Friday the 13th Part VII - The New Blood

Released in 1988, Friday the 13th Part VII - The New Blood has a premise that involves a girl with psychic powers going up against the recently returned Voorhees (new blood, indeed).  It is often summarized by fans as being "Carrie vs. Jason," but that summary isn't really accurate, as the "VS" part of the movie is relegated to the final 10 minutes or so.  The rest of it is standard Friday fare, with a group of young people just looking to have a good time but instead getting murdered in various ways.

Until this week I had only seen Part VII of the Friday the 13th saga once, back about 20 years ago when I was watching the series for the first time.  In general I am much more familiar with the front half of the Friday franchise than with the back half, so this was fun revisiting a movie I hadn't seen since I was a teenager.  Unfortunately, this turns out to be my least favorite of the first seven Friday films.


The movie opens with a recap of Jason's history and a summary of the events of Part VI.  Basically it all serves to remind the viewer why Jason is chained to a big rock in the middle of Crystal Lake.  Notable in this opening is two things; the voiceover narration is provided by Walt Gorney, better known as Crazy Ralph from Friday Parts 1 and 2, and the recap montage uses footage from the Friday Part VI teaser trailer, specifically the shot of the graveyard and the tombstone exploding.

After the refresher and the credits roll, we get a scene set in the past, where a young girl named Tina witnesses her parents having an argument that leads to physical abuse.  This probably isn't something new to the family, as little Tina, upset and afraid, runs toward the lake and paddles out in a boat, her father running after her.

While on the water, and with her father standing on the dock, Tina's psychic telekinetic powers manifest and cause the dock to collapse into the lake, taking her father with it.  Little Tina is very sad and traumatized.


Flash forward 10 years later, much of which she spent in psychiatric care, and Tina (Lar Park-Lincoln) is now returning to that lake house, along with her mother (Susan Blu) and her psychiatrist Dr. Crews (Terry Kiser) for further treatment.

Her recovery has come along nicely, but Tina foolishly goes down to the lake and accidentally raises Jason out of his watery prison (she does this psychically, trying to raise her father up for some reason).

Jason then goes on his mandatory murder spree (as is his wont) before Tina, in the finale, confronts him and does battle with Jason WITH HER MIND!

Note about the timeline:  The events with young Tina happened in 1989, with the rest of the movie taking place 10 years later (1999).  So at this point, Jason has been in the lake for a couple years, as the events from Friday Part VI took place in 1997.
Note about the note:  I know and realize that the filmmakers behind these films gave little to no thought towards the continuity between films, but I find it really interesting that most of the sequels take place in the future relative to the year each film was released.  For example, Friday Part VII was released in 1988 but, when following the timeline established, the events must take place in 1999.  Weird, right?

Anyway, Friday the 13th Part VII - The New Blood is not a great movie, but I do appreciate that it was trying something different with the franchise.  I think there should've been more focus on Tina and her abilities and I would've liked to see her do more battle with Jason.  The very end of the movie feels rushed and a bit like an anti-climax, which is unfortunate.

What really sinks this one is the multiple cuts and trimmed scenes that the MPAA ratings board demanded be removed from the film to secure an R rating.  These extra gore scenes are available in a really rough form on the DVD/Blu releases and a couple of them are really fantastic and would've really improved the film and made it more exciting and interesting.  As it is though, unfortunately, I have to say, even though it has the intrinsic "funness" associated with Friday the 13th movies, Friday the 13th Part VII - The New Blood is one of the weaker entries in the series.  However, I don't think I'll wait another 20 years before watching it again.

It's a birthday bash.

Notes:

Playing Jason for the first of what would be a record four times is stuntman/actor Kane Hodder.  This is perfect casting, seeing as how being underwater all those years really made Jason swell up to a Kane Hodder-like size.  It works!

Seriously though, Hodder puts in a solid performance as Jason, giving him a real hulking presence while remaining light on his feet (see: the part where he jumps through a window).  He also has this great scene where he's set on fire and at the time it was the longest onscreen burn ever done by an actor.  Very impressive.

Best kill in the movie is easily the sleeping bag kill.  In the version that was cut out, Jason gives her about six good wallops against that tree, which is great, but what we see in the final movie is just one good whack that kills her instantly.  It's less ridiculously brutal, but in its own way it still packs a punch.  It's one of the most iconic kills in the entire franchise.

As for the other kills in the movie, most of them are pretty standard stuff, which, once again, is a shame because some of the cut footage is really amazing, particularly this spectacular head crushing scene and the death of Dr. Crews, who gets a tree trimmer to the torso and his guts go everywhere.  These things are fine and all as they are in the finished movie, but they could've been so much more!

Also, there is a kill in the lake with a naked girl that is filmed partly beneath the water that is an obvious homage to the opening of Jaws.  I got nothing else to say about it; just something I noticed.

Jason's new look includes him wearing a chain, which is part punk rock, part hip-hop, and very chic.

During the finale when Tina is using her psychic powers against Jason she picks up a potted plant and throws it at him.  By itself this is uninteresting.  What does make it interesting/hilarious is that resting in the potted plant is the decapitated head of one of her friends.  Ha!

Tina's mom in this movie, Mrs. Shepard, played by Susan Blu, has some absolutely out of control 80s hair.  It's fantastic!  There are some really great mullets and things like that throughout the cast, but mom's hair is seriously the greatest thing.

Speaking of Mrs. Blu, her appearance here in Friday Part VII marks one of her rare onscreen roles, as she is mainly a voiceover actress, providing voices on Transformers, Jem, DuckTales and a slew of other things over the years.

Director John Carl Buechler is a special effects expert, having provided work for many Charles Band productions, like TerrorVision (1986), Dolls (1987), and Prison (1987), which is where he met Kane Hodder.  Buechler got the job because of his work on Troll (1986), which is strange if you've actually seen Troll.

Buechler also did some effects work on Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, which came out the same year as his Friday Part VII, a few months later actually, and did more than twice as well at the box office.

This marks the first time that Harry Manfredini was not the sole composer on a Friday movie.  Fred Mollin would provide most of the score and would go on to be the composer for Friday Part VIII and the Friday the 13th television series as well.

Lar Park -Lincoln was in House II: The Second Story in 1987 and she also had a reoccurring role on Knots Landing starting around the same time.  I think she makes for a really interesting final girl and to her credit she does attempt to do something a little different with her portrayal of psychic abilities (she's not just ripping off Sissy Spacek in Carrie).

Kevin Spirtas (credited as Kevin Blair) is Nick, the secondary protagonist and love interest to Tina.  He's likable enough but doesn't really do much in the movie.  Spirtas was also in the wonderfully cheap and cheesy The Hills Have Eyes 2 (1984) along with Kane Hodder and would go on to star in a couple Subspecies movies and would have a long 10 year stint on Days of our Lives.

Terry Kiser, who plays the jerk Dr. Crews, would go on to play the titular character in Weekend at Bernie's (1989) and it's 1993 sequel, which is fairly awesome and there is nothing else to say about it.

Final Thought:  Not terrible and not great.  I can say this about it though:  How many Part VII's of movie franchises are there out there?  Not many.  And Friday the 13th Part VII is one of them.

This poster from Ghana is freaking CRAZY!!

Read the rest of my Friday reviews:
Friday the 13th
Friday Part II
Friday Part III
The Final Chapter
A New Beginning
Jason Lives

Happy Friday the 13th!

Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI

Yesterday was Friday the 13th and, even though I tried, I failed to finish my new Friday the 13th review on time.  But hey, I like to think it's always Friday the 13th somewhere...

-Check out previous Fridays:
Original Flavor
Part 2
Three-Dee
The Final One!
JK, here's A New Beginning

Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI (1986) is, as the title implies, the one where Jason comes back.  His absence from Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985) was not appreciated by fans (and critics, as usual, hated the film), so the producers decided to course correct, bringing Jason back and making him near indestructible, just for fun.

Fun is the key word with Jason Lives, as this is considered the "fun" Friday of the series.  The humor is of the meta variety, with plenty of winks and nods to the audience, and this gives the movie a lighter tone, which pairs nicely against Jason racking up an absurd body count (18, the largest for a Friday up to this point).

The movie opens with Tommy Jarvis (now played by Thom Mathews) speeding down the highway with his friend Hawes (Ron Palillo, Horshack from Welcome Back, Kotter) on their way to destroy Jason's body.  It seems Tommy is still having nightmare visions of Jason (as established in Part V), so he feels the only way to free himself from torture is to dig up Jason's body and burn it.

Once they are at the cemetery and start digging (in a scene that is reminiscent of Tommy's dream from the opening of Part V), Tommy and Hawes unearth Jason's coffin and find him rotting inside.

Having some sort of anger flashback, Tommy flips out and grabs a metal fence pole and stabs Jason through the chest.  Tommy calms down but his relief is only temporary, as a pair of lightning bolts strike the metal pole and reanimate Jason's maggot-ridden corpse.

Jason's first order of business?  Kill Hawes by punching his heart out.

Tommy speeds off in his truck and heads directly to Crystal Lake, which is now called Forest Green, to warn the sheriff about Jason.  Of course Sheriff Garris (David Kagen) thinks Tommy is crazy and promptly locks him up for attempting to steal a gun.
Meanwhile, Jason finds his next two victims, Lizbeth (Nancy McLoughlin, the director's wife) and Darren (Tony Goldwyn), a couple lost on some backwoods road in their VW bug.  When they see Jason standing in the road, Lizbeth quips "I've seen enough horror movies to know any weirdo wearing a mask is never friendly."  This sort of self-referential humor is the hallmark of Jason Lives, commenting on the absurdity of slasher movies and of the Friday movies in particular.

The next bit of humor comes just a few short minutes later when, right before Jason impales and drowns Lizbeth in a puddle, she offers him her wallet and money.  He doesn't take it and there's a close-up of her American Express card floating away from her lifeless hand, a "never leave home without it" heckle-ready moment if there ever was one.

The next morning, the sheriff's daughter Megan (Jennifer Cooke) shows up at the station with few of her friends, looking for Darren and Lizbeth.  They're all working together at a newly opened summer camp for kids that is (of course) at the old location of Camp Crystal Lake.

Tommy warns them that something bad might have happened to them and Megan takes this as an invitation to flirt her ass off with Tommy (who is behinds bars, mind you.  Makes you wonder how often Megan gets all flirty with the prisoners..).

From this point on, Jason slaughters his way through everybody, the counselors, some paintball players, the cemetery caretaker, a handful of police officers, and a bunch of other random people, while Tommy, with the help of Megan, tries to put a stop to Jason once and for all by using a giant chain tied to a large rock.

That seems ridiculous out of context, but Tommy's idea is that maybe he can lure Jason to Crystal Lake, his original resting place, with the intent of wrapping the chain around his neck and drowning/defeating/trapping him under the water.  It works, but as we find out in the subsequent sequels, this is a short-term solution to a long-term problem.

Jason Lives is one of my favorite of the Friday movies (it's third or fourth on the list), as it's a fun and fast paced film with plenty of kills and jokes and a couple action scenes thrown in for good measure.  Amongst fans, it is generally well regarded and it even garnered a few positive reviews from critics.  Financially however the movie failed to gross $20 million at the box office and it didn't even nab the number one spot on it's opening weekend (Aliens was on it's third week and was killing it), making Jason Lives the first Friday film to not accomplish either of those things.

This decline for the Friday series was due to a few reasons:
1).  There was a lot of competition at the box office that summer and Jason Lives couldn't survive against Aliens, The Fly, Karate Kid II, Stand By Me, and Top Gun.
2).  Audience fatigue had set in regarding slasher movies and by 1986 the genre was basically dead, even if the kids were still going to see. . .
3).  Freddy Kruger.  By 1986, two Nightmare on Elm Street movies had been released and Freddy's ascension in popularity parallels with the decline in Jason's.

Not that any of that could deter a large, unstoppable zombie mass murderer from stalking, slashing, and wrecking his way through two more movies before the 1980s were done (and four more after that!).  Jason was back and he wasn't going anywhere (except New York. . .and hell. . .and outer space. .).

Random Notes:

It isn't made clear how much time has passed since Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, which takes place in 1992 according to the series timeline, but it must be less than five years, since the next film in the series takes place in 1997.  Enough time has passed since Jason died in The Final Chapter (back in 1984) that Crystal Lake has changed their name to Forest Green and, interestingly, Megan and her friends refer to Jason as a legend and not something that really happened.  Since they would've been children back in 1984, I guess it is possible that they could've been raised to believe that Jason was only an urban legend as the townsfolk suppressed the true history of the town...  Believe me, I've put too much thought into this, I'm just going to move on..

In a strange way, this movie shares similarities to the classic Universal monster movies, specifically the Frankenstein films.  Jason is reanimated by bolts of lightning, a dead creature brought to life, and he gains extraordinary strength and becomes virtually unstoppable.  Tommy takes on the role of the creator and feels responsible for Jason's destruction, a task he sees to personally.  On the technical side, the lighting and the use of fog during the night forest scenes adds to the gothic atmosphere.


After Jason's resurrection the opening credits start and, instead of having an exploding title screen like they have in the previous few movies (which I always think are great), there is a parody of the James Bond opening with a tiny Jason slashing from within his own eyeball.  This establishes the goofier tone of Jason Lives.

Another goofy moment:  when the caretaker looks directly at the camera and says "some folks have a strange idea of entertainment."

The special effects in the film are adequate but they aren't exactly spectacular.  Many scenes are the obvious victim of the censors demanding they be trimmed.  The two best kills in the movie, the triple decapitation of the paintball players and the death of Sheriff Garris, both work fairly well as they are in the movie, but they work even better when you see what was cut out (the deleted material is available on the most recent DVD and Blu-ray collections and can also be seen here).

Fun Fact:  This is the only Friday movie to have no nudity!  There is a sex scene but Cort (Tom Fridley) and Nikki (Darcy DeMoss) both leave their clothes on.

They do it in a camper van and after getting spooked when the power goes out, they peel out of there which is cool because it totally leads to some SQUEALING TIRES ON DIRT!

Also, it leads to one of my favorite scenes in the movie, when Jason, having snuck onto the camper, kills both Nikki (face smash through the side of the van) and Cort (head stab), which causes the camper to flip over and crash spectacularly.  Then, in what is one of the best shots in the movie, Jason crawls out of the wreckage and looks completely unfazed.

Another thing I love in this movie:  there are actual little kids at the summer camp.  For a small portion of the movie, the kids are actually in danger, but honestly they aren't in danger enough for my tastes.  Hell, the kids aren't even really in the movie that much at all, especially the boys, as young Nancy, who sees Jason a couple times, is pretty much the main kid in the movie.

Also, what kind of summer camp is being run here?  There is apparently a staff of six counselors, and only four of them show up ('cause two were murdered) before two of them take off (Cort to have sex, Megan to help out Tommy), leaving only Sissy (Renee Jones) and Paula (Kerry Noonan) to look after the kids.  Is there no additional staff at this summer camp?  Who's making meals for all these children?  The conditions of this Forest Green Summer Camp are suspect at best.

Classic Friday move: Jason smashes through a door:

Oh!  Another thing I love!  During the climax, Tommy taunts Jason when he's luring him out to the lake!  He calls Jason a "meathead," "chickenshit," "asshole," and a "pussy."  It's so great!

Tommy is played by Thom Mathews, who had just scored a horror hit with Return of the Living Dead (1985).  He's maybe the best of all the Tommys.  This movie is definitely his story and since he's the one who has the final confrontation with Jason, this slasher movie lacks a true final girl character.

Megan is the closest thing we have, and even though she does give Jason a bit of motorboat propellor to the face, she never has a one-on-one throwdown with Jason and her main function in the movie really seems to be helping Tommy out.

Jennifer Cooke was also on the sci-fi TV series V and she quit acting not long after Jason Lives.  Her husband is one of the founders of the Celestial Seasonings Tea Company and she is now involved in the tea business.

David Kagen is considered one of the best and most sought after acting coaches in Hollywood and owns and operates the David Kagen School of Film Acting.  So he knows what he's doing playing Sheriff Garris, who could just be a generic small town cop character, but Kagen gives him plenty of levels and some interior life.  Plus, he basically becomes the secondary protagonist towards the end of the movie, taking Jason on himself, and making a good go at it, before getting folded in half.  I wonder how often that comes up with his acting students?

Renée Jones would go on to star in over 1,000 episodes of Days of our Lives as Lexie Carver.  That doesn't mean anything to me, but maybe it does to you.

Tony Goldwyn can currently be seen on your wife or girlfriend's favorite TV show Scandal.  He plays the president.

Director Tom McLoughlin also wrote the screenplay for Jason Lives.  One of his original ideas was to introduce Jason's father, Elias, late in the movie, implying that he knows he's been resurrected and that he's looking for Jason.  This idea would be incorporated into the novelization of Part VI.  McLoughlin got the gig on Friday because of his work on One Dark Night (1982) with Meg Tilly and after Friday he would direct Date with an Angel (1987) with Phoebe Cates and Sometimes They Come Back (1991) with Tim Matheson and Brooke Adams.

The original score is once again provided by Harry Manfredini with additional songs provided by Alice Cooper.  "Teenage Frankenstein" and "Hard Rock Summer" appear, but the single and closing credits track is "He's Back (The Man Behind the Mask)," which even had a music video:

Final Thoughts:  Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI is the last really good Friday movie.  After this we get six more films, the total of which don't really stack up against the first six, even if parts of them are intermittently fun.  2015 has a third Friday the 13th this year (in November), so when that rolls around we'll check out The New Blood.  I'll try to have that review done on time.  See you then.

?Speeding? 

"So...what were you gonna be when you grew up?"