“Itty Bitty Little Pieces”: The Absolute Glee of Excess in ‘Friday the 13th: A New Beginning’
This article was originally written for That’s Not Current.
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter was, for a brief moment in time, meant to be the end of things. Of course, everyone changed their minds about as soon as the movie hit theaters and proved to be the most successful Friday the 13th to date up to that point. Still, the ending of the feature itself seemed to suggest that things would continue, and that when they did, they would be very different. Just as Halloween 4 would do after it, The Final Chapter ends with the suggestion that the movie’s young hero would go on to take over the reigns as killer. In this case, that young hero would be Corey Feldman’s Tommy Jarvis.
And that is, as we all know, not at all what happened. Whatever ideas there might have been for continuing the series with Tommy as the killer, they went out the window and something very different began to take shape. But even still, it wouldn’t be that different. If people wanted to see someone else take over the mantle of the killer, they certainly are treated to that in A New Beginning. The major difference is the fact that this isn’t a character established beforehand, nor are we as an audience led to believe that anyone other than Jason Voorhees might be the killer. Even when there are clues and red herrings as this movie provides, when a Friday the 13th film has people suggesting that Jason has returned from the grave, you kind of just take it at face value.
That, I think, will always be the reason that so many fans are immediately dismissive of A New Beginning. It’s not what you get from the other films, it’s not even a Jason movie, and it doesn’t ultimately broadcast that fact. Having said that, everything you get out of a typical Friday the 13th, you get out of this one. If anything, you get so much more of it. You get it in excess. All of the sleazier elements of the preceding four entries, from the sex and the drugs to the obvious gore, are dialed up to eleven and put on display for everyone to see, from the beginning of its runtime to the end. A New Beginning is the sleaziest of the franchise, truthfully by a wide margin, and that’s probably where people really decide to take it or leave it.
Sure, it’s a slasher, but it’s a slasher a little more in the vein of Sleepaway Camp than the original Friday. Everything is amped up. The body count is almost double what it had been in the previous films, the nudity is almost triple. It’s utterly tasteless but, as such, does have its place. Friday the 13th was exploitation from the start, at least to a degree. But this is the pure distilled essence of exploitation. This is a late night Drive-In movie that happens to have Paramount backing, advertised to a mainstream audience yet catered to fans of things like Street Trash. On that level, it’s just amazing that it even exists.
Even the wacky side characters we’d gotten from the beginning of the series with folks like Crazy Ralph are taken to the extreme. That’s one of the best things that A New Beginning has to offer, in my opinion. It is absolutely full of weird, eccentric, memorable characters you could only find in a film like this one. First and foremost, there’s Ethel and her dim-witted sidekick/son, Junior. Ethel is almost a parody of Mrs. Voorhees in some ways, a woman who is clearly unhinged from the moment she steps on screen, cursing all of the kids for having sex all over her property and threatening to kill every last one of them. She checks all of those boxes, and yet she’s so over-the-top and ridiculous that I don’t think anyone could seriously consider her a potential suspect for the film’s killer. In such a mean-spirited entry, it would be difficult to imagine the killer being the one character who feels like she stepped out of Student Bodies.
Then you’ve got characters like Demon, who is defined by the effortless charisma brought by Miguel Nunez, as well as by the stomach problems caused by his microwave enchiladas. These wildly eccentric characters are peppered throughout A New Beginning. Even though Demon is only in one scene, he’s referred to by many fans as one of the most memorable characters of the entire franchise, thanks to so many of those weird little quirks, especially his singing in the outhouse. Then you have characters like Pete and Vinnie, long speculated to be the franchise’s first gay couple, who are… well, who are also defined primarily by their bizarre and unexpected singing. In fact, there’s so much of that throughout the movie that if there had only been one or two more “ooh babies” and “rat-a-tat-a-tooies,” you could potentially consider A New Beginning a musical.
These weird, over-the-top eccentricities extend to the film’s main characters, too, cementing the idea that everything in A New Beginning is just pushed to the limit, past the realm of believability and taste, comfortably floating in a pool of its own excess. Joey, the ill-fated candy bar lover whose death sets up the plot, is like a full movie’s worth of Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Franklin in a single two minute scene. Vic, who chops Joey up with an ax for speaking to him, is from the second he first appears on screen, exactly the kind of person you’d expect to chop someone up for speaking to him. Granted, this might have something to do with the setting, as all of these kids are psychiatric patients and their time in the woods is meant to be a form of therapy. But even still, every character is pushed to the extreme.
Take Tina and Eddie as a prime example. The horny couple had become a Friday the 13th staple, by this point. We had Jack and Marcie in the original, Jeff and Sandra in the second, Andy and Debbie in the third and, well, just about everyone in the fourth. But all of those characters felt kind of lived-in, they were lively and as much as they were thinking about sex, they were also on occasion not thinking about sex, as such is the way of being a teenager. That’s not at all the case with Tina and Eddie, who perfectly embody A New Beginning’s love of excess. They’re the couple that loves to have sex and so all they do is have sex. And that’s it.
It even extends to our protagonist, Tommy Jarvis. Even though he’s not the killer this time around, he’s the main character. He’s grown up in the years since The Final Chapter — which is somewhat hilarious, as this was actually released a little less than a year later — and is barely coping, to say the least. Tommy is absolutely haunted by what Jason did to him and to his family. He still has nightmares about it, and in his nightmares he’s still a child, which I think is a really interesting thing to note. There’s a kind of stunted growth to Tommy in this entry. Even though it’s a wildly different entry from both the movies before and after it, it feels like an appropriate mid-point between the unlikely young hero of Final Chapter and the full-blown, determined leading man of Jason Lives. This is Tommy at rock bottom.
Even still, the excess defines him. Tommy is meant to be barely coping and so we never see a scene of him really coming anywhere close to coping. To show us how not fine he is, we don’t get a scene where he’s anything even approaching “okay.” If someone scares him, if someone does something unexpected, if someone makes fun of him, he is going to lash out and beat them to a pulp. This also serves another purpose as, despite being our protagonist, Tommy is meant to be our biggest red herring. Because of that, every time he’s alone he sees a vision of Jason. It’s over-the-top as everything else is, but also sad. It genuinely makes you feel for the character. And that’s why I think it’s ultimately a very good thing that he doesn’t actually turn out to be the killer at the end, even when I know that’s still what a lot of fans wanted to see.
As gross and extreme as A New Beginning can be, it actually means a lot that someone who is barely coping, who is not doing a great job just hanging on and getting through the day, can rise to the occasion and play the hero when they’re needed to. The fact that Tommy manages to take Roy head on, that he manages to save the lives of both Pam and Reggie, is really impressive for someone who is struggling to the degree that he is. There could also be an added element there to the fact that Pam bears a resemblance to his sister, Final Chapter’s heroine Trish, especially as she comes into her own as a survivor. She could really basically be considered Trish-Lite. And then there’s Reggie, who is a kid roughly the same age Tommy was in The Final Chapter, finding himself in the exact same situation that Tommy had been in as well. Comparing it to The Final Chapter, that kind of puts Tommy in the Rob role, which is interesting for a lot of reasons.
Tommy very clearly looked up to Rob in the few scenes they shared in Final Chapter and idolized this older loner as a kind of take-charge hero. Tommy listened to whatever Rob told him to do when it became clear that they were in danger and probably put a lot faith in him, especially as a kid with an absent father, trusting him that they would be safe and that he would succeed in killing Jason as it was the very job he came there to do. And of course that didn’t happen. Rob was killed — much to his own surprise — and Tommy had to take matters into his own hands, hacking up a madman with a machete at the age of twelve. It’s important to note that through both A New Beginning and Jason Lives, when Tommy has an episode or reflects back on the events of Final Chapter, he’s not traumatized by his sister’s screams. Instead, he’s hearing the sound of his own voice as he wails on Jason with a machete.
That inner conflict, that balance of anger and aggression with the need to do what’s right and protect those around him, is one of the most interesting things about A New Beginning, without a doubt. And it all comes together at the end, when he — believing him to be Jason — faces down the killer, Roy, in the barn. By doing this, he’s allowing himself to succeed where Rob failed, righting what might be construed as the biggest wrong of his childhood, by not allowing Reggie to sacrifice his innocence in the same way that Tommy had been forced to himself. Of course, the irony there is that Reggie was already a tougher kid than Tommy ever had been from the get-go.
These are some of the most prominent and fascinating things in A New Beginning and I think all of them are likely unintentional, even if they’re clearly there to be read. After all, subtlety really has no place in this movie. It’s absolutely not something director Danny Steinnmann was concerned with and, on one hand, that’s kind of amazing. It’s actually hard to pull that off in something that is fundamentally a murder mystery, where typically every nuance would build a suspect or provide a clue. When you take all nuance out of the equation, you’re working with an entirely different set of tools. It’s why I think most slashers of the era that were this sleazy, The Burning and Madman, among others, didn’t try to retain the whodunit aspects of other slashers and just focused on getting to the meat-and-potatoes as quickly as possible. The fact that A New Beginning even tries to do this is, in its own way, ambitious.
Yet I think there are moments of subtlety to be gleamed from this movie. I think there are a lot of those great little moments, accidental or not, that make being a fan of this franchise so rewarding. Particularly when it comes to Roy, our killer. One of the biggest things that I grew to love about this sequel — as, like many others, I’d simply felt cheated as a young fan — is how well it broadcasts that the killer is not in fact Jason when you go back and watch it. On the most obvious level, there’s the mask. Putting Tommy’s visions of Jason in the film is clever as it keeps reminding the audience what he looks like, so that when we see the hockey masked killer revealed later on, we can easily see that that’s someone different thanks to the coveralls and the blue marks on the mask.
But it does so many more interesting things than that, especially during the final chase sequences. When Roy gets knocked down, it takes him a little longer to get up than it certainly ever took Jason. When he gets stabbed, he looks down at the blood on his hands, almost in a daze. And in one of my favorite little moments of acting from any of the killers in the franchise, when Tommy stabs Roy in the thigh and he collapses in pain, the very first thing he does instinctively is to try and reach up and pull his mask off because in that one moment of searing pain, keeping his identity hidden is the least of his worries, he just wants to get a better look at the knife and to pull it out. He stops himself, of course, and manages to get back into the moment and keep playing the Jason persona, but getting that little touch makes it that much more interesting. It’s one of the most realistic bits out of any of the films and I’m still impressed by it even now.
Even still, those moments of genuine cleverness are little pearls floating in a river of grime as A New Beginning is by and large certainly not trying to be clever. If you were to relate the Friday the 13th franchise as a whole to Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles, the whole thing might have an air of tastelessness, but knows exactly what it’s doing and executes it perfectly, often with genuine wit. Meanwhile, A New Beginning is the scene where everyone sits around a campfire farting for two straight minutes. It has no other meaning, it has no wit to speak of, it is doing nothing more or less than what it is doing and yet it still fundamentally relishes in what it is doing and — either because of or in spite of that — gets the job done.
