The summer after "THE FINAL CHAPTER" hit theaters, box office potential and greed found a way to bring Jason Voorhees back to life in FRIDAY THE 13TH PART V: A NEW BEGINNING.
Corey Feldman was already filming "The Goonies" so he's relegated to the opening pre-credits scene as 12 year old Tommy Jarvis. He watches as two young men out for thrills dig up the grave of Jason and get the machete treatment.
Is it a dream? Who knows. The screenplay is credited to three people, none of whom seem to be focused on anything but the horny parts of camp.
Post main titles, Tommy now appears to be in his early twenties and he looks nothing like Corey Feldman. He's been in and out of mental hospitals the past decade and loves to play with knives. He's played by John Shepherd, whose credits include some TJ Hooker episodes and a bit part in "The Hunt for Red October". If I was him, I'd lean in on that submarine role.
Tommy ends up at a "police yourself" no-rules halfway house in the woods. A local Hillbilly lady and her son arrive on a motorcycle, call em all "loonies" and then ride off into a cloud of smoke, Mamma and Junior, spewing profanities.
The residents conveniently fall into all the traditional camps, the hot blonde chicks, one of whom seems to be Goth, the fat loser guy who always has food running down his face, Vic the crazy dude chopping wood with a very sharp axe..."Joey look out!!" The paramedics who joke about dismembered bodies, the two greaser guys whose car breaks down in the woods....
The greaser guys, Pete and Vinnie, seem to have wondered in from a profane 50's biker movie. What the hell are they doing in a film that takes place in the early 80's?
Frank Mancuso made a fortune producing these films that consistently made a lot of money off of their small budgets. He has said that he hated the Writer/Director of this installment, Danny Steinmann, calling him a pervert and the film "soft core porn." It DID take nine tries to get an R rating and not an X for the film. Steinmann seems to have more of a penchant (and hunger) for B-movie nudity, language and R rated Hee Haw humor that he does any kind of creative kills.
And we all know these slasher films thrive on how creative the kills are.
On that score, beyond a road flare down the windpipe and a tree tourniquet, meh.
The acting is horrible, the story is stupid and everyone always falls down and hurts their ankle right when Jason bursts through the door.
Honestly, Part V just serves as more evidence they should have stopped after the original trilogy.
But no, we have a long way to go.....
Thanks to it's $2 million budget and $22 million at the box office, Part VI was only one year away.
As for this mess, it's as bad as it gets. By the time the heroine was wielding a chainsaw and battling Jason in a hayloft, I had lost interest in Jason, Tommy and all the half naked coeds running around.
This feels like JASON V PORKY'S. That alone earns it an F.
The final ten minutes sees Steinmann and his trio of writers throwing everything and a guts-filled kitchen sink at the screen in hopes of creating something masterful.
Bloody awful.
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