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Friday the 13th, Part V - A New Beginning

Friday the 13th, Part V - A New Beginning

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Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Doesn't compare to the rest of the films
Review: A now teenage Tommy Jarvis is institutionalized for his mental problems due to the events in the previous installment, "Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter". Soon after his arrival, people around Tommy starts dropping like flies--someone is murdering people using Jason's killing style... Is Jason back to finish him off?

To me, this is the second worse film in the "Friday the 13th" series. The death count is too high, preventing a good plot from developing. The only good thing about this movie is the performance of John Shepherd as Tommy Jarvis. Fans of Jason Voorhees might be disappointed at the film's ending.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Best of the series.
Review: I know you are saying "What's up with that dude saying it is the best in the series". I'll tell you why: the best roughing up sequence in horror movie history and the most hilarious moment in the movie.

This movie has Tommy (I admire this dude's body. This guy is FIT!!!!) who is hallucinating about the Masked Man. He does this amazing roughing up scene that puts Steven Seagal to shame. It was really good for it was a martial arts defense beating and I had to rewind this scene 10 times to see how he did it. Eat your heart out Steven Seagal!!

The hilarious moment with the mother and son was also a good scene that made the movie the best in the series (and the most memorable, I might add). How many times do you see that scene in real life: it is rare but happens.

Other than that, I admit Jason is not around all the time BUT it is a Friday the 13th flick, what more can you ask (besides the woman with the nice rack who got laid in the middle of the woods and died due to her eyes plucked out (extreme pain moment folks!)

With all consideration aside, it is one of three movies that tie Tommy in with his motives against Jason.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: one of the most enjoyable
Review: As a f13 fan and a jason fan i really didnt care that the killer wasnt jason.The killer in this movie is not as scary as jason but hes okay at it.As for the film itself the goriest killings are in this one with alot of blood.Alot of the characters are stupid but they all get killed which makes us happy.As for the acting its 50-50 as usual and the guy who plays tommy does a great job as him.And the dvd is excellent with hardly any blemishes and the sound is outstanding.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: one of the best of the series
Review: This is one of the most entertaining films in the friday the 13th saga.This film has the most gruesome killings in all the friday the 13th series and the best naked girls.It centers around tommy jarvis who allegedly killed jason in part 4 who is now in amental house,anyway someone then starts putting on a jason mask and hacking people up.Alot of people say this is one of the worst friday the 13th movies but it is so entertaining theres a killing every 5 seconds and alot of naked women.Now as for the dvd i thought that the transfer looked great the sound was good,but their should of definitely been more extras.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: One of the worst "Jason" movies ever made!
Review: I don't know why I said this was one of the worst "Jason" movies ever made because you know what, Jason wasn't even in this movie! That was a huge dissapointment. This is just about some guy who keeps on having flashbacks of when he was a kid, he saw Jason actually come out of his grave and slaughter the people that dug him out. He goes away to a camp where they can try to help him with these problems he is having. In his time there many things happen, yeah you know killings! But the worst part is Jason isn't the one doing any of them. It's just a man in a costume, I will leave it to you to figure out who it is. The only thing I liked about this film was the beginning.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: If I had a dollar for every star this film deserves...
Review: ...I'd be broke!

Don't get me wrong, I love slasher movies and I'll defend some of the Jason flicks until I'm blue, but the only decent thing about this film is seeing John Shepherd (who plays Tommy Jarvis as a teenager) without his kit on. He's a very attractive guy (who'd have thought Corey Feldman would bloom into this?), and makes an unusual diversion from the usual chick-parade of the Friday the 13th movies. There is no real plot, even by series standards, and the budget must have been at sub-Charles Band levels judging by the abysmal gore effects (fortunately, they couldn't afford many of them). As for wondering who the killer is, who GIVES?! The 'director', and I use the term loosely, can't even handle the mystery angle properly. Yes, there is one. You have to concentrate.

Absolute crap.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The hottest chicks in all of the 13 series
Review: Wow! Wait until you see the gazangas on the chick that gets hedge-clippers through the eyes. She'd got the biggest coconuts you ever seen on a teenage nymphomaniac. Plus check out the weird little punk blonde with the black tips. If she ever gets her head out from between those headphones you could have a grat conversation about the Sex Pistols. The hot blonde counselor ain't bad either.

Funniest Kill - The Michael Jackson wannabe (named Demon, Soul-Glo and all) who lives in a van, gets killed in the homemade porta-potty.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Fady Ghaly's reviews
Review: Why this film was a part of the series? -I don't know. I'm utterly clueless as to why it is allegedly an extension of the fourth installment, for the sixth didn't even have any connection to it whatsoever. It had a clever name-clever enough to entice viewers into renting it-but the results of such actions are dreadful, for fans expecting to see what popularized the others, that is to say.

Although this installment actually features an actress named Voorhees (Debisue Voorhees), the popular maniacal murderer of that name is nowhere to be seen-clothed or otherwise-subsequent to a brief pre-credit appearance in a dream Tommy Jarvis was undergoing that, however, was ever so badly set up. Can you believe it? Jason Voorhees, the one to start it all and the cause for the seemingly endless number of sequels in which you see on video shelves today, is nowhere to be found subsequent to that damn dream that is almost like an insult to those who crave seeing the loony in action, and rather replaced with some other in whom I had not at all found as being the least bit appealing to me. Although he takes on the mode of Jason, the mere premise that Jason himself wasn't in it is affective enough as is. It just isn't the same, you know? The sensation in which you develop from the others completely shatters in this one, as it does when watching the very infamous prequel to the equally successful Halloween series, which also baffled horror buffs and grew a very distasteful reputation since its release. (I was told by a dear friend of mine long ago when I was once in junior high school that he picked it off the shelves at Roger's Video and that, as he went up to the counter to pay for the rental, the employee actually told him that she would strongly advise him not to walk out of the door with it, but he, now aware of the disappointment he was up for, wanted to see it more than ever for the sheer deliberation of ridiculing it, and had he ever!)

Also, the dialogue was awful; it was so awful, I wouldn't be surprised if I were to come to discover that the writers were intoxicated. (One scene in particular features some grease head still stuck in the fifties and sixties, vocalizing the word "(...)" over and over again as he rushed his friend to fix their vehicle.) The performances were laughable. And, I mean, when a director becomes so fatuous as to forgetting to confirm an actor who's in character and is in the progress of going to the can, to pull down his pants in order to do so, to defecate, you know it'll be nothing but a joke-being the reason I was not at all surprised over the number of scenes which featured frontal nudity, and of the slew of curses which were pervasively uttered; neither was I over such inventive death sequences these filmmakers clearly added in hopes of luring us in, for presenting them was the only good use this film really had to offer!

However, in all honestly, as impossible as it may be, it had motive for all the killings that went on; more motive than the former sequels, believe it or not. For the stalker turns out to be the father of a son who was previously hacked apart with an axe by an anti-social patient living in that Pinehurst home for disturbed teens. (It makes sense. It's not the right thing to do, but no one's perfect, and emotions may not always be able to be controlled during circumstances such as these, when one's inner demon seems to overpower their sanity and force them to carry out upon these lurid acts. Everyone has a breaking point-the father reached his.)
And despite of what I said in the beginning about it being a misfit, it, now that I think about it, somehow still felt like it was at least in the spirit of the series, which was the one factor that prevented me from giving it a one-out-of-five rating, mind you.

So, all and all, although it was a complete joke, it was still entertaining for the sheer deliberation that it was one, for you will most likely not stop laughing till the very last moment! (I know I didn't when I first saw it with that dear friend of mine, whose mother, in the room at the time, looked at us as if we were mentally ill, the living room was filled with that much laughter!) However, I should caution you, it is most definitely not for the squeamish, for its death sequences were not only inventive but graphical and highly disturbing, too. (Some of them make the ones in the fourth look like child's play.) Adding to that, it also has the highest body count. (Why I'm I not surprised?)

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: The mask remains the same, only the title is different.
Review: Friday the 13th Part 5: A New Beginning is the second of the two films in the series that did not feature Jason Voorhees as the slaughtering juggernaut. It restarts the series after the mega-hit 'Final Chapter', focusing on the now troubled teenaged Jason killer Tommy Jarvis.

The trauma of hacking the Crystal Lake mass murderer to pieces has understandably kept poor Tommy plagued with vivid hallucinations and uncontrollable violent outbursts. Thus he has been continually moved from one mental health facility to another. As the story begins we find Tommy being relocated to a Troubled Youth Camp near Crystal Lake in the hopes of finally breaking the grip his past has on him. Things take a turn for the worse when, in front of Tommy and the rest of the group, one youth snaps and violently kills another. Suddenly a hockey masked killer prowls the night, slaughtering all unfortunate enough to cross his path. But Jason is dead, so just who is this killer? Could it be that Tommy has finally snapped and become what he tried to destroy?

Calling this entry in the long running slasher series a breath of fresh air would be both overly generous and an outright lie. Danny Steinmann's direction, while uneven and unpolished, is workmanlike. Martin Kitrosser's script tosses a little humor around but does nothing with the mystery premise, focusing entirely on the multiple killings (which are numerous, this entry had the highest body count of the series). Harry Manfredini's famous score, while reorchestrated, remains basically unchanged. It's just another formula feature, albeit one entertaining enough to recommend to the numerous fans of this kind of cinematic junk food.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Ringing the changes on an old, old story
Review: Danny Steinmann's "Friday the 13th A New Beginning" (1985) picks up five years after events in the previous movie. Geeky little Tommy Jarvis - the kid who confronted Jason and emerged the victor! - has been transformed by the unlikely casting of hunky John Shepherd, taking over the role from the somewhat less photogenic Corey Feldman. Traumatized by his previous encounter with Jason, Tommy is transferred to a halfway house for disturbed teenagers, located deep in the woods, where the murder of one inmate by another seems to bring Jason out of retirement, unleashing a fresh wave of hideous killings by someone concealed behind a distinctive hockey mask. Has Jason really come back from the grave?...

Given that Big J appeared to meet his match in "Friday the 13th The Final Chapter" (1984), the mystery surrounding the killer's identity in "A New Beginning" is possibly its most intriguing feature. That, and the casting of Shepherd as an emotionally wounded victim of circumstances who's prompted into uncontrollable rages at the slightest provocation. Our sympathies are clearly with him from the start, though the script eventually reverts to the old formula of decimating the entire cast before pitting a handful of plucky survivors (including Melanie Kinnaman and Shavar Ross) against the marauding killer.

By this time, of course, the series had become more of a franchise than a viable movie format, and the script (co-written by director Steinmann, David Cohen and "Friday III" scribe Martin Kitrosser) veers wildly from the ridiculous to the sublime. It's hard not to groan when the heroine's car runs out of gas in the middle of nowhere when the killer's rampage has been firmly established, or when a chainsaw breaks down at a crucial moment during the climax, or when a bulldozer is commandeered by the one character least likely to know how to drive it! Furthermore, an element of not-so-subtle parody is introduced by the sheer number of on-screen killings (a whopping 22!), most of which are completely unnecessary to the plot and involve peripheral characters who are introduced for no other reason than to be bumped off in spectacular fashion! Some of Martin Becker's more explicit makeup effects have been sacrificed for an R-rating, but there's still plenty here to keep most splatter fans happy.

Whatever it's faults (and there are plenty!), this slapdash sequel still manages to work up a fair head of steam, allowing the concept to develop beyond the established formula in a manner which doesn't interfere with the main business at hand (Jason's rampage through an isolated location), whilst also meeting the expectations of an undemanding audience. Watch out for Carol Locatell as a foul-mouthed Ma Kettle-type character who lives in the woods with her thick-headed son (Ron Sloan), a comic double-act worthy of its own movie.

As with all the entries in this series to date, Paramount's region 1 DVD is yet another no-frills affair, presenting the movie in a finely detailed anamorphic (1.85:1) transfer running 92m 5s, bolstered by the original 2.0 mono soundtrack. There's an anamorphic trailer and English captions, and nothing else.

NB. From this point onward, the "Friday" series descended into caricature. Unable to rely on the same increasingly tired scenario, producers were forced to introduce thematic 'variations' which deviated from the original concept and thereby rendered it less effective. "Jason Lives Friday the 13th Part VI" (1986) foregrounded the elements of parody which had always been inherent in the material, while "Friday the 13th Part VII The New Blood" (1987) introduced a subplot involving telekinesis which lifted the franchise into the realms of the supernatural, culminating in one of the most stupid, contemptible climaxes in horror history. "Friday the 13th Part VIII Jason Takes Manhattan" (1989) fatally relocated the series to the Big Apple, relying almost exclusively on Jason's status as a cultural icon to carry a pretty feeble narrative, while "Jason Goes to Hell The Final Friday" (1993) offered a supernatural explanation for Jason's activities in a story which was completely removed from the series' humble origins and didn't play like a "Friday the 13th" movie at all. As such, for all its drawbacks, "A New Beginning" is the last genuinely worthwhile entry in the Voorhees saga.


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