Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning

Is every moment a fresh beginning? If you’re TS Eliot, you’d say so…but a series like Friday the 13th? Lately it’s been more whimper than bang.

When did chinks start appearing in the Jason armor? Maybe here, with Friday the 13th: A New Beginning? Possibly, but there’s still so much nuttiness that it makes for a very compelling series entry indeed.

Friday the 13th Part V, follows up on the tale of young Tommy (Corey Feldman), who managed to escape the clutches of the Butcher of Camp Crystal Lake. This was a point where recent Hollywood whistle-blower Feldman had yet to become a star big enough for his agent to pull him away from this project (The year this was made, 1985, was the same year Corey’s career took off in The Goonies).

Here, Tommy is at the grave site of Mr Jason Voorhees. It’s a disturbing scene, in more ways than one, as Jason’s supposed “final” resting place is being beset by grave-robbers. In a downpour, Tommy watches as Jason re-animates (maybe a misnomer, as he wasn’t really dead) and eviscerates his two desecrators.

Tommy is then taken to the local sanitarium, one Pinehurst Halfway House (run by the Unger Institute of Mental Health), a secluded residential treatment facility for youngsters. He’s got the flop sweats, and has still got his creepy masks in tow, mostly as a tie-in to the fourth movie in the series…But not really. It’s at the facility where Tommy is introduced to his fellow misfits, as well as the centre’s overseers and staff.

This includes: a Blondie knock-off, Violet, a Goth-lite whose bad akimbo dancing matches the lurching Crispin Glover in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter; Reckless Reggie, a little African-American kid whose grandpa is Pinehurst’s chef; chunky chocolate aficionado, Joey, and an assortment of townsfolk lifted straight out of the Beverly Hillbillies.

Meanwhile, two of the town’s greasers have been murdered by their ride, two lovebirds laid waste in a thicket, and a masked man is on the loose, even as the mayor proclaims Jason is, “a handful of dust!”

Friday the 13th: A New Beginning is wacky and lovable, with a bunch of illicit drug-taking heretofore unseen in the series. There’s a cat jump scare that could’ve appeared on Mad TV, and death-by-shears ripped off from the proto-campground gore-fest, The Burning.

Good times!

***1/2 (out of 5)

 

31

If Malcolm McDowell (no stranger to terrible movies) heeded the advice of the film agent he played on Entourage…well, he’d have told himself to pass on Rob Zombie’s 31, a boring, ugly, stupid, awful misfire that makes RZ’s Halloween reboot look like the summit of achievement.

31 sees Rob Zombie channeling Quentin Tarantino with another number— the 70s — rehashing the sepia and grunge that gave his earlier works their Texas Chainsaw Massacre aesthetic, + slick QT-talk like “the dirtier the work, the luckier you get.”

To quote Steely Dan’s Dirty Work,
“Times are hard
You’re afraid to pay the fee
So you find yourself somebody
Who can do the job for free…”

It’s pretty pathetic for someone as rich and successful as Rob Zombie to crowd-fund their art, essentially double dipping as it’s getting people to pay for a finished product, not once, but twice. Thankfully, this reviewer happened upon 31 through a library digital streaming service, Hoopla.

But no fanfare for this tale, about a bunch of carnival freaks in a touring van who are forced to fight to the death in a game of the same name — 31.

It’s painstakingly drab, cheap-looking, and not even juiced by the presence of a wrinkly, baked-in-the-hot-sun Meg Foster or a neo-Nazi midget (if you can’t shock with a neo-Nazi midget, then it’s time to find another line of work).

One thing 31 has going for it, sorta, is McDowell camping it up like a powder-wigged Amadeus harlequin, the Svengali figure who goes by the name of  Father Napoleon-Horatio-Silas Murder…Why? It’s just pseudo-smart syllable multiplication, speaking of numbers…

Harlequins, carny folk, big tops…It’d be nice to see RZ put aside his clown obsession. Then again, it’s even bled into his other business as well: he and his band performed the Grand Funk Railroad classic rock radio chestnut “We’re an American Band,” on Kimmel, bedecked in clown make-up, which provided more frights than this.

Variety nailed it with their take: [31 is a] “fanboy’s highlight reel of homages, without any of the credibility or context that made most of the films he’s inspired by so fine.”

*1/2 (out of 5)

[Listen to us talk House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects!]