Friday the 13th: Part VII- The New Blood
So, just to clarify here. The psychokinetic Tina resurrects her abusive father whom she accidentally killed about a decade ago to take the always-returning Jason Vorhees back to his watery grave…and all of this takes place AFTER 1986’s “Jason Lives: Friday the 13th- Part VI.” I just wanted to make sure I had all the facts straight in this latest chapter in the hilarious misadventures of Jason killing teenagers.
Camp Crystal Lake is not exactly the Hamptons here. The upkeep in this location where “The New Blood” takes place is drab and uninteresting to look at visually. And yet, Tina Shepard’s family has a vacation home here, and there’s another home right next to it where the requisite collection of teens and misfits come to celebrate their friend’s birthday. If this ALL takes place after the events of the previous six films in the “Friday the 13th” franchise, then the area of Crystal Lake has the greatest real estate agent of all-time, because there is no power in heaven or Hell that could get me to even rent one of these houses, given the history of murder and carnage in this area.
If I’m coming off snarky with those first two paragraphs, it’s not out of spite or resentment, but out of affection for the bonkers logic of the “Friday the 13th” franchise, which has always been my favorite of the iconic ’80s horror franchises. And when I finally watched “The New Blood” in 2009, it quickly became one of my favorite entries in the series. I like that Tina (Lar Park-Lincoln) is a character we can root for, and an interesting character dealing with some trauma that her mother (Susan Blu) genuinely wants to help her through, even as the doctor (Terry Kiser) just wants to exploit her gifts in hopes of resurrecting Jason for some fucking reason. That’s a fun hook for a mini-reboot of this franchise after the three-film Tommy Jarvis storyline that concluded with “Jason Lives.” And I like that the teenagers that find themselves in the crossfire in this film aren’t all entirely stupid, which had kind of become a given in the franchise after the first two; some of them actually show some ingenuity before getting killed off, some of them we even like before they die. Even on a budget of less than 3 million dollars, director John Carl Buechler and writers Daryl Haney and Manuel Fidello try to elevate this film beyond just being another cheap slasher film, with brief quotations of the “Dies irae” hymn in the soundtrack by Fred Mollin in between Henry Manfredini’s iconic theme to underscore the issue. Even if the film doesn’t reach the heights of the first two “Friday the 13th” films, it has something more going on than setups for kills.
And yet, the sleeping bag kill in this movie might be the most iconic part of this entire film. When Kane Hodder, in his first time out as the masked menace of Crystal Lake, just straight-up lifts the woman in the air, still in the bag, and slams her up against that tree, it’s one of the best moments in the film. This film lacks the sense of humor of “Jason Lives,” and Tina’s story is straight-up soap opera with one of the worst psychiatrists in movie history, but how can you not appreciate the fit-for-the-slaughter group of teens in the next house over, including a snooty bitch, a sci-fi-writing weirdo, a nerdy girl who cleans up well, and a couple that smokes weed before having sex (and we know what that combo means in this franchise)? The combination of elements doesn’t put it on the level of the first two “Friday the 13th” films, and I’l admit to enjoying “Jason Lives’s” awesomely groan-worthy humor a lot, but “The New Blood” was exactly what this franchise needed to reassert itself, even if it did piss away the goodwill the film gives audiences after the fact.
