John Carl Buechler's Friday the 13th Part 7: The New Blood
Written: Nov 08 '00 (Updated Nov 08 '00)
Product Rating:
Pros: The psychically endowed heroine is an interesting idea, but unfortunately, the formula of these films prevents it from being explored in anything more than the most cursory sense
Cons: Wooden acting, pedestrian direction, and a complete lack of gore amongst other things.
Mike_Bracken's Full Review: Friday the 13th - Part 7: The New Blood
Friday the 13th Part 7: The New Blood:Paramount Pictures Rating: USA: R/ UK: 18/ Australia: M
In 1986, Paramount Pictures released Tom McLoughlin’s Friday the 13th Part 6: Jason Lives, the sixth installment in their ever popular slasher film series. All in all, part 6 was better than it had any right to be, mainly because McLoughlin (who not only directed, but also wrote the story) injected some much needed humor into the series, creating a film that played like one part prototypical slasher film, one part spoof. Unfortunately, Jason Lives failed to break the $20 million mark during its theatrical release, so Paramount decided to return to the more standard stalk and slash formula (with a small twist) when they released their 1988 entry, Friday the 13th part 7: The New Blood, which is arguably one of the lamest entries in the entire series.
Once again, the plot focuses around the infamous Crystal Lake (which has reverted to the Crystal Lake moniker, despite the fact that the town name had been changed to Forrest Green in the last film), perennial hunting grounds of one Jason Voorhees, a super-deformed man-child who drowned in the lake while at a summer camp many years prior. Last time out, Jason’s arch nemesis Tommy Jarvis accidentally resurrected our hockey-masked madman from the dead and had to send him back to the bottom of Crystal Lake in order to stop him for good.
However, this being a slasher series, I think we all realize that nothing is forever and you just can’t keep a good slasher down. Sometime after the events of part 6, a new group of young adults have gathered at the lake in order to throw a surprise birthday party. This group of nondescript characters includes all of the usual suspects—a pothead, a rich girl who’s easy, a young couple in love, a mousy good girl, and so on. Don’t worry about these characters or who played them—they’re only here to die violently and they have no real bearing on the story. The only guy worth talking about in this cabin is Nick, that devil-may-care stud who we all know will still be with us in the last reel. Nick’s not like the others—which all but guarantees he’ll be around at the climax.
No, the real story (or what passes for a real story this time out) is centered in the cabin next door. Our virginal heroine Tina (Lar Park Lincoln), her mother, and slimy psychiatrist Dr. Crews (played by none other than Terry Kiser—Bernie of Weekend at Bernie’s fame) have come to Crystal Lake so Tina can confront her guilt over killing her alcoholic and abusive father by destroying a dock he was standing on with her psychokinetic powers (thereby sending him to the bottom of Crystal Lake as well). Of course, we soon learn that our altruistic doctor isn’t really interested in helping our Carrie-wannabe—no, he just wants to document her psychic powers so that he can become rich and famous.
Long story short (amazing that a series that really has so little plot in each installment can take so much space to set up, isn’t it?), Tina goes to the lake and tries to use her psychic powers to resurrect her father (why he’s still on the bottom of Crystal Lake is beyond me—you’d think someone from the county would have dived to recover the body. Of course, why this girl would want to bring up a corpse that’s been on the bottom of a lake for more than a decade is beyond me as well—I’m sure Dad’s not gonna look the way you remember him…), but she instead resurrects the undead Jason. From there, it’s business as usual, at least until the climax, where we get to see a showdown between the psychically endowed heroine and the zombie Jason.
Many series detractors were quick to label this film ‘Carrie versus Jason’, citing the psychic girl angle is basically just a reworking of the driving idea behind Stephen King’s first novel. And while it is indeed that when you look at it on the surface, there actually seems to be a bit more to it.
The marriage of slasher killer and virginal heroine is one that’s long been established in genre criticism. Even the most casual fan understands the dynamics behind the idea of these films—virginal young women battle killers who murder anyone who engages in immoral activity with her purity eventually allowing her to triumph over evil. At their core, they’re fables designed to teach youngsters about the dangers of leading an immoral lifestyle.
So, the cynical amongst us would be quick to label the idea of Tina being psychically gifted as just a weird plot twist designed to provide a new style of final showdown. However, I think it ties into the slasher canon in a much more integral way—and that the screenwriters perhaps deserve a bit of credit for having an original and interesting idea, even if they couldn’t implement it in a manner that makes the movie more original than its predecessors.
Simply put, the standard belief regarding poltergeist activity and many instances of psychokinesis is that these events are often centered around young, virginal women on the cusp of womanhood—basically, the physical, mental, and hormonal changes occurring in these girls manifests in some kind of external form, particularly when under extreme duress. So, it’s really sort of interesting to see the virginal heroine exhibit these abilities—and doesn’t seem like such a convoluted stretch if you’re at all interested in psychic phenomena.
On top of that, the film has a weird, almost Freudian thing going on with the whole daughter/dead father thing that figures into the climax. I’m not going to regale you with any kind of analysis on that though—Even I’m not daring enough to be dissecting one of these films from a psychology standpoint.
John Carl Buechler takes the director’s seat in this installment (he’s also a Special FX technician for the film as well) and does a fair job with the lame duck script he’s saddled with. No one turns to these films expecting to find the next Dario Argento or Sam Raimi, but that doesn’t mean fans should have to sit through direction that’s lamer than the art films churned out by first year film students, either. Buechler keeps the pace moving, but rarely offers up any kind of new or intriguing visuals. Overall, this makes the film look incredibly ordinary—particularly when viewed on the heels of McLoughlin’s more daring part 6.
The cast is as flat and uninspired as you’d expect, filled with a group of thespians who’ve never gone on to star in anything else worth talking about. Terry Kiser is the only remotely bright spot here, and even then, his character is written in that bland Snidely Whiplash-style that keeps him from becoming an even two-dimensional character.
Hardcore fans of the series often give this one a little more respect than it deserves, and they do so for one reason—this film marks the first appearance of stuntman Kane Hodder as Jason. Hodder (who’s played the villainous zombie in each of the subsequent installments) is the first stuntman to ever don the hockey mask on more than one occasion. Overall, Hodder’s Jason is pretty average—the guy’s a zombie and he doesn’t run, how hard is this role to play? Hodder’s one strength is his physically imposing size—this guy dwarfs everyone on the set when in full Jason regalia. However, I’m still at a bit of a loss concerning why Hodder’s Jason is so revered by the fan contingent—I think guys like Richard Brooker and Ted White did just as good a job playing the character, and they actually had to run around and take some beatings that Hodder’s zombie Jason is clearly impervious to. This isn’t to take anything away from Hodder’s portrayal of the character—I’d just like to see some of the other guys who’ve played the relatively thankless role get some respect as well.
Moving on, The New Blood (which is a really bad title—we just had A New Beginning back in part 5, now we need new blood already?) is easily the least bloody entry in the series. Quite simply, there’s no blood in this film. However, before you start howling for the head of John Carl Buechler, consider that the original print of the film was pretty darn splatterific and that the MPAA forced Paramount to make approximately 10 cuts in order to get an R rating. These cuts occur in almost every death scene in the film, robbing each of any gore and impact they might have had and giving this movie a real neutered, almost PG-13 feel.
The shame of this is that it should be obvious to any serious gore aficionado that this installment had the potential to really deliver. There are some great new kills in this film, including a scene where Jason kills a character with a gas-powered weed whacker, a golf-swing style decapitation with an axe, several impalements, and my personal favorite, a scene where Jason picks up a girl in a sleeping bag, holds her by her feet, then swings her head into a tree trunk. These are solid kills—had they featured the gore FX work that was shot with them, this film might get a couple of extra stars from me for the carnage.
The standard Friday the 13th score gets a much needed makeover this time out. Harry Manfredini’s aural string assault and ‘chi-chi-chi-ha-ha-ha’ onomatopoeia is still present and accounted for, but the bulk of the film’s music is provided by Fred Mollin. Astute Friday fans will recognize Mollin as the man behind the music for the syndicated spin-off, Friday the 13th: The Series (a cool little show about two cousins and their occult mentor tracking down cursed antiques—Jason had nothing to do with the show, but that never stopped it from being successful). In fact, much of the music here would also turn up in the television show as well. This change of pace musically is nice—I’ve always been a fan of Mollin’s work and this gothic sounding score is a great example of why.
In the end, Friday the 13th Part 7: The New Blood is a weak film. Wile the screenwriters and director John Carl Buechler give it a game effort, they’re ultimately hampered by a weak cast, the MPAA ratings board, and worst of all, the built in blueprint that every Friday film must ultimately follow. The lack of blood and guts kills this film completely, because without it, this movie can’t even draw the hardcore gore audience who generally flock to these films (there is some T&A, though). The only reason this film holds any historical significance to series fans is because it marks the emergence of Kane Hodder as the ‘quintessential Jason’—and that’s not nearly enough reason to recommend it to the casual fan. Friday the 13th Part 7: The New Blood barely gets two stars from me—see it only if you’re a hardcore slasher film fan.
Product DetailsOriginal Title:Friday the 13th - Part VII - The New BloodActors: Kane Hodder - Kevin Spirtas - Lar Park-Lincoln - Susan Jennifer Sulli...More at iNetVideo.com
Tina Lar Park Lincoln a telekinetic mental patient travels back to Crystal Lake for some therapy that will allow her to transcend the tragic death of ...More at Family Video
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