Friday the 13th: A New Beginning
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 This hardly has anything to do with Jason
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Friday the 13th: A New Beginning is a 1985 American slasher film directed by Danny Steinmann and starring Melanie Kinnaman, John Shepherd, and Shavar Ross. It was originally supposed to be the first installment in a new era that was suppose to make Tommy Jarvis slowly become the next Jason Voorhees, but due to the poor reception of this movie, it reverted back to Jason Voorhees, with all of the Tommy Jarvis stuff getting scrapped shortly after, though he does appear in the following film.
Plot
Years after Tommy Jarvis (John Shepherd) murdered hockey-masked serial killer Jason Voorhees, he resides in a mental hospital and struggles with the trauma of the experience. When Tommy moves to an isolated halfway house, he has nightmares about Jason's return, and soon one of the patients (Dominick Brascia) is killed. As the body count grows, Tommy begins to question his sanity and wonder if Jason has risen from the dead. But, to determine the killer's identity, Tommy will need to survive.
Bad Qualities
- Outside of Tommy Jarvis's nightmares, and Roy Burns disguising himself as Jason Voorhees, this has nothing to do with Jason Voorhees whatsoever.
- Ridiculous and unrelatable moments such as Joey Burns literally getting killed by Vic Faden all over a chocolate bar.
- What makes this worse is that Vic Faden yells at him to leave him alone, which Joey does, but somehow still gets killed for it, making it feel incredibly forced.
- Roy Burns, the one in disguise as Jason Voorhees the whole time feels somewhat redundant as he begins killing others after his son Joey was killed by Vic with an axe, which led him being arrested, even though he could've just arrested him and give him punishment, which by the way Vic does arrest him, but still does these.
- Almost every character feels unrelatable as they all are crazy and over the top insane for some strange reason that's never explained, making none of the characters relatable whatsoever.
- Most of the kills are off-screen and feel very poorly made, though this somewhat excusable as they were originally on-screen but the MPAA forced them to cut them out.
- Ridiculous and over the top acting, though this is most likely due to the fact that almost all of the characters are all crazy for some reason.
- The film does a poor job trying to set of what the tone is in the movie as whether or not it's suppose to be a serious horror flic or a dark comedy.
- Tommy Jarvis feels a bit wasted, as even though it's suppose to focus on him and it would build up him to become the next Jason Voorhees, it hardly even focuses on him as way too many new characters are being added and shoved in just for the sake of getting many kills as well as to most likely pad the movie to feature length, making his reappearance almost pointless.
- It doesn't even help that after this movie's negative reception, all of these plans of making him the next Jason Voorhees would just be forgotten about as Jason is brought back to life in the next film.
- It overuses the whole car won't start cliche several times to the point it gets really repetitive and annoying at best.
- They even do this with a chainsaw.
Good Qualities
- It was nice for them to bring back Corey Feldman as the younger Tommy Jarvis who played as the character in the previous film to show some continuity of the last film, despite being only one scene.
- Solid performance from John Shepherd.
- Despite being pointless, the scene with one of the guys asking a girl if they can get married only for her to reject him while laughing as he gets overly angry about this is somewhat laughable.
- There are a lot of kills in the movie some of which being pretty well made, such as one in which Eddie is killed with a rope stuck on him as he's behind a tree.
- At least most of the movie takes place on a Friday the 13th like what the title says unlike the previous two films.
Reception
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning holds an approval rating of 18% based on 22 reviews, with an average rating of 3.6/10. On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 16 out of 100, based on eight critics, indicating "overwhelming dislike."
Trivia
- This was the last film to be directed by Danny Steinmann before his death on December 18, 2012.