Friday the 13th, Part V: A New Beginning (2009)

Deluxe Edition DVD

I'm starting to sense a pattern here. When these new Deluxe Edition DVD's started coming out, I was revisiting this franchise basically from scratch. It had been probably 20 years or so since I had seen any of these flicks and didn't remember much at all. When I watched the first wave of Friday the 13th, Friday the 13th Part II and Friday the 13th Part 3 3-D, it seemed to me that the first film was pretty damn awesome and still a classic to this day... while Parts II and III seemed to get worse. This new wave that starts with Part IV: The Final Chapter was rather awesome and... here's where that pattern comes in... this next film, Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning, seems to be a bit worse that its predecessor.

I've heard this leg of the series, Parts 4 through 6, referred to as the "Tommy Jarvis Trilogy" and it seems like a pretty damn good fit... although it could've turned out a lot differently. The movie opens with a cameo from Corey Feldman as Tommy Jarvis where he sees two dudes digging up Jason Voorhes' grave and, of course, he slices and dices then comes after Tommy... but it's just another dream the adult Tommy Jarvis (John Shepherd) has, still haunted and plagued by his encounter with Jason as a child, so much so that now he's on his way to a new safe house for sanity-challenged kids called Pinehurst. Of course, it doesn't take long for a string of nasty murders to take place and yada yada yada. The movie also might not have turned out this way if it wasn't for a little film called The Goonies. See, they originally wanted Corey Feldman to star here as Tommy Jarvis, in a continuation of The Final Chapter... but Feldman was working on The Goonies at the time and all he could do was a cameo that we see at the beginning, before we cut to the adult Tommy Jarvis played by John Shepherd. Damn you, Goonies!

The main thing that seemed to be different in this film as opposed to the previous four is the kill count is quite a lot higher. There are 21 kills in this movie as opposed to 14 in The Final Chapter and it seemed that co-writer/director Danny Steinmann was given marching orders to kill as many as he could in this flick. While that's all fine and dandy, this film is still essentially the same length as the previous films and, with the exception of a few wonderful kills, most of the rest are done in rapid-fire cutaway action that, 1) you don't really get to see the kill and, 2) just seems to rush us right on through to the next kill... which you likely won't see much of anyway. I'm all for smash-cut shots for jump-scare value, but when you smash-cut to a kill, it's so insignificant that you wonder why you even watched the character in the first place. With a few exceptions, the film is devoid of the slow build-up to a kill and its replaced with this fast-food kill style that just keeps serving them up without any regard for quality. Now, there are actually some pretty good kills here, the most notable of the group being a couple who get rather brutally murdered after having sex, with Jason's amazing head-tourniquet job on the guy standing out as one of the more inventive in the series. Still... why they only limited these unique kills to just a few, I don't know.

Of course, the acting isn't the greatest here, but we do get some nice turns from Shavar Ross as the precocious youth Reggie and Melanie Kinnaman as Pam, one of the counselors at the halfway house and some wonderful dark comic relief from Carol Locatell as the seriously cranky Ethel Hubbard and Ron Sloan as her dimwitted son, Junior, but most of the rest, including the about-to-be-slaughtered youth, are rather boring turns. While I'm not a huge fan of director Danny Steinnman's smash-cut kill style, he did keep quite an interesting structure to the script, which he co-wrote with Martin Kitrosser and Danny Cohen. In terms of Jason Voorhes, this is probably the most unique take on the character in this film, and the writers all do a fantastic job of really keeping you guessing throughout the film, with a pretty nice little twist at the end there. Steinnman's direction, aside from the kills, was fairly decent and the few kills he did actually pay more than a split-second of screen time to, were done rather nicely.

Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning, is a solid and rather unique entry into this franchise, but certainly not the best.

We get another dose of slick special features here, and we start out with an ongoing feature from all these Deluxe Editions. Lost Tales from Camp Blood - Part 5 is another short film that tells us another peripheral tale in the Jason Voorhees world. This short flick is an extension of the Part 4 film, with the same dude from the hospital that had his eye plucked out, escaping into the woods with Jason chasing after as they run into a young couple camping in the woods. Swings of the machete ensue, of course. This one is about six and a half minutes long and, like the others, it's nothing amazing, but a decent short flick.

The Crystal Lake Massacres Revisited Part II is next and this second part of this hilarious series and they go a little deeper into the Tommy Jarvis saga and we hear from some of the same people from the first installment and we have some new people as well like Reggie's cousins, Violet's sister and even a deranged old man who used to be in the mental institution with Tommy Jarvis before he was sent to Pinehurst. This was is just under 10 minutes long and it's a funny little continuation of this series, but it's not quite as funny as the first part..

New Beginnings: The Making of Friday the 13th: Part V A New Beginning is the last thing we get here, besides the Theatrical Trailer, and they start off right away by poking fun at and discussing the fact that this was a sequel to a movie called The Final Chapter. We get some nice interview bits from Shavar Ross, who played Reggie, Tiffany Helm, who played Violet and they both said that when they auditioned, they weren't even informed that it was a Friday the 13th movie at all. We also hear from writer-director Danny Steinmann, Dick Wieand, who played Roy and we also hear from Harry Manfredini and how this was one of the more difficult scored to produce. We also hear some interesting stuff from the director Steinmann about the MPAA giving them a hard time about the love scene. All in all, this is a slick 11 minute piece that goes deeper into this fifth film and ends out the special features on a great note.

While it doesn't quite have the greatness that Part IV displayed, Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning is another fine entry into the franchise.