Friday the 13th: A New Beginning

Check your calendars!  It's Friday the 13th and that means it's time for another Friday the 13th movie review!  Try to stay alive, we're looking at Friday Part 5!




When Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter was released in 1984 it was meant to be, well, the final chapter in the Jason Voorhees slasher saga.  Of course it ended up being the most successful film in the series (at the time) and since it made a ton of money there was no way that the producers wouldn't want to make another Friday movie.  The only problem was, Jason was dead.  So what do you do?


You make A New Beginning.

Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985) opens with a dream sequence featuring a cameo by Corey Feldman (as young Tommy Jarvis) watching two wild teens dig up Jason's grave, only to get killed.  When Older Tommy (John Shepherd) wakes up in the van of an institutional hospital, we learn that it is eight years after the events of The Final Chapter and that Tommy is on his way to Pinehurst Halfway House, an outpatient group home for troubled youth, to hopefully aid in his recovery.

All the patients and staff at this halfway house are your basic Friday camp counselor types; you got the horny couple, the dork, the hunk, the punk, the final girl, you know the types.  However, right after Tommy arrives, there is a murder, as crazy Vic (Mark Venturini) kills his housemate Joey (Dominick Brascia) for being an annoying fuck.

Soon after, more dead bodies start piling up around the group home, and since Tommy is haunted by visions of Jason, it seems like he might be the killer.  But is he?  Or is it one of the many red herrings introduced?  Or is Jason somehow back from the grave?

To answer that last one, no, Jason is not back from the grave.  In fact, the Jason that does the killing in this one is often referred to as "fake Jason."  You can tell he's a fake because his mask has blue marks on it, not red.

Fake Jason

So who is doing the killing?  SPOILER WARNING:  at the end of the movie, when Jason is killed, his mask falls off and it's revealed to be. . . some guy.  Actually at first you're really not sure who it is, so the filmmakers wisely add a scene of the sheriff explaining who the killer was and why he did it, which by the way was Roy (Dick Weiand) the weird paramedic and he did it because Joey, the murdered patient at Pinhurst from the start of the movie, was his secret son.  Seeing him dead, and blaming those around (?), he snapped and later donned the identity of Jason to start killing people.  It's kind of dumb, in fact, it's really dumb, but I give credit for trying something different, even if it doesn't totally succeed.  Either way, I'm glad real Jason comes back in the next movie.

Random Notes:

The opening credits have the Friday the 13th logo EXPLODING with Jason's hockey mask, revealing the subtitle A New Beginning.  I've said it before, but exploding credits are the best.

A New Beginning takes place eight years after The Final Chapter, which was set in 1984 (as were  parts 2 and 3, for that matter).  That means A New Beginning, released in 1985, takes place in 1992.  It's a future movie!

When Tommy arrives at Pinehurst, he's met by Pam (Melanie Kinnaman), the director of the program.  By the end, she would become the film's final girl, which, even though she's maybe a little bit older than previous Friday final girls, totally works because she brings this maturity and responsibility to the role that really freshens up the character type.  Plus, later she gives Jason a good run for his money, attacking him with a chainsaw in the barn.
Totally badass.

When Tommy's unpacking in his room he meets this kid who tries to scare him with a fake spider.  This practical joker goes by Reggie the Reckless (Shavar Ross), although I think everybody just calls him Reggie the whole movie.  Nobody humors him with that Reckless shit.

Reggie doesn't live at the Halfway House, he's just there visiting and staying with his granddad George who works in the kitchen.  Sometimes kids in movies can be really annoying, but Reggie has a lot of charm that goes well with his attitude.  Plus his all-red sweatsuit is a pretty cool look.

Being so young, Reggie does have an embarrassing moment though, when he screams like a little boy when encountering Jason out in the rain:

(this video has stupid Mario Bros. sound fx at the end, but the scream is intact, that's the important part).

Despite being so young, Reggie does become the secondary protagonist, facing off against Jason alongside Pam, and even getting a big action moment when he drives a tractor through the barn door and hits Jason square in the stomach.  Tractor Punch!

While Tommy is the main character in the movie, he's actually a suspect in the killings most of the time, and the audience isn't sure if he is or not.  He conveniently disappears sometimes, casting further suspicion, but when he shows up at the end to help Pam and Reggie fight Jason in the barn, you know what's up.

However, even after his heroic moments, in the last scene of the movie, Tommy wakes up in the hospital from another Jason dream and then slowly walks to his dresser and pulls out a hockey mask (how did he get that?), puts it on, grabs a knife (and that too!?), and sneaks up on Pam a seemingly stabs her.  I say seemingly because the camera goes into a slow zoom-in on his eye as the film fades to black and credits roll.  So it's implied that Tommy killed her and will probably pick up Jason's mantle, but thank god that doesn't actually happen, as heroic Tommy shows up for Friday part 6 (although played by a different actor).

Note:  Tommy still makes his masks like he did as a kid, but that skill doesn't come into play during the movie (except for a couple cheap scares).

There are a lot of kills in this Friday movie, 22 I think, which is one of the highest for a Friday film.  Since there are so many, some are only okay-ish (your basic throat slashes or stabs to the stomach or head) and there are quite a few offscreen kills.  My favorite kills in this one are the flare to the face, the skull crushed against the tree using the leather strap, and the decapitation while riding a motorcycle.

Overall, while I find the special effects perfectly serviceable, I am left wanting a bit more.  I feel quantity outweighed the quality here.  Also, it seems as if some of the scenes were cut or edited down (which happens with these Friday movies), and I've read that some parts (like Violet's death) were reshot to be less graphic.


Speaking of Violet (Tiffany Helm), she's the punk girl in the house.  She's got a goth attitude and colored hair, pale skin, you know the type.  There's a scene later, right before she gets killed, where she's dancing in her room. . .it's hilarious.  She's doing this strange interpretive robot dance. . . it's great, definitely one of the highlights of the movie:

Let's talk cast and crew:

Director Danny Steinmann had previously directed Savage Streets (1984) starring Linda Blair before getting the Friday gig.  Going back even further, Steinmann's first movie job was writing and directing a hardcore porno called High Rise (1973), on which he used the name Danny Stone.  This porno background is interesting because Steinmann wanted to push the sex in A New Beginning, particularly in the sex scene with Tina (Deborah Voorhees [!]) and Eddie (John Robert Dixon).  Apparently they shot a pretty hot and heavy sex scene, but it was later cut down and the peeping tom weirdo Raymond was added in (and killed) to cut the scene down.

Co-screenwriter Martin Kitrosser, who also worked on Friday part III (1982), would write and direct Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toymaker (1991), but has since become a successful script supervisor in Hollywood, most notably working on all of Quentin Tarantino's films.

Harry Manfredini once again provides the score, although this is his first original score since Part 2 (parts III and The Final Chapter just recycled music cues from the first two).  There's some slight variation to some of the themes and, all in all, it's a good score.



Other than being Reckless, Shavar Ross also played Gary Coleman's best friend on TV's Diff'rent Strokes, not to mention similar "friend" roles on Growing Pains and Family Matters. As an adult he has become a born again Christian and has started his own production company, Tri-7 Entertainment, that specializes in films and whatnot aimed toward that market.

In the movie, Reggie goes with Pam and Tommy to visit his brother Demon (Miguel A. Núñez) at a trailer park.  Demon is a real cool dude, smoking weed and hanging out with his lady in his super cool van (he doesn't live at this trailer park, I think he might just be passing through or something, I'm not sure.  Maybe he lives in the van...), but of course he does get killed, in an embarrassing way no less:  while trapped in an outhouse bathroom he gets stabbed with a metal pole.

"Them damn enchiladas!"

This is one of Núñez's first roles and, along with Return of the Living Dead (also 1985), he would establish himself a nice little genre following.  He would go on to be a prolific character actor, appearing in tons of movies and TV shows, including Tour of Duty (series that ran from '87-90), Lethal Weapon 3 (1992), Street Fighter (1994), Scooby-Doo (2002), and Black Dynamite (2009).  He also had the lead role in Juwanna Mann (2002).

After Vic slaughters Joey, he is carted off to jail and not seen again in the movie.  I guess the idea is that once more killings start, he would be a suspect or something, but really, at the end, I'm left wondering why Roy didn't go after Vic and why he murdered everybody else instead?

Putting his talents of meat-headed dickishness to more use, Mark Venturini would also star in Return of the Living Dead, in which he played lead punk, Suicide.

Carol Locatell played the crazy neighbor lady Ethel who rides around on a small motorcycle with her not-bright adult son Junior (Ron Sloan).  She owns the property next to the Halfway Home and is mad that Eddie and Tina keep sneaking over to her land to have sex.

A lot of comedy mileage is gotten out of Ethel swearing and verbally berating her son.  At one point she calls him a "big dildo."

Locatell is a very prolific television actress, but I noticed she also starred with Pam Grier in Coffy (1973), which is pretty cool.

Final Thoughts:

Friday the 13th: A New Beginning is just that, a new beginning for the Friday films.  They tried to do something a little different in trying to work around Jason being dead from the previous movie, and while only half successful, I do appreciate the mystery element that hasn't been seen since the first film (who is the killer?), even if the payoff is weak.

This movie gets a lot of flack for the fake Jason, and I guess for also being the start of the decline in the series, but I found it more fun this time around than I have in the past.  This is definitely a second-tier Friday movie, but for the second-tier it's not too bad, and for not having Jason in it, it could be a whole lot worse.

Luckily we never find out, as Jason returns in Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI.  Look for a review next month.  It'll be on a Friday.

Hey, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning is 30 years old this year!  Happy Birthday, Roy!

"Real" Jason

Fake Jason

Check out the previous Fridays:
Friday the 13th
Friday Part 2
Friday Part III
The Final Chapter

Howling VI: The Freaks

Step right up, folks!  It's the sixth installment of my ongoing and important Howling Series Retrospective Review!  That of course means we're looking at Howling VI: The Freaks, so let's get right to it!

Howling VI: The Freaks (1991) is very much in the tradition of all the Howling sequels, being that it isn't very good and is only intermittently interesting, the latter of which really hinges on your personal tolerance for crummy direct-to-video werewolf movies.  I will say that part VI is an upswing in quality over the previous two installments, but only slightly.


The plot is still fairly generic, as is some of the acting, which ranges from serviceable to questionable.  The special effects are the main attraction and are the best they've been since part III.  There is even a transformation scene!  Sure, the quality of the final product may be debatable, but after the near-non-existent amount of werewolf action in part V, the makers of part VI at least had the good sense to bring some monsters into their monster movie.


The story beats of Howling VI basically involve a weird loner drifting into a small town, getting hooked up with a job, a place to live, and a love interest (all in one stop, mind you), before it's revealed that he's got the curse of the werewolf which leads to him being captured and put on display by Mr. Harker at his traveling freakshow, Harker's World of Wonders.  Mr. Harker, of course, is hiding his own monstrous secret...

It might seem like some of the finer points are being glossed over, but no, that's really about the gist of it.  Besides, it's the little details that are interesting, not the movie's run-of-the-mill plot lines.

Ian Richards (Brendan Hughes, Return to Horror High [1987]) is our drifter hero who is very concerned about the upcoming full moon.  In the classic tradition he is a sympathetic werewolf character, the kind that worries about his change cycle and is aware of the dangers it brings.  He keeps his distance from others and I would imagine this is part of why he's a drifter.  Also, he's British.



When he arrives in town he's harassed by the local sheriff (Gary Carlos Cervantes), told to move along (standard issue movie stuff), before he gets a job offer to help restore a local church with this guy Dewey (Jered Barclay).  There is a longer-than-necessary montage scene of them restoring the church and they do a ton of work.  The way it's cut together makes it seem like it's all in one day, but it was most likely a week or something.


When they're done some of the locals admire and compliment their work, including the sheriff, who tells Ian he did a good job.  So that's a good tip:  if you drift into a small town and you want to endear yourself to the local law enforcement, do some refurbishing work on a church, possibly during a montage.

The movie really takes its time getting to the werewolves and freaks, but once it does things really start to pick up.  The first highlight in the film is Ian's transformation scene.  It starts with Ian waking up in a hilarious fashion and screaming "OH, CHRIST!"

After that you got the standard stretching and changing of the hands, feet, back, and face transformation special effects stuff, they're all fairly decent.  However, once fully transformed, Ian the werewolf looks like this:

Definitely more of a man-wolf.  Watch the whole thing here:

President Obama welcomes you!

I said that the transformation scene was the first highlight of the movie, but actually before that happens Harker's World of Wonders rolls into town.

Harker's is one of those traveling carnival freakshow things, which has a vibe that is sort of a cross between Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983) and The Funhouse (1981).  It has all the standard carnival stuff, games, jugglers, snake charmers, clowns, and mimes, but the main attraction is the World of Wonders (aka: the freakshow).

When Ian takes Elizabeth (Michele Matheson), Dewey's daughter, on a date to Harker's, they get a personal tour of the freakshow by Mr. Harker (Bruce Payne) himself, who seems to have an interest in Ian (it is implied that the two of them share some sort of history).

Mr. Toones (Deep Roy) is one of the first stops on the tour.  He's a little person who sits at a table playing cards.  Not a big deal really, but then it is revealed that he has a third arm underneath his right armpit.

The bummer thing about this third arm gag is that it never comes into play the rest of the movie, as it's a weird little detail that is forgotten.  I would've loved it if Mr. Toones fired a gun with his hidden third arm or something, but alas, this movie delivers no such thing.

After Mr. Toones plays a few hands, the next attraction is the half man, half woman Carl/Carlotta (Christopher Morley), who sings a song.  This is really the tamest of all the freaks but Morley really gives Carl(otta) some layers, playing the character as kind of a jerk with a bad attitude, not to mention a possible relationship with Mr. Toones.

Apparently Morley was an actor and female impersonator known for cross-dressing roles, most famously the transvestite who gets roughed-up in Freebie and the Bean (1974).  Morley also had a reoccurring role on General Hospital, was She-Tim in Bachelor Party (1984), and played a drag queen Marilyn Monroe in Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead (1991).  A very kind YouTube user has complied all of Morley's scenes from Howling VI into this clip:






Another one of the acts is Mr. Bellamey (Antonio Fargas) and he's a weird clown-jester who bites the head off a chicken.

Not much of a freak per-se, but uh, okay, whatever.

Antonio Fargas is one of the bigger names in the cast.  He of course played Huggy Bear on TV's Starsky and Hutch and was also in a ton of movies, including Across 110th Street (1972), Cleopatra Jones (1973), Foxy Brown (1974), Car Wash (1975), and a bunch of other stuff (he's still working to this day).  So it is really weird to see him bite the head off a chicken.

Alligator Boy (Sean Sullivan) is a real-deal freak, the kind with scaly skin and all that stuff, and while he acts ferocious he is actually a big softie.  His name is Winston and even better, he has a pet cat that is named Winston II.  Alligator Boy gets a little bit of a subplot and even helps Ian out later in the film.  He's basically the secondary protagonist.

After Ian is captured by Harker and put on display at the freakshow, Harker throws werewolf-Ian Winston II and wants him to eat it for a gathered crowd.

That cat is not happy during this scene.  And no, Ian doesn't eat the cat, much to the crowd's disappointment.

Also, this scene has an appearance by actress Elizabeth Shé in a non-speaking cameo as her character Mary Lou from the previous sequel, Howling V: The Rebirth (1989).  I guess she shows up in the next film as well, which I've seen (years ago) but don't remember her specifically.  I think they try to tie these films together, but I'm not sure.  I'll talk more about that when I watch and review Howling: New Moon Rising (1995).

Harker is the kind of villain with an aristocratic aloofness to him, practically sneering all of his lines.  He also has that vague European threatening quality about him which serves the character well (similar to Philip Davis' character Count Istvan in the previous Howling movie).

I've read this in more than one review, so this isn't an original thought, but Harker (and actor Bruce Payne) definitely gives off a vibe that is comparable to actor Julian Sands.  So if you know Sands' work, than you know what kind of villain this movie is giving you.

Now time for the SLIGHT SPOILER:  Late in the movie it is revealed that Harker is a vampire.  This happens in a scene where he pops out of his coffin which is disguised as a couch in his RV and biting and throwing a guy (the snooping mayor) through the roof of his trailer:

Monster Harker is a Nosferatu-style vampire that sort of resembles a purple version of the Salem's Lot (1979) creature, although with a rufflier shirt:

In the end when (AGAIN SPOILER) Harker is killed by staking and by sunlight, there is a disintegration scene that looks like it was accomplished by using time-lapse and an air cannon.  It reminds me of a combination of the finales to The Evil Dead (1981) and Gremlins (1984).

One more thing I have to bring up about this movie:  Boom mics.  They're all over the place!  For those of you who don't know, boom microphones are used to record sound during movies and they are these microphones on long poles that are supposed to hover above the actors during filming.  Sometimes (especially in low budget movies) it will dip into frame.  It happens at least three times during Howling VI.

They shoulda hired a boom operator with greater arm strength.



Let's talk cast & crew:

Director Hope Perello worked as a production coordinator on some Cannon Films, most notably Stuart Gordon's From Beyond (1986) and Dolls (1987), and also as a producer on Catacombs (1988) and Puppetmaster (1989).  She would go on to direct Piper Laurie in comedy/drama St. Patrick's Day (1997), which was her last film credit.  She is now the director of the Pasadena Space Arts Center.

Novelist Gary Brandner once again gets "based on" credit for his books, even though nothing (once again) was used from his series.

Screenwriter Kevin Rock also wrote the sequels Warlock: The Armageddon (1993) and The Philadelphia Experiment II (1993).  His real claim to fame is writing the screenplay for the ill-fated Fantastic Four (1994) film, a Roger Corman production of legendary terribleness, never intended for release (it has still to this day never seen a legit release).

Michele Matheson played Rebecca, Randy Quaid's Amish girlfriend in Kingpin (1996).

Sean Sullivan was Phil, the guy trying not to spew in Wayne's World (1992) and he was also a member of Buford Tannen's gang in Back to the Future III (1990).

Deep Roy is of course a famous little person actor, appearing in Flash Gordon (1980), The NeverEnding Story (1984), seven episodes of Doctor Who, and more recently he was all the Oompa Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) and he has a small (haha) reoccurring character in the new Star Trek films.

I mentioned Bruce Payne earlier being a Julian Sands-type.  This is now confirmed since I look at his filmography and see that he took over for Sands in the titular role in the Warlock series with the third film, Warlock III: The End of Innocence (1999).  Payne also gets some good roulette advice from Wesley Snipes in Passenger 57 (1992):


Closing Thoughts:
Howling VI: The Freaks isn't so bad that you want to claw your eyes out; it's watchable.  That's my pull quote, but I'll go on to say that it is not a very good movie, as its low budget, direct-to-video qualities are too readily apparent, but it does offer some monster action and somewhat enjoyable special effects, so it at least does that right.  Also, there are some well staged and shot scenes in the film, with some good uses of lighting, which are the kinds of things that keep this from being unwatchably bad.

This is a unique entry in the Howling series, as it gives the werewolf another monster to fight against, and there's more action in this one than parts IV and V combined.  All in all, I'd say if you picked a random Howling sequel to watch, without having watched any of the others, this actually wouldn't be a bad one to choose.  It's still a bad movie, but you could have fun and enjoy it.  If interested, it's available on Netflix Instant  NOW.

Previous installments in The Howling Series Retrospective Review:
The Howling
Howling II. . .your sister is a werewolf
The Marsupials: Howling III
Howling IV: The Original Nightmare
Howling V: The Rebirth