That final chapter idea of part four thankfully was an empty threat. However, until ‘Jason Goes to Hell’ came out, Friday the 13th Part 5 was the closest thing this franchise had to a “Halloween III: Season of the Witch” type installment—basically, one that most fans of the series tend to purposefully ignore.
If you only edited so that the killer actually was (spoiler alert again) Jason Voorhees, instead of lunatic ambulance driver Roy, then it’s really not that much different from the other entries. Tommy Jarvis is back, although he is now a teenager, and living in a group home due to the trauma he endured in the last film.
This time he is played by John Shepard who does a solid job here. Though my favorite Tommy Jarvis is the one in Part 6, Shepard here is good at playing the role of a teenage with childhood trauma issues.
Had they followed through with the twist ending this movie puts forth, it would also have changed this series forever, and perhaps for the better. This movie was directed by Danny Steinmann, who is also apparently a famous porn director, and it shows here as the nudity count in this movie tops all the previous ones, and most of the latter ones.
Part five has a different vibe than a lot of the other movies. The mood is darkly comical, but in a very sleazy kind of way. This is the first of the movies to not be set on Camp Crystal Lake. It’s a few miles inland, in the town, which is populated by a weird mix of guys who act like greasy rockabilly hipsters from the 1950s and deranged hillbillies who wandered off the set of Deliverance.
“Jason” spends this movie hacking through a rather forgettable group of mentally unstable teens at the local shelter. This is one to see only if you are a fan of the genre, and of the series.
Friday The 13th Part 5: A New Beginning gets a two out of five: FORGETTABLE.
Vortainment 