Friday the 13th Part V
1985 Directed by Danny Steinmann
Halloween Marathon 2024 Day 4 Film 9
Full Title: Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning
I needed to watch something sleazy after midnight. This fits the bill- about as messily derivative and trashy a slasher film can be. Tommy Jarvis is sent away to an outdoor camp with daily psychiatry for at risk teens. He's still having visions of Jason from the previous film, with the hockey mask tormenting his waking and dreaming moments. That's about all there needs to be for setup- as the cast of teens seem to each be in their own little movie as an excuse to the mass amount of bodies that will be stacking up in this film.
One of the other teens goes mad with an ax and chops up another that had been pestering him while chomping on chocolate bars. Other scenes involve random violence spouting out throughout the camp, and a neighbor lady named Ethel chews up scenery like there's no tomorrow saying how bad that camp is. Her cartoonish hillbilly son Junior also steals moments making emotional outbursts on screen. I have a feeling like they're a small callback to Texas Chainsaw type family horror. Who knows what she's cookin' up? Eventually they're slayed like the rest of them- with skewers and hatchets and scenes with nude or scantily clad women. There's buckets of garish gore with characters running around like a Scooby-Doo mystery.
There's even some scatological comedy with enchilada farts and revved up chainsaws. It's all for the sake of chuckles and eeww moments that feels like it's already commenting on how disposable and lurid the series had become by that point. Where do you go after you've killed off the main baddie? Space? Hell?..... Manhattan??? Those settings will be for later sequels, but this one seems to encapsulate the trash of the era. Everything is absurd, with no connection between the various characters, kills, and fake-out endings. The cinematography is all over the place with Jason smashing in a wall like a Kool-Aid man with a splashy fast zoom. The score and setting drive the movie, with the "dark and stormy night" being taken literally; making this film more of a modern monster movie more than a humanistic slasher film.
That monster movie of the week feel is exactly where Jason starts to go- and where Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends (2021/2022) takes the character of Michael Myers. Myers becomes this unstoppable killing machine, complete with a traumatized victim side story like Tommy Jarvis in Corey taking up the monster's mantle. These themes retread Friday Part V - without all of the humor and dumb gusto.