As you will remember from the last Friday the 13th film, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, young Tommy Jarvis had vanquished our favorite hockey-masked homicidal maniac Jason Voorhees, bringing an end to this killer's four-year regime of terror. He had shaven his head to look like Jason, a technique that allowed him to establish trust with the monster. They are of the same origins: children who don't fit in, capable of understanding but incapable of enjoying the hedonistic pleasures of adolescence. The implication on one hand is that their motivations stem from sexual frustration. Jason and Jarvis are both fascinated and repulsed by sex. This is a secondary factor though. At the core, and consistent with all the Friday the 13th films from the very beginning, is the frustration of being haunted with demons (such as the subtextual sexual jealousy and frustration of The Final Chapter or of the Larry Zerner character in Part 3, of whom Jason obtained his hockey mask) while everyone around you is entirely carefree. These Friday the 13th films are essentially parallel to David Lynch's Blue Velvet. Some have mentioned that Dorothy and Frank are the two most sympathetic people in the film. They are sick people, whereas the Jeffrey character has the privilege to be romantic and naive. (And romance and naivety is of course a strong relief for both Dorothy and Frank.) Friday the 13th is about film noir anti-heroes in a plastic Ghost World, and being jealous of every aspect of it.

Watching Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, one thinks that Jarvis has become Jason. His act of violence is a sort of transition into evil. Jarvis' brutal slow-motion beating of Jason certainly seems to reference Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs. Is the killing of Jason then proof that Jarvis has become as Jason is? I have recently watched David Fincher's Fight Club where Edward Norton destroys his alter ego Brad Pitt by shooting himself. This ending and its subsequent final shot makes up for the moralistic third act. Pitt has told Norton that eventually they really will be the same, and following Norton's final and complete act of self-mutilation, his enormous suffering then developing into a fully realized consciousness, he indeed becomes Brad Pitt. Similarly, the connection of Jason with Jarvis suggests that Jason is a creature of Jarvis' id, acting out the repressed fantasies of his subconscious. The shaven head and the total mutilation of Jason's corpse suggests that Jarvis has destroyed him because he has finally become Jason. He is now all-powerful, a creature of physical supremacy and emotional and moral sublimation.

My friends, Jarvis doesn't kill Jason to regain a sense of justice for the murder of his family, just as Jason doesn't kill everyone to regain a sense of justice for the murder of HIS family. Revenge has absolutely nothing to do with regaining justice. It has to do with regaining power. One is made weak through an attack, and by attacking back they can feel strong again. Justice is a buzzword that ignores what is really going on. This is the reason I argue that films like Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter or I Spit on Your Grave are occasionally if not completely brilliant, and films like Death Wish or Enough are seriously confused.

I cannot say that Friday the 13th: A New Beginning adequately recognizes or builds upon the promise of the last film. It has Tommy Jarvis, grown up to a teenager, haunted by memories of destroying Jason. He keeps seeing Jason in his dreams. He is unable to stop the masked one from doing his thing. Jarvis is put in the funny farm for medication and therapy, but is eventually transferred into a halfway house so he can prepare to re-enter society. He does not get along well with the rest of the people at the halfway house. He is quiet and moody. One guy spooks him with a mask and Jarvis wails on him. There is another round of Jason-style killings in the film. Has Jarvis become Jason and begun to finish what he started? The movie doesn't quite confirm or deny and suggests that we will have to wait for the sequel. (Friday the 13th: Part 6 doesn't go on any further with this, so I have been told.)

The film gets major points for staying in the shadows. We don't cheer for Jarvis or the real killer, but we sympathize. Again, they are very much film noir antiheroes in a plastic Ghost World. They have baggage, baggage, baggage, and nowhere to leave it. But the film loses major points for plain wearing thin Jarvis' transformation into Jason. It's become stretched out and the gimmick is beginning to show. It's quite obvious that I am one of the largest Friday the 13th apologists. I actually take these movies pretty seriously. But by the end of Friday the 13th: A New Beginning you realize that the film is being quite a bit of a tease. What was very heavy significant stuff has become a really cheap gimmick.

The violence in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning is only really sexualized in two slaughterings. A girl gets undressed for bed; wearing nothing but a pair of panties. I'm prepared to believe that some women sleep in this manner, but how many pull the covers just under their nipples? I never knew breasts had to breathe so much. Anyway, she is sleeping on the top of a bunk bed. Jason (or rather the killer) stabs her from underneath with his machete. This is a stabbing and not a slashing. Very important, it’s a piercing wound simulating sexual penetration. She flops around in suffering/mock orgasm. The other sexualized killing is of a dye-haired cutie that doesn't seem to be wearing a bra under her tank top. Jason (or the killer; hey, when I'll just call him Jason, you'll know what I mean) pushes her against the wall and stabs her. Again we hear her moan in shocked suffering/mock orgasm. Jason then sets the two up along with a boy he had previously killed in a makeshift ménage a trois. Check it out for yourself. I think that he even puts this display in Tommy Jarvis' bedroom, although my memory may be failing me.

There is something very sexy and very provocative about all of this. This is dangerous stuff, and is more powerful than pretty much anything in Friday the 13th: Part 2 or Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. But unlike Friday the 13th: Part 2 or Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter it is not as consistently present. I do notice that the fan website www.fridaythe13th.com mentions a number of impalings, nailings and stabbings, but not to the extent of those other two films. They don't seem to focus on sex or the entrance of steel into the flesh in a penetrating manner that can really be read as sexual. That makes it curious. Do the murders stand in for the sex act or not? Well, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning suggests that the killings exist mostly out of sexual frustration and jealousy, encompassing the "rape by steel" as far as some other things.

There is a noticeable degree of eye violence in the film. Jason likes to gouge out eyes. In Friday the 13th: Part 3 I remember an eyeball popping out of a skull, but in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning the eyes are cut, squashed and gouged on three different victims. Two of them are lovers who are killed post-coitus. (This does happen in every Friday the 13th film, but a lot of the time people are killed without ever having sex.) The girl stretches out naked on the ground, content and satisfied with her sexual experience while her boyfriend bathes. It's one of the more erotic images in a Friday the 13th film, simply because she is so relaxed and carefree about her body and her sexuality. (And I understand that being carefree is what gets you killed in a Friday the 13th movie.) Jason comes with some gardening shears and slices open her eyes. Her boyfriend comes back and Jason puts a leather strap around his eyes from behind a tree and pulls until it cuts through the top of his head.

Now why the eyes? The eye is often symbolic, I think, of God's omniscience. It's his all-seeing eye. It knows all. In taking it from them, he is then robbing them of their omniscience. The taking of the eyes is the ultimate humiliation, as the power that they once had over him is usurped. Remember, the serial killer in Se7en blacking out the eyes of little boys in their underwear? Speaking of the serial killer in Se7en, there may very well be an air of superiority stemming from this usurpation of power. I notice that the original 1985 cover art features red light shining through the eye sockets of the Jason mask like lasers. Because Jason has extensive eyes, eyes that go in all directions his omniscience is all-encompassing. The deterministic nature of the Jason character is then deeply realized. Without their eyes, the meaninglessness of his victims is reduced even further. This is of course a major theme of the series.

The other murder is a cook, who simply has his eyes gouged out. This certainly throws a wrench in the whole machinery as I don't know why his power would need to be usurped. The significance of his life is reduced by default. That's one of the maddening things about the movie; the philosophy behind its violence is never consistent enough, but a good deal of the time the messages of the violence are ear-shatteringly loud. Well, I have to say that I gave it my best shot. Friday the 13th: A New Beginning is not liked very much by fans of the series. Still, the film is certainly not for people who are not fans of the series. I'm going to have to argue against the reputation that the fans have given it. The problem that everyone has with the film is that the actual Jason is not in it. The person in the film doing all the killings is just wearing a Jason mask and has the same MO as the Great One. As horror film scholar Mike Bracken points out, they are still basically getting Jason. The reason that most people see these movies is to see a stalking hulk of a man in a mask slaughter people in a variety of different ways. That's why the critics hate them, and that is why, I guess, we all love them. Friday the 13th: A New Beginning brings home the goods.

However, I think that I can understand the complaint. This is the first film of the series that does not show any clips from previous Friday the 13th films. There is some dialogue from Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter on the soundtrack, but the film never brings up how Adrienne King killed Mrs. Voorhees, or how Jason drowned as a boy, et cetera et cetera. Jason is regarded as a sort of urban legend, which is right, but the characters seem much more detached from it all than in the previous films. The mythology of Jason himself is overly downplayed.

The killer turns out to be a father who is killing people in revenge for the murder of his son; he used the dead Jason as a disguise. On the one hand, this turns him into Mrs. Voorhees. She killed for the very same reason. The film illuminates a thin distinction between Tommy Jarvis, the killer and Jason Voorhees, as I have established in the beginning of this essay. This is a highly meaningful contribution to the Jason mythology even if it is indirect. On the other hand, I am able to see this denouement as very Scooby-Doo. The killer isn't becoming Jason as much as pretending to be Jason. I think I would have preferred it if the film had not provided any motivation at all for him to wear the Jason mask. Thinking it over, I think that the film respects the Jason mythology more than it disrespects it. Charges against the film on the grounds that Jason isn't there are largely unjustified.

What I think was a bigger shock for me was how divorced the film is from the usual Friday the 13th aesthetic that I have come to be fascinated by. Friday the 13th: A New Beginning is by far the goofiest Friday the 13th film yet. I have heard people say that there is no humor in it. Have they been seeing the same movie? From the very beginning of the film, where a young Corey Feldman is looking on to see Jason Voorhees’ grave being desecrated, the film develops its own brand of delirious hilarity. The Harry Manfredini score seems to be aping John Williams in a way that you sometimes hear a bad movie aping John Williams. The upcoming Jason massacre is made up to sound like a magical adventure. Later in the film the kid in the movie, named "Reckless" Reggie, attacks Jason by driving a tractor at him. When one of the camp counselors, I mean halfway house therapists, has a chainsaw/machete duel with Jason, Reggie is enthusiastically cheering for her. Reggie prides himself on being reckless; it's not as much that he is disaffected, but that he is more than ready to take on the challenges of the adult world.

(Reggie is black. Early on in the film especially, his dialogue is sprinkled with Ebonics. Reggie's blackness is used because it more strongly establishes him as streetwise. It's easier to write a child as precocious if you make him black. I am not sure that this is racism as much as racial shorthand through stereotype. I am sure that for many it looks like I'm using overly complex euphemisms, but Reggie is not portrayed as inferior. Later in the film we see him with his brother Demon, played by black character actor Miguel A. Núńez Jr. Demon is a stoner who lives in a trailer park and dresses like Michael Jackson. Or so I think, my knowledge of ‘80s icons is pretty rusty. He gets diarrhea from bad burritos and has to run to the outhouse. While in there he sings back and forth to his girlfriend a song that consists almost completely of the phrase "oh baby oh baby.” I have little doubt that you would have a much easier time describing Demon as a racist caricature. Then again, I could easily imagine this same character being played as a white character, with little changing at all. )

The reason that the violence in the Home Alone films hit such a chord is because it shows boys establishing their autonomy. The humor and joy of that film was in seeing little Macaulay Culkin establishing his manhood and his ability to be on his own. For the most part I think that this is healthy or at least normal stuff. Moments like Reckless Reggie's attack on Jason and his cheering during the chainsaw fight play this like a piano. Reggie gives children watching the Friday the 13th films someone who they can relate to. I think that that is the joke director Danny Steinmann is making here. The film is self-consciously a slasher movie for kids. It's a cheap Xerox of the Spielberg magic that reminds of the quite atrocious Lady in White and Garbage Pail Kids Movie. Now even if this material is aimed directly at kids, as this is a Friday the 13th film, the presence of these elements strikes a harshly sarcastic note.

Reggie does not share any kinship with Jason as Tommy Jarvis did in Friday the 13th: The Final Friday. The material is still the same, adolescence is feared and hated, but the film's childish tone does not add any thematic significance. It exists more in reference to the film's new aesthetic qualities. The film goes away from the traditional Jason mythology. It's much slicker, and doesn't seem to take itself as seriously as its predecessors. The first three films (until now, Part 3 being the goofiest) had the texture of pulp. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter was pulp done 90 percent professionally. It paid homage and respect to its predecessors. Friday the 13th: A New Beginning is a lark though. It doesn't distance itself through minimalism. It hardly considers minimalism at all. Its distance is primarily through self-conscious irony. (Friday the 13th: Part 3 was a mixture of the two.) Steinmann does not make the film into a Mel Brooks movie, but he's clever in the way he subtly reconciles the more professional look, a personal style and a sense of humor with all the conventions of the series. The film is a crude fit, but it fits and establishes itself as a uniquely oddball contribution to the series.

In addition to the "cheap Spielberg" tone Steinmann films a few of the killings in a Raimi-esque fashion. In a few quick shots we get a point-of-view shot of the weapon zooming onto its screaming victim. Steinmann even ups the ante on the bad dancing shown by Crispin Glover in Friday the 13th: The Final Friday. Before the tank-topped braless girl gets killed, she's dancing the Robot to some New Wave music. This is all very delirious and funny. The film is clever in having the story take place at a mental hospital halfway house. The film's first murder is of one loony by another loony. The civilians never do any killing. The victim is portrayed as so obnoxious, and the murder as so idiotic, that you can laugh without feeling callous. You may feel embarrassed that you haven't even the semblance of taste, but you can laugh. The halfway house is generally interchangeable with any summer camp or summer house in the woods. The film's victims are to stay there until they are ready to re-enter society. The point of the Friday the 13th films is that they never want to.

When I put the video of Friday the 13th: A New Beginning into my VCR, my hopes were not high. I was afraid that I would have to give my first negative review to a Friday the 13th film. And so soon after the triumph of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. But Friday the 13th: A New Beginning is a very welcome addition to the Friday the 13th series. Yes, it's not as good as Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, but I don't think that it is a letdown. This film is every bit as good as the other three films in the series, and like the other three films in the series it's good in precisely its own way. The Friday the 13th films have been establishing such a consistent level of quality through its first half that I don't think that I will pop the next videotape with apprehension as much as reassurance.