One of my favorite episodes from “The X-Files”’ first season is called “Roland.” It’s about a mentally handicapped man named Roland who is a janitor at a rocket research laboratory. He ends up killing the scientists by starting up the rocket systems. Later he leaves behind complex equations. How could this be? After all, Roland is no rocket scientist! It turns out that his colleagues murdered his twin brother, who was a rocket scientist, so that they wouldn’t have to share the credit. All that is preserved of the twin brother is his disembodied head, which is cryogenically frozen and communicates with Roland through telepathy. If this sounds ridiculous so far, wait until you get the development of the frozen head being thawed out, or Roland being given a love interest. It’s tardsploitation at its finest. These two are so cute and retarded that they are hilarious. “Roland” is a guilty pleasure in that you genuinely feel guilty in taking pleasure from it. It’s a guilty pleasure in the broadest sense of the term. Both the mentally handicapped and the physically handicapped (the brother is just a frozen head, heh heh) are exploited with such seriousness and earnestness that you realize that the filmmakers have no idea that they were being utterly tasteless. Furthermore, the episode is so goofy, but in that same serious and earnest tone, that you realize that the filmmakers had no idea that they had lost any semblance of credibility.

There are a couple moments like that in Friday the 13th: The New Blood. One is a killing by Jason of a girl in a sleeping bag. He picks her up and swings her against a tree. It’s one of the sickest and funniest things that I’ve seen in a Friday the 13th movie. You laugh, and you know that you really shouldn’t be laughing. Jason, in general, kills like he can’t kill fast enough. He doesn’t seem to take any pleasure from his kills, he treats them like annoying chores. The dominant thought that seems to be going through his mind is “Fucking die already."

The victims in The New Blood may be the most annoying encountered yet in a Friday the 13th movie. They are just plain mean. If you are familiar with this entry in the series you’ll know that it is about a girl with telekinesis who fends off Jason. Well, she is admitted to the mental institution and the other characters openly make fun of her about it. Believe it or not, the previous victims in the Friday the 13th films were never bullies. There was the bike gang in Friday the 13th Part 3, but that was a bike gang. The antagonism here is much more intimate. These are her peers that are tormenting her. One of the bitchy girls sets her sights on the telekinetic girl’s boyfriend. In order to make him jealous, to attract him, she makes out with another guy. When it doesn’t work, she kicks the guy out of bed, casually admitting to him that she led him on and he has failed to turn her on. “Hey, at least I gave you a chance,” she purrs.

I hated this bitch. But I have to say that it was deeply satisfying to see Jason casually dispose of her. We tend to become desensitized to the violence in Friday the 13th films. We aren’t very interested in the why or especially not the what or when of a killing nearly as much as the how. We have something invested in the characters in The New Blood, however. A good deal of the time we really want to see them die. The intense desire to see a character die is not a rare emotion to be felt for the cinema. Bloodlust is a strong emotion, and like all strong emotions it ought to be thoroughly exploited. You see this even in children’s films. I remember thinking when watching The Rescuers Down Under that the evil poacher was so evil that death was not enough punishment for him. I remember feeling unsatisfied with that movie especially because all they did was have the bad guy fall off a cliff. What is somewhat unique to these movies is having the unlikable character taken out by the villain and not the hero. Gremlins had a Mr. Potter-like character being executed by the Gremlins. We hated her, and were sort of cheering for the Gremlins, making the triumph of the Zach Galligan character sort of perfunctory. (Ronny Hu's Bride of Chucky killed off unlikable characters so often that we did not feel that the good guys were ever really threatened.)

What is especially sticky, I think, is the fact that this character gets this critic and I truly think the filmmaker and the theoretical audience angry, simply by virtue of her being a cocktease. Sexual frustrations are sadly not a part of the violence in The New Blood however, and this aspect can’t really be commented upon. None of the killings in the film are rapes by steel (focusing of a piercing weapon entering the flesh). Jason basically just cracks them in the coconut. At one point he even goes after someone with a weedwhacker! (Later to be spoofed by the 1993 Super NES video game “Zombies Ate My Neighbors.” I even added that little factoid to the Internet Movie Database. Check it out in four weeks or less!) In the Friday the 13th films, those who do get them usually see sex as just a pastime. An outsider who is not sexually initiated creates the sexual frustration shown through the rape by steel of the sexually experienced.

The outsider in Part 4 onward was Tommy Jarvis. He has become like everyone else in Jason Lives, and so is replaced by this telekinetic chick. She murdered her abusive father accidentally with her powers when she was a child. The experience left tremendous emotional scars on her. She hasn’t been able to come to terms with it, and it has since left her maturity, towards sex in particular I suppose, stunted. The girl repeatedly cries out for her daddy, and the idea seems to be that if she has sex she will be betraying her deceased father. While this aspect is not very well-developed within the film, the association between Jason and the deceased father is very strong. She tries to use her powers to resurrect her drowned father, but instead ends up bringing up Jason. Her psychologist repeatedly tells her that her delusions of seeing Jason and his crimes are directly related to her guilt of murdering her father. Jason is then a manifestation of her fear of her father. Not her real father, of course, but the idealized protective father.

She is given telekinesis, but this power is an extension of her femininity and sexuality, not a force that is intended to suppress it, like Jason. Telekinesis is, after all, a condition that manifests itself during the teenage years when the adolescent body goes through a wide variety of changes. Her defeat of Jason through her telekinesis serves as an acknowledgment of her sexuality and femininity, and of course a triumph over the (self?)-repression from her father manifested in Jason. This then excuses the film from attacks by critics (admittedly influencing my preconceptions of the film) who claim that the use of telekinesis is a gimmick used to resurrect a dying series. You know; it’s Carrie vs. Jason. The description itself points to the strengths of the film as it allows us to differentiate Carrie from Jason. That jump scare at the end of Carrie always worried me. It seemed to be saying that Carrie was a shit-eating monster, and after death is still a shit-eating monster. Anybody who thinks otherwise is a moron. I’m not sure that I would go so far as to say that Friday the 13th: The New Blood is better than Carrie, but I would certainly argue that it is more optimistic and more humane. Carrie is a good guy here.

Reading Jason as a manifestation of her protective father is also interesting. It justifies the new murdering method. Jason is not trying to have sex with or create some other sort of personal intimacy through his murder, he is just trying to get rid of them. Jason is a hypermasculine entity, and as his controller is a decidedly feminine female, it makes sense that he will not try to rape people with some sort of phallic symbol (i.e. ice pick, machete and spear). The character is not really much of a character this time around, but I think that that too is typical for the entries this late in the series. We can pretty much forget that Jason is getting revenge for his death and the death of his mother. Jason is portrayed a bit more like a mythological character. His demise and resurrection, being chained to the bottom of Crystal Lake and being summoned by a teenage girl out of loss from her father, even sounds like the stuff from myths.

Director John Carl Buechler has produced the fastest-paced Friday the 13th film to date. He doesn’t give us any time to rest or be bored, but he also doesn’t give the film any time to be introspective or resonate. The earlier, grainier Friday the 13th films knew that they weren’t going anywhere. And so they had some laziness to them; they were comfortable. We had nice little moments like that scene where the girl impersonates Katharine Hepburn to a bathroom mirror while wearing a T-shirt and a pair of panties. The Friday the 13th films never really had plots that really mattered, and we were okay with that. We understood that the story was just a reason to get Jason to kill everyone. With The New Blood the plot is seen with the utmost importance, and that is a misstep. The telekinetic girl is enough character and plot. The doctor who wants to make her more upset so that she uses her powers more often and he can better document her to get rich and famous is too much character and plot.

Buechler doesn’t understand that part of the charm is just in the waiting, in the fact that nothing happens. He wants to keep things moving so we can get on with the plot and we don’t get bored. Because of its fast pace and the overvalue allocated to the characters and plot, The New Blood actually feels like the least satisfying Friday the 13th film to date. Not the worst, mind you, but the least satisfying. You should still see it, but mixed in with several other rentals. Pretty much all the films in the series have this sort of problem. That is their blessing and their curse. But this film probably does leave you emptier than most. The New Blood is lacking in the minimalist hopelessness of the earlier films. I think that I’d go as far as to say that the old films had poetry. After the fifth part of the series, A New Beginning, I’ve come to think that it has left forever. Perhaps it’s a sign of the times, like the spirit of the ‘70s has finally left the earth. The newer Friday the 13th films have more of a studio gloss and less of an independently financed exploitation flavor. (We are speaking relatively, of course.) But The New Blood has more unintentional comedy and is goofier then the old classics. It’s an improvement upon the previous film Jason Lives. We are laughing at the film more than we are laughing with it. Or if we are laughing with it, which I think could be the case, Buechler is better at being subtle.

The goofiness still reduces the victims of their personality and resonance. They are perhaps reduced further than ever before. When Jason destroys the dicktease it plays like a particular Shania Twain song. The creature that she has made herself up to be don’t impress Jason much. There is something in The New Blood that gives it the strongest ‘80s flavor of all the Friday the 13th films. I really cannot say for sure what exactly it is. I think that it may be the clothing. The actors are clothed in brighter colors. They somehow look tackier than ever. The squatty girl with the glasses who wants to prove that she can get a man somehow reminded me of Natalie from “The Facts of Life.” The idea of Jason terrorizing the cast from “The Facts of Life” is, of course, a very pleasant thought. One of Jason’s victims is dressed as a preppie. As I have learned from the VH1 documentary “I Love the 80s,” the preppie style was meant to be a reaction to punk. That too is a very pleasant thought as well, as it helps the film develop a sort of superficial culture of crap. (Some trivia: Susan Blu who plays the heroine’s mother was Granny Smurf in the uberbanal “Smurfs” cartoon series.)

The origin of the heroine’s telekinesis is interesting. Her father is directly mentioned in the dialogue as being a drunk, but he doesn’t look like a drunk. The mother is said to be beaten by him, but she doesn’t look beaten. There is cleanliness to the dysfunction. You realize that there really isn’t any place for the outsider to fit into. Her problems cannot really be articulated properly in this universe, as most of the people who inhabit it do not really have very many problems. Writing that, I realize that it sounds awfully naïve, but the attitude is still not without its validity. When you’re young there are several times that you have to ask the question: Why isn’t everyone else this fucked up? How can they be so comfortable when the walls are closing in? And I suppose that that is a large part of the reason so many teenagers and college students get involved in causes, cults, even maybe gangs. There comes a point where you are almost forced to get involved in something bigger then you are, just so you don’t end up like the characters in this movie. We tend to think that audiences relate to the characters in the Friday the 13th films. I think that it is really the opposite. These are the people that we don’t want to be and don’t want to be seen as. They are shallow, empty and very stupid. That’s why audiences cheer when they die. Much of Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood can be described and even celebrated as a B-movie joke that is sometimes in delicious bad taste. The film is never boring. The twist at the end is among the stupidest that I have ever seen, but its stupidity has its own sort of audacity. All the same it is respectful to the conventions and mythology of the series. I can’t remember the last time that I had both so much joyous disrespect and respect for a film.