Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)
★½ — Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)
What were they thinking? Genuinely, I want to know who sat in a room, looked at a franchise built entirely on the myth of one unstoppable, hulking, supernatural killer, and decided the smart move was to leave him out. That is the central, unfixable problem with Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, and no amount of fake blood can patch over it.
For most of its runtime, this is a Jason-free film. Oh, someone's wearing the hockey mask alright, but it's a copycat, a regular human being doing regular human murderer things. The reveal is supposed to be a twist, I suppose, but it lands less like a clever subversion and more like a betrayal. The whole reason people show up to these films is for that eerie, mythic, unstoppable presence. Jason doesn't run, doesn't panic, doesn't reason. That's the point. Strip that away and you've got a generic slasher with a borrowed aesthetic and none of the weight behind it.
There are kills, and I'll give it this: the practical gore effects are doing their job. If you're a hardcore horror fan who can switch your brain off and just wants creative carnage, there's enough here to keep you occupied. The effects crew clearly turned up to work even when the rest of the production didn't. Blood and guts, fine. Everything surrounding the blood and guts, not fine.
The acting is wooden in ways that go beyond the usual slasher charm. There's a difference between B-movie performances that are knowingly rough around the edges and performances that are just flat-out bad, and this film has plenty of the latter. The dialogue doesn't help them. Characters say things that no human being would say, react to events in ways that defy basic logic, and exist purely to be positioned in front of a blade. The pacing drags through stretches where nothing interesting is happening, and when the story tries to do something with the idea of trauma and recovery, it doesn't earn any of it.
The setting, a halfway house for troubled teenagers, had some potential. There's a version of this concept that could work. But the script isn't interested in doing anything meaningful with it. The characters are sketched so thinly they barely register before they're dispatched, and the emotional stakes, what little there are, dissolve almost immediately.
If you want proof that strong practical effects and a recognisable brand can't carry a film on their own, here it is. The franchise was already showing cracks by this point, but this entry feels like a genuine identity crisis. It doesn't know if it wants to be a mystery, a slasher or something vaguely psychological, and so it manages to be none of those things properly. The copycat gimmick might have worked in a different context, but in a series where the monster is the mythology, removing him isn't bold, it's just empty.
Compare this to something like Re-Animator, made the same year, and you can see what low-budget horror looked like when it actually had a personality and a point of view. That film understood what it was and committed completely. A New Beginning can't say the same.
One and a half stars. Jason may have been dead at this point in the timeline, but the real casualty was the series' confidence in itself.
Rating: ★½ | Year: 1985 | Watched: 2025-10-01
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