Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)

By 1985, the Friday the 13th franchise was already a well-oiled machine at Paramount Pictures, reliably filling seats with each new instalment and firmly establishing Crystal Lake as one of horror's most recognisable addresses. The series had launched in 1980 and, by the time its fifth entry arrived, it had become both a commercial staple and a lightning rod for critics who felt the slasher genre was running on fumes. Friday the 13th: A New Beginning arrives at an interesting, if awkward, crossroads: the previous film had appeared to close the book on Jason Voorhees for good, leaving the producers with a genuine question about where to take things. Their answer, for better or worse, was to attempt something of a soft reinvention, repositioning the series around a new central character rather than its beloved, hockey-masked antagonist. The tagline, "If Jason still haunts you, you're not alone," was doing a lot of work.

The film was directed by Danny Steinmann, whose background was largely in exploitation cinema, and it was produced through the familiar collaboration of Georgetown Productions, Sean S. Cunningham Films and Paramount Pictures. The premise follows Tommy Jarvis (John Shepherd), a young man still psychologically scarred by his earlier encounters with Jason, who has been placed in a halfway house for troubled teenagers. When a series of brutal murders begins in and around the facility, the spectre of Jason looms large, though the film's relationship with that idea turns out to be rather more complicated than the marketing suggested. At 92 minutes, it is a reasonably lean runtime, and the screenplay keeps things moving through a rotating cast of supporting characters, including Tiffany Helm and Juliette Cummins, who bring a certain raw energy to the material even when the script does them few favours. Melanie Kinnaman takes on the role of Pam, functioning as the film's primary survivor figure and moral anchor. It is a polished but unremarkable production in technical terms, representative of the mid-budget horror fare that Paramount was comfortable releasing into a hungry marketplace. For fans of 1980s genre cinema, it sits alongside other horror efforts of the period such as Re-Animator, another 1985 release that demonstrated just how varied the horror landscape could be that year.

What makes A New Beginning a curious object, even now, is the weight of franchise expectation it carried. Audiences in 1985 knew exactly what they were coming for, and the film's decisions around its central mythology were always going to be contentious. Whether those decisions constitute a brave creative pivot or a fundamental misreading of the audience is largely a matter of where you stand on the series as a whole. Horror fans with an appetite for the era's practical effects work may also want to check out the site's coverage of Castle Freak and When Evil Lurks, both of which approach the genre's capacity for visceral impact from quite different angles. With all of that context in mind, here is what Movies With Macca made of it.

Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (1985) is a baffling entry in the franchise, marketed as another Jason slaughter-fest, but shockingly Jason-free for most of its runtime. Instead, we get a copycat killer wearing the iconic hockey mask, which completely undermines the horror and legacy of the series. No supernatural hulking presence, no eerie stillness, just a generic murderer  stabbing teens in increasingly ridiculous ways. What were they thinking? The whole appeal of Jason is his mythic, unstoppable force, and without him, it’s just another dull slasher with a gimmick. That said, the kills are gruesome, practical effects still strong, with plenty of creative gore that’ll satisfy hardcore horror fans. But outside of the blood, everything else falls flat: the acting is wooden, the dialogue cringe-worthy, the pacing sluggish, and the story makes zero sense in this universe. A forgettable, identity-crisis of a film that lost sight of what made the series work. Jason may have been "dead," but the real tragedy is how much this franchise had already declined.

I keep coming back to that central problem, because it really does colour everything else. You can forgive wooden performances in a Friday the 13th film, and you can forgive a plot that barely holds together, because the whole contract with the audience is built around atmosphere and iconography. Strip that out and you are left with something that feels strangely hollow, like a tribute act playing the hits but missing whatever made the original worth attending in the first place. The practical effects genuinely deserve their credit, and I would not want to pretend otherwise, but good gore alone has never been enough to carry a film across the finish line with any real conviction. For me, this one sits firmly in the "curiosity only" pile, worth a watch if you are doing a completionist run through the series, but unlikely to stay with you once the credits roll. Sometimes the most frightening thing a franchise can do is forget what it actually is.

Rating: ★½  | Year: 1985  | Watched: 2025-10-01

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Trailer

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