But before we get to that, I thought instead of giving you another interchangeable movie poster as the art for the post about Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985), I'd go for this funny t-shirt design, which I almost bought except I've been adding a few too many t-shirts to my collection in the past year. (While refusing to get rid of the old ones, leaving my closet perpetually overstuffed.)
I mean it's funny for obvious reasons, but it also gives me a chance to talk about one of the most interesting elements of the whole franchise: the date Friday the 13th really has nothing to do with anything.
Friday the 13th was, of course, the date on which the first massacre of innocent camp counselors occurred, back in the first movie. Or was it also the date Jason drowned? I can't remember, but they would have had to incorporate it into the first movie to justify calling the movie that, since there was no previously existing property they were drawing on.
Since then? It means bupkis.
If this franchise were being created in the 2010s instead of the 1980s, the screenwriter would hold him or herself to more rigorous standards. There would be something ritualistic about the Friday the 13th date and it would be incorporated into each narrative. It might be similar to the Halloween series, where there is, in fact, one day they are trying to continually avoid related to Michael Myers: October 31st.
You usually get a handful of Friday the 13ths every year, so indeed, these stories could all take place on that date. But as far as I can tell, they do not. In fact, I only remember Friday the 13th being invoked one other time in the whole series, though it may have been the same footage in multiple movies, because it's someone telling a campfire story to scare people, and this footage comes back a couple times.
I just thought that was interesting.
Well Friday the 13th: A New Beginning is the first since the original that does not begin with recycled footage from the previous film. And they easily could have gone with that, because despite the promise of a fresh start, it does begin with a character from the previous film, who was played Corey Feldman there. His name is Tommy, and Feldman does play him again just for the length of the dream sequence that opens this film.
I was not, at first, sure if it was a dream sequence, but I'm certainly glad it was.
The film begins with Feldman in the woods, where he's gone to visit Jason Voorhees' grave. This grave looks comical; it just has Jason's first and last name on it, scrawled hurriedly in paint, like you might do if you were making a quick and dirty cemetery scene for your front yard as part of your Halloween decorations. It looked like a kid would have done it. And when Feldman's Tommy is scared from the scene by a couple older teenagers who plan to dig up Jason's corpse to gawk at it, we see Jason in the grave, still wearing his mask. Which is just an absurd way to imagine a funeral home burying someone, to add to the absurdity of the writing on the grave stone.
Of course, after Jason rises from the tomb, slaughtering both of the older teens, he starts to come for Tommy, frozen to the spot. And this is when an older Tommy -- at least five years older, maybe more -- startles awake in the backseat of a car, where he had been dreaming.
We soon learn Tommy is on his way to a halfway house. Although he's still somewhat timid by nature, the trauma of surviving the original interaction with Jason, as portrayed in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, has left him susceptible to bouts of rage and other antisocial behavior, which has led to joining a group of others who are similarly unable to thrive in a mainstream setting.
Finally. Something different than a bunch of teenagers going to the woods near Camp Crystal Lake to have sex.
Oh there's still people having sex in this movie. And the halfway house is still in the woods. But at least, as far as I can tell, these woods are not adjacent to Camp Crystal Lake. Though they may be, I certainly may have missed the reference. (If so, that's a pretty cruel thing to do to poor Tommy.)
And at this point I should tell you something about my viewings of these movies. Because they are so short, and because my younger son is staying up later and later (and refusing to abandon the living room until he's forced to go to bed), I am getting a later and later start on watching them while still maintaining optimism that I can finish at a reasonable hour. The "reasonable hour" last night was close to 1:45 after several naps during which I paused. This is a familiar tune, I've sung it before.
But this does mean my perception of the events in these films is becoming a bit foggy. And because the screenwriters have not earned my attention through a complex mythology, smart dialogue or clever twists in the plot, I've determined my loose grasp of the series isn't something to mourn. It's just a reality.
Though I should say, I do reward this film for doing something a little bit different. Does that make it a good film? Heck no. But at least they're trying. Sort of. Maybe.
One thing about the Tommy character that is clearly different is that we follow him for this entire film. The survivor of the previous films has always been summarily dispatched at the start of the next film, though in some cases, they may just be gone from the proceedings. I'd be lying if I said I could remember for sure. But they/we are quite clearly following Tommy for A New Beginning, and because it's the same character who looks different (played by a different actor), we are also conscious of a time jump in the way we weren't in previous films.
The other thing I'll say about A New Beginning is that it appears to stay true to a nominal notion of "science." Jason was as clearly dead at the end of the last movie as he's ever been -- well, at least as he's been since he originally drowned. So his continued existence was never actually "scientific" in the first place. But at least in this case, the person wearing the Jason mask is not actually Jason Voorhees -- spoiler alert -- but rather, a copycat killer who gets to have the same impact as Jason because Jason is really just a hockey mask anyway, isn't he? Anyone can look equally menacing behind that hockey mask.
I assume it'll be the actual Jason again, somehow, in the next film, which is subtitled Jason Lives, and again comes out just one year later. I'll watch it later this week.
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