If Jason still haunts you, you're not alone!
Jason Voorhees was pronounced dead after being hacked to death by the young Tommy Jarvis at the end of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. Since then Tommy has grown up in a variety of mental hospitals, unable to cope with his traumatic experiences and recurring nightmares about Jason.
Shortly after Tommy is moved to a halfway house, in a rural, wooded area not unlike Camp Crystal Lake. Soon a hockey mask wearing villain begins killing off the residents of the halfway house, and anyone else who happens to be in the vicinity. Has Jason returned from the grave? Has Tommy slipped into insanity and picked up Jason's legacy? Or is someone else altogether behind this new spat of grisly murders?
A New Beginning, the fifth film in the legendary Friday the 13th series, starts to show the first serious signs of weakness for franchise. While far from the worst of the sequels, it fails to provide the same jumps, the same suspense, and the same gore as its immediate predecessors. While it does contain the odd exception, it comes off as much more flat than the earlier sequels and starts off quite slow initially. Some of Jason's usual creativity does come out, but a large number of the deaths are by simple stabbing, or occur off-screen.
Some of the characters in A New Beginning are so ridiculous or utterly obnoxious that you can't help but eagerly await their demise. The unfortunate part is that because they are so obnoxious, they take away somewhat from the enjoyment of the movie. In some of these cases, like the two rednecks, their presence in the film could have been much briefer and this could only have improved the movie over-all.
Finally, it seems somewhat superfluous to have inserted a sequel without the actual star villain into the middle of the series. Considering how many silly ways Jason came back to life in these movies, you wouldn't imagine that anyone would have had a problem with him doing it one more time.
3 dead rednecks out of 5
Rated R for violence/gore, sexual content, nudity, language, drug use, frightening scenes.
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