Bob DeSimone) and his friend Lana (Rebecca Wood) are also killed, this time with an axe. Panic begins to ensue, but the mayor (Ric Mancini) refuses the sheriff's (Marco St. John) claim that somehow Jason Voorhees has returned. Fearing he is losing his mind, Tommy must once again face his demons if he is to survive another Friday the 13th!
TRIVIA: Although actor Dick Wieand is credited for the role of "Roy/Jason Voorhees", it is actually stuntman, Tom Morga, who appears in the scenes featuring the impostor Jason, as well as those with the hallucination of Jason, which haunts Tommy.
Top and Above: Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman and John Shepard) is still haunted by his memories of Jason Voorhees!
The origins of Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning actually began with Friday the 13th: Part 3 - the film was supposed to center around Part 2's survivor Ginny (Amy Steel), set at a mental institution to which she'd been committed due to emotional trauma. However, Steel declined to return, and the concept was shelved. Part 3's screenwriter Martin Kitrosser later dusted off the story and wrote a treatment for New Beginning's basic story. Early in development, screenwriter/director Danny Steinmann, fresh of the moderate success of his directorial debut Savage Streets (1984), starring Linda Blair, was brought on board to direct New Beginning as part of a two-picture deal with Paramount Pictures; the deal also would have included directing a Last House on the Left sequel, although the project ultimately fell through. Interestingly, Steinmann had actually been working in exploitation cinema under various pseudonyms since 1973, starting with the hardcore sex comedy High Rise. That was Steinmann's only adult film, an attempt to make a better version of Deep Throat (1972), but it did speak to the sleazy sensibilities he brought to A New Beginning.
Working with co-writer David Cohen, Steinman worked under two directives from Phil Scuderi: deliver a shock, scare, or kill every seven or eight minutes, and turn Tommy into Jason. In fact, Scuderi presented Steinmann with a graph to emphasize his "every 8 minute" rule, which meant the film needed to keep introducing new characters and then kill them 3 or 4 minutes later. To turn Tommy into the new "Jason", Steinman and Cohen wrote in the original screenplay a very different version of New Beginning's opening dream sequence; it opens as a continuation of the ending of the previous film - Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984) - as a young Tommy is taken to the same hospital as Jason's corpse. Then, in a sudden fit of psychotic rage, he winds up attacking half the hospital staff trying to get to the morgue to find Jason's bloodied body. Once he has finally found the body, Jason suddenly rises from the autopsy table. Immediately after this, the adult Tommy wakes up in the van, en route to the Pinehurst house (like in the movie).
Working with co-writer David Cohen, Steinman worked under two directives from Phil Scuderi: deliver a shock, scare, or kill every seven or eight minutes, and turn Tommy into Jason. In fact, Scuderi presented Steinmann with a graph to emphasize his "every 8 minute" rule, which meant the film needed to keep introducing new characters and then kill them 3 or 4 minutes later. To turn Tommy into the new "Jason", Steinman and Cohen wrote in the original screenplay a very different version of New Beginning's opening dream sequence; it opens as a continuation of the ending of the previous film - Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984) - as a young Tommy is taken to the same hospital as Jason's corpse. Then, in a sudden fit of psychotic rage, he winds up attacking half the hospital staff trying to get to the morgue to find Jason's bloodied body. Once he has finally found the body, Jason suddenly rises from the autopsy table. Immediately after this, the adult Tommy wakes up in the van, en route to the Pinehurst house (like in the movie).
TRIVIA: Three different hockey masks are featured in the film. The first is the one which the Jason impostor, Roy, wears, which has two blue stripes on either side of the mouth. The second is the one the real Jason wears when Tommy sees him in the hospital room at the end, which has one red triangle above the eyes. The third is featured on the poster, and is an entirely different hockey mask, with more breathing holes on it. This one is never used in the film.
Top and Above: Jason (Dick Wieand and Tom Morga) has returned to kill a new group of teens, ending with a showdown with "final girl", Pam Roberts (Melanie Kinnaman)!
In order to keep the storyline a secret, the film was originally called "Repetition", after the David Bowie song of the same name (in fact, several of the other Friday the 13th films have used Bowie songs as fake titles).The film was originally written to have Corey Feldman as the star, reprising the role of Tommy Jarvis. However, he was already working on The Goonies (1985), and therefore the script was rewritten to have Feldman's appearance limited to a cameo. In fact, all of Feldman's scenes were shot on a Sunday in the backyard of his own house! Among the cast, the only people who knew Jason was actually the ambulance driver were the two leads (John Shepherd, Melanie Kinnaman), the stuntman playing Jason, and the actor playing the driver. However, when it came time to film the big reveal everyone knew it was horrible. In fact, they filmed fake Jason's death scene twice, but still, no one believed the audience would be able to just see the unmasked man and instantly remember him as the ambulance driver.
Like all previous entries in the Friday the 13th series, New Beginning encountered an enormous amount of resistance from the MPAA. One month prior to the film's release in the United States, the MPAA demanded that sixteen scenes featuring sex or graphic violence be edited in order to merit an "R" rating instead of an "X". Amongst the scenes that the MPAA demanded trimmed (or out-right cut) was a 3-minute long sex scene between the characters Tina and Eddie; played by Deborah Voorhees and John Robert Dixon. Sadly, in later years, when Voorhees became a teacher, she was actually fired from two different high schools due to the sex scene in New Beginning. Ultimately, the film required nine trips to the MPAA before finally being granted an "R" rating.
Released on 1,759 screens in the US, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning debuted at number one at the box office, grossing over $8 million in it's opening weekend. Producer Frank Mancuso Jr. was reportedly so pleased with the take at the box office opening weekend, he called up Steinmann and claimed the numbers were like "the golden times". By the end of it's theatrical run, the film had grossed nearly $22 million, but received mainly negative reviews from critics; Variety wrote, "The fifth Friday the 13th film reiterates a chronicle of butcherings with even less variation than its predecessors", while Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote, "It's worth recognizing only as an artifact of our culture."
Like all previous entries in the Friday the 13th series, New Beginning encountered an enormous amount of resistance from the MPAA. One month prior to the film's release in the United States, the MPAA demanded that sixteen scenes featuring sex or graphic violence be edited in order to merit an "R" rating instead of an "X". Amongst the scenes that the MPAA demanded trimmed (or out-right cut) was a 3-minute long sex scene between the characters Tina and Eddie; played by Deborah Voorhees and John Robert Dixon. Sadly, in later years, when Voorhees became a teacher, she was actually fired from two different high schools due to the sex scene in New Beginning. Ultimately, the film required nine trips to the MPAA before finally being granted an "R" rating.
Released on 1,759 screens in the US, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning debuted at number one at the box office, grossing over $8 million in it's opening weekend. Producer Frank Mancuso Jr. was reportedly so pleased with the take at the box office opening weekend, he called up Steinmann and claimed the numbers were like "the golden times". By the end of it's theatrical run, the film had grossed nearly $22 million, but received mainly negative reviews from critics; Variety wrote, "The fifth Friday the 13th film reiterates a chronicle of butcherings with even less variation than its predecessors", while Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote, "It's worth recognizing only as an artifact of our culture."
ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE: 16%
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