I've gone round and round with my feelings about Friday the 13th Part 5: A New Beginning. I've never hated it for it being all a ruse and not featuring Jason at all. I actually always felt that that was a little more interesting and brought something new to the mix. The truth is that it's just not a great horror film,
and doesn't really resemble one. What I've gradually come to realize is that it's nothing more than a black comedy, and an unintentional one... I think. To be fair, this film could've been left out of the series altogether and the story wouldn't have changed that much, but I find it too enjoyable to ignore it. Even though I burst out laughing at certain scenes and moments in the films in this series, this one really is, beat for beat, a comedy, and it makes me laugh pretty hard. As a horror film, it's bumblingly terrible, uninteresting, horribly shot, shodily edited and contains story & dialogue that are just egregious on all possible levels. It's very much the black sheep of the franchise, just like how Halloween III: Season of the Witch was to the Halloween series. The big difference between the two is that even though Halloween III had nothing to do with the franchise who's moniker it carried, it was actually a very solid movie. This movie isn't, but it winds up being very entertaining anyway. It's also interesting to note that the films were due to follow the storyline of Tommy Jarvis becoming the new Jason, but the nearly universal negative response caused the studio to bring Jason back. Thankfully, that change paid off and the best film of the series was soon to follow.
March 25, 2007
