FRIDAY THE 13th PART VII: THE NEW BLOOD (1988)

Studio:       Paramount Pictures
Director:    John Carl Buechler
Writer:       Daryl Haney, Manuel Fidello
Producer:  Iain Paterson
Stars:     Lar Park Lincoln, Kevin Blair, Susan Blu, Terry Kiser, Susan Jennifer Sullivan, Elizabeth Kaitan, Jon Renfield, Jeff Bennett, Heidi Kozak, Diana Barrows, Kane Hodder

Review Score:

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Summary:

A telekinetic teen inadvertently raises Jason Voorhees from his watery grave, kickstarting a new Crystal Lake killing spree.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

As a young girl, Tina Shepard runs from her family’s Crystal Lake cabin after her abusive father John hits her mother Amanda. Tina takes a small boat onto the lake. From the pier, John pleads for his daughter to come back. Tina shouts, “I wish you were dead!” Unintentionally, Tina’s dormant telekinetic abilities suddenly manifest from her anger, causing the pier to collapse, which kills John.

Years later, Amanda Shepard drives Tina back to the cabin to work with Dr. Crews on confronting her guilt over her father’s death. Tina meets Nick, who is hosting a surprise party for his cousin Michael at the cabin next door.

As their sessions go on, Tina suspects that Dr. Crews is merely trying to exploit her psychic powers, although Dr. Crews insists he only wishes to help her. Fits of frustration cause Tina to uncontrollably move objects with her mind.

Tina wishes for her father’s return while at the water’s edge. Using her telekinesis, Tina inadvertently resurrects Jason Voorhees from underwater, where he was trapped by Tommy Jarvis. Tina collapses.

When Crews and Amanda find her, Tina insists that she saw a man rising from the water, although she does not know who he was. Crews repeatedly dismisses Tina’s claims as delusions.

On his way to the surprise party, Michael’s car breaks down. Making his way on foot through the woods, Michael and his girlfriend Jane are killed by Jason with a metal spike.

Nick invites Tina to the party next door. Tina meets party guests Melissa, who has a crush on Nick and is jealous of his interest in Tina, sci-fi enthusiast Eddie, Russell, whose uncle owns the cabin, Russell’s girlfriend Sandra, Ben and Kate, David, and mousey girl Maddie and outgoing girl Robin, both of whom are interested in David.

When Tina has a sudden vision of Jason murdering Michael, she immediately rushes back to her cabin. Crews again claims that Tina merely experienced a delusion.

Jason murders a camper named Dan and steals his machete. Jason then kills Dan’s girlfriend by slamming her sleeping bag against a tree while she is inside of it.

The next day, Melissa spies on Tina and Nick as they confide in each other about their traumatic pasts. When Melissa teases Tina about being crazy, Tina uses her powers to nearly strangle Melissa with a pearl necklace.

Tina tells Crews what happened with Melissa. An argument about how best to treat Tina ensues between her, Crews, and Amanda. Tina psychically throws a TV at the doctor’s head.

Tina tells Nick that she suspects something is wrong at Crystal Lake. She asks to see a picture of Nick’s cousin and identifies Michael as the person she saw murdered in her vision.

Jason slaughters Russell on the shoreline before drowning Sandra in the lake.

Amanda snoops through Crews’ notes and discovers he had been manipulating her daughter. After finding Michael’s body in the woods, Crews walks in on Amanda. Tina overhears Amanda and Crews arguing about committing Tina to a psychiatric hospital. Tina steals the car keys and drives away.

A vision of Jason mutilating her mother causes Tina to crash. Tina runs into the woods. Nick eventually finds her while Crews and Amanda conduct their own search for Tina.

After making herself up to be more attractive to David, Maddie is killed by Jason inside a barn.

David and Robin have sex inside their cabin. Ben and Kate have sex in their van outside. Trying to make Nick jealous, Melissa comes onto Eddie, but ultimately spurns him.

Jason crushes Ben’s head outside the van. Jason shoves a party horn into Kate’s eye socket. Inside the cabin, Jason murders David at the refrigerator.

After finding Michael’s body, Nick and Tina return to Tina’s cabin. Looking for a handgun, Tina finds evidence that Crews was manipulating her along with a collection of newspaper clippings identifying the killer she resurrected as Jason Voorhees. Tina temporarily loses control of her ability at the revelation as items begin flying around the room.

Jason murders Eddie inside the other cabin. Jason then throws Robin out a second story window. In the woods, Jason murders Amanda. Dr. Crews flees.

Tina stays at her cabin hoping her mother will return while Nick goes to warn the others about Jason. After finding Eddie’s body, Nick returns to Tina’s cabin. Nick discovers that Tina left in search of her mother, but he runs into Melissa.

Tina finds Crews in the forest. Crews tells Tina that her mother died, but Tina runs into the woods looking for Amanda anyway. Jason kills Crews.

Tina finds her mother’s body among the mutilated corpses in the woods. Tina runs into a confrontation with Jason.

Tina psychically summons tree branches that pull Jason into a puddle. Tina sends a downed power line into the puddle to electrocute Jason. Jason recovers and chases Tina back to the other cabin. Tina psychically throws furniture at Jason before collapsing the porch on top of him.

Tina returns to Nick and Melissa at her cabin. Disbelieving Tina’s claims of what is happening, Melissa opens the front door to go outside. Jason puts an ax into Melissa’s face.

Following another telekinetic battle, Jason and Tina end up in her cabin’s basement. Tina uses her powers to tighten Jason’s hockey mask until it bursts from his disfigured face. Tina douses Jason in gasoline and sets the cabin on fire. Tina finds Nick, who was knocked down by Jason earlier, and they escape the cabin as it explodes.

Jason unexpectedly recovers to confront the duo once more on the pier. Tina ultimately uses her abilities to resurrect her dead father, who rises from the lake to pull Jason underwater.

An ambulance takes Tina and Nick away from the cabin ruins in the light of day.

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Review:

Fans give “Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood” a great deal of guff, a fair bit of which is rightly deserved due to a slipshod production.  Not all of its criticisms are earned necessarily, as the movie does get a few things conceptually right, even if execution is off.

For one thing, “Part VII” is the first Jason-centric entry in the series to have a throughline someone can definitively put a finger on.  It’s a poorly plotted one, yet still more than can be said of other “Friday the 13th” sequels where conveyor belts simply send partying teens into Jason Voorhees’ machete blade.

To be sure, “The New Blood” has plenty of that too.  But the lead’s motivation to redeem herself for her father’s inadvertent death provides a loose theme that actually makes this movie ‘about’ something.

Some years ago, young Tina Shepard’s dormant telekinetic powers came to life when she shouted, “I wish you were dead!” to her abusive father standing on a Crystal Lake pier.  Tina’s wish came true.  The pier collapsed around dear dad, trapping him underwater to keep company with Jason, still attached to the sunken stone Tommy Jarvis chained around his torso.

With Tina now a teen, Dr. Crews wants to get to the bottom of these psychic abilities by having the girl confront her guilt at its source.  When her frustration boils over, Tina wills her father to rise from his grave, but unwittingly resurrects Jason instead.  If Tommy Jarvis has blood on his hands for bringing back Voorhees in “Jason Lives” (review here), imagine what it will do to Tina’s mind when Crystal Lake’s killer takes his terror tactics to love interest Nick and his party guests next door.

From the Carrie White clone to the cheap coincidence of a conveniently populated cabin a few feet away, “The New Blood’s” setups are admittedly silly.  What else was anyone going to do to freshen the formula six sequels deep in the series?  Send Jason into outer space?  It would take a trip to New York and another one to Hell before producers would be desperate enough for that far out idea to take flight.  All premises being relative, telekinetic teen is one of the more grounded ones.

“The New Blood” certainly isn’t without problems, though they’re generally the same ones hamstringing every “Friday the 13th” film.  Secondary character development is as cursory as ever.  Never mind names.  Outside of “sci-fi geek” and “girl with glasses,” it’s nigh impossible to note anything distinctive about anyone.  Not only are several partygoer personalities redundant, they’re hitched to barely there love triangles or troubled romances that don’t do a single thing to create a connection.

“Part VII” also has some of the dumbest excuses for scene changes ever seen in a horror film, which is really saying something.  If you watch the movie with an eye for when people suddenly decide to change locations or why, none of their movements have any sensible reasoning behind them.

One scene has Tina and Nick debating her need to find her mother against his desire to gather his friends.  Despite knowing a murderous madman is loose, Nick willingly leaves Tina alone at her cabin, because she insists on waiting to see if her mother returns, to jaunt over to the neighboring house.  Nick finds the first body just a few feet from the front door, prompting a quick 50-yard dash back to Tina’s place.  Somewhere in those two minutes, Tina scrapped her plan to stay put to venture somewhere else.  At least Melissa, who sneaked away from that other cabin some incalculable time ago and had been who knows where since, serendipitously arrived within that window, though she and Tina never crossed paths.

The movie makes it seem like Crystal Lake’s layout puts large lengths between each landmark while establishing shots show the geography putting everything within easy shouting distance.  This makes believability an even bigger issue, although when isn’t it in slasher cinema?  No one ever hears anything whenever someone is murdered.  This includes one girl inside a van who doesn’t hear Jason crushing her boyfriend’s skull on the other side of a door.

The MPAA infamously did more butchering to “The New Blood” than Jason does onscreen in the film.  Nearly no blood is seen and the camera habitually cuts from any impact or penetration when a metal implement meets a body part.

This doesn’t excuse errant editing elsewhere.  “The New Blood” was just as notoriously a rushed project, which is a better explanation for why cuts occur in the middle of a moment only to return minutes later, picking up from the precise point where an interaction was interrupted as if nothing broke the rhythm.

What’s “good” about “Friday the 13th Part VII” then?  Well, it’s the first franchise appearance of Kane Hodder, commonly considered fans’ favorite Jason despite his four appearances being in the four “Friday the 13th” films commonly considered the fans’ least favorite.  And in spite of 1988 R-rating restrictions, a couple of well-directed scenes and iconic kills, like the brutal sleeping bag beatdown, leave a lasting mark.

Fred Mollin’s touch additionally accentuates Harry Manfredini’s music with deepened gravitas that isn’t as dated to the early 1980s.  Then again, it is dated to the late 1980s and practically overdoses on extended audio stings.

“Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood” is not a particularly well-made movie.  Nonetheless, I appreciate its abandonment of “Part VI’s” jocularity and attempt at adding a much-needed new dimension to the fiction.

Even though it is technically sloppy, I have to award it the same score as “Jason Lives” because canon-wise, “Part VII” plays straighter, and plays a bit better.  Maybe it will only be remembered as “the Friday the 13th with Carrie in it,” but that’s more of a distinguishable impression than what makes previous installments memorable.

Review Score:  65

Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives Review

Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan Review

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