Friday the Thirteenth: A New Beginning (Part 5)

Corey Feldman is one of the most easily recognizable faces in Hollywood history, and here he kicks off a grisly if predictable horror flick—one with a certain cachet of infamy due to behind-the-scenes anecdotes of drug use and debauchery—with a scene that could have been lifted from one of my own midnight fever dreams.

Or, really, anyone's nightmare.

Coming through the trees in the rain, no doubt somewhere in the immediate vicinity of Camp Crystal Lake, Feldman (who once, hot damn, liked one of my replies to one of his posts on Twitter/X) sees two human hounddogs digging up the grave of Jason Vorhees. He emerges, alive of course, and ready to whoop up on the would-be resurrectionists, who meet the predictable grisly fate.

FRIDAY THE 13TH: A NEW BEGINNING | Opening Scene (1985) Movie CLIP 4K

Then he wakes up. Waking up, older Tommy Jarvis (John Shepherd) is a thoroughly traumatized human basket case who is transported by state cops to his new home at a halfway house very close to Camp Crystal Lake. Its inmates, or whatever, are the typical horny calèche of slasher-movie meat, but also a morbidly obese fellow with a bad Seventies fro who eats chocolate bars and drips the chocolate down the sides of his fat, sweaty face. Which is a real grotesque thing, as you can imagine (well, actually, you don't have to imagine it...).

There's a young black boy also, whose father is the cook (no stereotypes here), and the noble Final Girl, “Pam” (Melanie Kinnaman), who is the camp counselor, or guru, or psychiatrist. Later, we get a couple of 1985 black Superfly types who were borrowed from a Rick James video, who literally “live in a van down by the river” (apologies to the memory of the late Chris Farley). The guy, “Demon” (how's that for an apt nickname?), played by actor Miguel A. Núñez Jr., seems to have an affinity for frozen convenience-store burritos, and proves it by being dispatched mid-BM while sitting in an outhouse. (Which had to stink any way you squeeze it. Or, in this case, stab it, I suppose.)

Joey (Dominick Brascia) gets KO'd by wood-chopping psychopath Vic (Mark Venturini) in a scene so memorable I've carried it with me lo these many years from the time I saw this particular gutter flick at the on-post movie theater in Fort Clayton, Panama (which is now no longer there). It's brutally senseless, sickening, and indecent—but then so is life.

So begins the rest of the flick with predictable results. Horny kids, vaguely gay greasers, wicked old women, and the rather impressively memorable Flock of Seagulls proto-goth Violet (Tiffany Helm), who does weird robotic dances before meeting everyone's favorite hockey-mask-wearing silent psychopath.

There is the brutal final lap toward a barn. Along the way, corpses pile up and everybody dies. Well, not everyone.

Reggie proves to be a hero. Also, he somehow learns how to drive a tractor right into the masked menace. The whole thing goes along like ritualistic psycho-slasher-movie clockwork. The big reveal at the end feels like Scooby-Doo went bloody and had a sexy neckin'-in-the-woods body count. There really isn't a lot to see here that is very distinct. Or memorable.

And of course, we have a twist ending, a fake-out ending. And the fact that certain aspects of the film actually did manage to stay with me after all these years, haunting my daydreams, personal visions, and, of course, nightmares.

So, Jason buried himself, like a half-revived corpse in the deep, primal layers of my warped subconscious, representing now the dark, unreasonable fear creeping through my personal mental woods, machete in hand; silent, inexorable; an unreasoning machine of annihilation.

One wonders how Corey Feldman would feel about that.

Friday The 13th, Part V: A New Beginning (1985) Theatrical Trailer

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