Cheap Friday the 13th, Part V - A New Beginning (DVD) (John Shepherd, Melanie Kinnaman) (Danny Steinmann) Price

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Customer Reviews of Friday the 13th, Part V - A New Beginning

Underrated sequel
What a cool little movie this is! I can't believe its gotten so much bad press even from so-called horror fans. Just because this movie doesn't contain a live Jason Vorhees doesn't mean that the story isn't good. This is actually part 2 of the Tommy Jarvis story. Tommy is the young boy who killed Jason in the Final Chapter. Here we catch up with him as he's being transported to a home for mentally troubled teens. This movie and the series is now turning into a horror/comedy. THere is plenty of gore and scares here but there are also a lot of laughs thrown in as well! And it works perfectly! There are some funny funny characters in this sequel! There's a mother/son duo of rednecks that is hilarious! There's also a lot of funny scenes between the teens interacting in the home. The mystery here is that after Tommy arrives at the home a whole new rash of murders begins. ANd Tommy suspects that Jason is somehow still alive. The whole Friday series is by far my favorite slasher series. The directors show a lot of imagination and they really seem to care about preserving the series. They do a great job of casting all these fun characters who make this movie really fun for the viewer. This is one of the best and most imaginative Fridays and a great bridge in the series.

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Jason is dead!
But someone's doing a pretty lamentable impersonation of him in this dull sequel. Hell, the impersonator isn't even truly revealed until the climax. Up until then it's just close ups of his feet and stuff like that. Plus everybody in this movie is killed and after about halfway thru you realize this so there is no more suspense. And some of these deaths even happen offscreen so there is just no point in them. And even more of the people killed have nothing to do with the killer's motive. So there's more pointless death for you.

And what's with the ending? I'm glad Paramount ditched any ideas associated with this movie and started afresh with Jason again in Part VI. Tho I am not glad at this DVD. Once again it has horrid cover art. No extras outside of a trailer and the movie itself is censored. There is so much unseen gore in the Friday the 13th series. And we will never get to see it if Paramount doesn't listen to the fans.

Friday the 13th Part V is presented in muddy looking 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen and thin, strident and brittle Mono sound.

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No Jason? No problem.
This is routinely cited as one of, if not the, worst film in the Friday series, and that's saying something.

First off, you won't be watching this flick by accident. Either you're a fan of the series, or not really. It's no secret that the films follow the same formula. It's a real statement about the 80s and about Hollywood in general that the ultra-cynical filmmakers would churn out the same product every year, to diminishing returns, until they ran it into the ground (witness the appalling Part VIII, Jason Takes Manhattan). Strangely enough, the last two installments of this indefatigable series were two of the best: Jason X, and Freddy vs Jason. You have to wreck the series to rebuild it.

Jason was killed at the end of Part IV. It seems that it only took a little bit more abuse than he had endured in Parts 2 and 3 to kill him, even though he was stabbed, hung, axed in the head, etc. But apparently, Tom Savini's machete-to-the-head finale to The Final Chapter was the necessary fix.

Tommy Jarvis, the hero of Part IV, finds himself in a halfway house, years after the events of the previous film. Of course, he is still completely haunted by Jason, the masked maniac invading his daily thoughts. (In Hollywood, you can never recover from trauma, ever, and it will always return to destroy you and your life.)

One day at the half-way house, populated with troubled 80s kids, someone gets butchered, and the cops haul off one of the youths. Then, one-by-one, people start getting offed by a hockey-masked psycho, and Tommy is convinced Jason is back from the dead. It's up to him to ultimately square off against the villain, again, after the requisite amount of bodies pile up.

No secret, but it's not Jason doing the killing in this one, which is the main reason the movie is not well regarded. Also, it happens to be ineptly directed and acted on many fronts, and the gore and violence has been cut to ribbons, yet again, courtesy of the hypocrits at the MPAA who gave an R rating to WAY more violent action films of the same period. Remember folks, if someone gets shot in the movies, it's an action movie, and that's okay. If they get stabbed, it's a horror movie, and the gore needs to be limited.

I would separate the Friday flicks into about three categories, the first four sequels comprising one, then VI, VII, and VIII comprising another, and the later era with Jason Goes to Hell, Jason X, and Freddy vs Jason the last. The original film was going to be a one-off murder mystery, till they decided to have Jason inexplicably rise from Crystal Lake. Then they had a new franchise on their hands. The early films still tried to be horror films, but they weren't scary, just very cynical and violent, and cheaply done. They're fun for fans in the obvious ways, but the series certainly changed with Part VI, becoming more self-reflexive.

The DVD, of course, is a lousy, bare-bones job, yet another by Paramount. We get...a trailer! Wow. The picture is good, the sound is fine, but these are real fan films, best enjoyed by horror film fans and geeks, who have fun with the whole thing, but of course we get zero in the appreciation department from Paramount. Compare these to some of the excellent Anchor Bay DVD releases, most of which reverently collect bonus material for added value.

Recommended for series fanatics, this film will have you rooting for the killer to bump off the annoying cast with demented glee. It does have some appropriately sick and demented touches, including the flare, the decapitated-on-motorbike death of an inbred cretin, a chainsaw, Dudley from Different Strokes, and a cameo by Corey Feldman, whose career would only go downhill after this masterpiece. Oh, and one of the more ineptly directed whodunit plots in a long time.