Friday the 13th: A New Beginning

Friday the 13th: A New Beginning is a 1985 American psychological slasher film directed by Danny Steinmann and starring Melanie Kinnaman, John Shepherd, and Shavar Ross. It was originally supposed to be the first installment in a new era that was suppose to make Tommy Jarvis slowly become the next Jason Voorhees, but due to the poor reception of this movie, it reverted back to Jason Voorhees, with all of the Tommy Jarvis stuff getting scrapped shortly after, though he does appear in the following film.

Plot
Years after Tommy Jarvis (John Shepherd) murdered hockey-masked serial killer Jason Voorhees, he resides in a mental hospital and struggles with the trauma of the experience. When Tommy moves to an isolated halfway house, he has nightmares about Jason's return, and soon one of the patients (Dominick Brascia) is killed. As the body count grows, Tommy begins to question his sanity and wonder if Jason has risen from the dead. But, to determine the killer's identity, Tommy will need to survive.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) The film feels like it didn't exist and never needed a sequel since Jason Voorhees is already dead in the previous film.
 * 2) Outside of Tommy Jarvis's nightmares, and Roy Burns disguising himself as Jason Voorhees, this has nothing to do with Jason Voorhees whatsoever.
 * 3) Ridiculous and unrelatable moments such as Joey Burns literally getting killed by Vic Faden all over a chocolate bar.
 * 4) * What makes this worse is that Vic Faden yells at him to leave him alone, which Joey does, but somehow still gets killed for it, making it feel incredibly forced.
 * 5) Roy Burns, the one in disguise as Jason Voorhees the whole time feels somewhat redundant as he begins killing others after his son Joey was killed by Vic with an axe, which led him being arrested.
 * 6) * His motivation doesn't make enough sense: He plans to avenge the death of his son by killing everyone at Pinehurst and Crystal Lake but doesn't even try to kill the man who murdered him. Granted, his son's murderer was arrested so it would be impossible to get to him.
 * 7) * Also, he comes off as a discount version and a rip-off of Michael Myers from the Halloween franchise, since he wears a mechanic suit and a hockey mask.
 * 8) Almost every character feels unrelatable as they all are crazy and over the top insane for some strange reason that's never explained, making none of the characters relatable whatsoever.
 * 9) Most of the kills are off-screen and feel very poorly made, though this somewhat excusable as they were originally on-screen but the MPAA forced them to cut them out.
 * 10) Ridiculous and over the top acting, though this is most likely due to the fact that almost all of the characters are all crazy for some reason.
 * 11) The film does a poor job trying to set of what the tone is in the movie as whether or not it's suppose to be a serious horror flic or a dark comedy.
 * 12) Tommy Jarvis feels a bit wasted, as even though it's suppose to focus on him and it would build up him to become the next Jason Voorhees, it hardly even focuses on him as way too many new characters are being added and shoved in just for the sake of getting many kills as well as to most likely pad the movie to feature length, making his reappearance almost pointless.
 * 13) * It doesn't even help that after this movie's negative reception, all of these plans of making him the next Jason Voorhees would just be forgotten about as Jason is brought back to life in the next film.
 * 14) It overuses the whole car won't start cliche several times to the point it gets really repetitive and annoying at best. (They even do this with a chainsaw.)
 * 15) There is WAY too much nudity and sex scenes, seems fitting considering the director first directed a porno.
 * 16) The film ends on a shameless and horrible cliffhanger, where Tommy is wearing Roy's hockey goalie mask and wielding a butcher knife and about to kill Pam, making him the next killer. However, after the movie's negative reception, the idea of Tommy being a killer was scrapped.

Good Qualities

 * 1) It was nice for them to bring back Corey Feldman as the younger Tommy Jarvis who played as the character in the previous film to show some continuity of the last film, despite being only one scene.
 * 2) Solid performance from John Shepherd.
 * 3) Despite being pointless, the scene with one of the guys asking a girl if they can get married only for her to reject him while laughing as he gets overly angry about this is somewhat laughable.
 * 4) There are a lot of kills in the movie some of which being pretty well made, such as one in which Eddie is killed with a rope stuck on him as he's behind a tree.
 * 5) At least most of the movie takes place on a Friday the 13th like what the title says unlike the previous two films.
 * 6) Despite (BQ#4), Roy Burns' Jason Voorhees outfit does look cool.
 * 7) The scenes that show Tommy having dreams and hallucinations of the real Jason Voorhees are cool.
 * 8) Some characters are decent, like Tommy, Pamela or Reggie.
 * 9) Some parts of the movie are unintentionally funny, like the scene where Demon sings with his girlfriend while in a toilet (yes, really) or anything involving Ethel.

Reception
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning holds an approval rating of 18% based on 22 reviews, with an average rating of 3.6/10. On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 16 out of 100, based on eight critics, indicating "overwhelming dislike."

Trivia

 * This was the last film to be directed by Danny Steinmann before his death on December 18, 2012.