Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood review.
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood is an interesting entry in the long running franchise. It serves as both the last of the classic “Jason stalks and murders teens around the lake” stories…and the beginning of wild swings that would doom the rest of the series.
Classic movie reviews will contain spoilers.
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood
Directed by John Carl Buechler
Written by Manuel Fidello and Daryl Haney
Starring Lar Park Lincoln, Kevin Blair, Susan Blu, Terry Kiser and Kane Hodder
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood Review
People have different opinions as to when the Friday the 13th series went off the rails. Some argue that it’s with Part V when we saw an imposter Jason hack his way through a terrible movie. Others choose the moment Jason is resurrected as an indestructible zombie at the beginning of Part VI. The problem with either of those reading is that Part VI is awesome. It’s a hard sell for a series downfall happening before we see one of its highest peaks. For me, the answer has always been simple. It’s the climax of Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood.
That is not to say that the climax of this movie is bad…it isn’t. I enjoy Jason’s showdown with Tina as much as anything else in the film. What it represents, however, is a series that will continue to travel down a path of increasingly silly ideas that look better on a poster than on film. Jason Voorhees meeting his match in a super-powered teen isn’t a bad idea in the traditional sense. It isn’t even The New Blood’s fault that the series would continue to double down on these wacky impulses in the future. But it does give us what I feel is the definitive jump the shark moment for the series.
What makes Friday the 13th Part VII so interesting is that it isn’t just the beginning of the end. It’s also the last traditional Friday movie that sees Jason butchering a new crop of teenage partiers who have assembled at Camp Crystal Lake. Part VIII puts the massacre out to sea. Jason Goes to Hell targets adults (and unknown family members) in town…all while Jason is passed from body to body. Jason X sends him to the future…in space. Freddy vs. Jason sees him tearing up a suburb before facing off with the child-molesting burn victim in a fight to the death. Aside from the 2009 remake…Friday the 13th Part VII also represents the end of the beginning.
So let’s enjoy the classic carnage while we can. Unfortunately, the MPAA forced a lot of cuts to the kills so most of them aren’t very memorable. Jason does a strange thing in The New Blood where he starts killing people with whatever is handy. I don’t know how a party horn or a weed-whacker were handier than his trusty machete…but they’re (censored) fun anyway. Friday the 13th Part VII does give us one of the all-time best Jason kills, however. I’m talking, of course, about the sleeping bag into a tree kill. Even this was edited down form its original form…but nothing could lessen its awesomeness.
It’s not all about Jason’s slaughter of barely developed characters this time around. Our final girl is something new for this seventh outing. Tina (Lar Park Lincoln) has telekinetic powers…and a very silly backstory. When we last saw Jason Voorhees he was being chained to the bottom of Crystal Lake by Tommy Jarvis. Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood picks up from that place and shows us how he was freed.
In a flashback, a young Tina uses her powers to bring a dock down around her drunk, abusive father…killing him. We jump forward in time as a grown Tina and her mother arrive back at Crystal Lake for a therapy session with Dr. Crews (Terry Kiser). Telekinetic Tina accidentally frees Jason (Kane Hodder, for the first of four times) while wishing she could bring her father back. Unleashed by Tina’s uncontrolled powers…Jason is back to kill all those people we talked about earlier.
The climax of The New Blood gives us something new to the series. While Jason has been thwarted before (even killed once by Corey Feldman) he’s never been physically dominated the way Tina can do. He’s no match for her telekinetic powers. There are some fun ideas in the fight…but it’s painfully short for a movie that was marketed on the showdown. The movie ends with Jason right back where he began the movie…chained to the bottom of Crystal Lake.
But things had changed, forever. From the Telekinetic Tina fight forward…no idea was too silly for this franchise to tackle. I’m not blaming Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood for every bad decision that followed. But it is the line of demarcation. The series had bad ideas before this. Those bad ideas were missteps in the service of keeping a franchise alive when they had killed their main antagonist. Future bad ideas were a result of simply having no other ideas of what to do with him. Would he have ended up in space either way? Probably. Would every classic series entry from this point on still have a weird gimmick? Most likely. It isn’t Part VII’s fault…but Part VII is the moment the focus of the series went from killing teens at Crystal Lake to putting Jason in different situations…almost always to his detriment.
That covers Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood’s place in the series…but not how it fares as a movie. It’s…good? I can’t tell how much of that is nostalgia. Or even longing for the parts of the movie that are the classic goodness of partying teens being casually and violently dismissed. We didn’t spend any time discussing those characters which should tell you how well-developed they are. Uber-bitch Melissa (Susan Jennifer Sullivan) is easily the highlight of the group.
Chemistry between characters is a problem. Everyone looks like they’re having a fun time…they just don’t seem to click with each other at all. Tina has a love interest with which she has no sparks. In a movie like Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood…it doesn’t really matter. They’re all just fodder anyway. This movie falls right in the middle of the pack for the series. It’s nowhere near as bad as series lows…and nowhere near as good as series highs. An easy one to put on and turn your brain off to. Which, in a way, is the series at its best.
Scare Value
You can feel the shifting of the series happening as you watch Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood. The series had grown bored of unleashing its killer on Crystal Lake and was desperate for new ideas. We get plenty of classic Jason kills here…but we also see the rise of the outside the box ideas that would plague the series moving forward. Tina is a fine adversary for Jason…but the series would never recover from the need to up the stakes with ideas that, frankly, aren’t that good. From telekinetic Tina to Manhattan to body swapping to space…the series would never be the same. The New Blood marks both the end of the franchise we knew and the beginning of what it would become.
3/5
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood Links
Streaming on Starz
Rent/Buy on VOD from Vudu and Amazon
Buy the Friday the 13th Collection on Blu-Ray from Amazon
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood Trailer
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