Steezy's Movie Reviews #9 - Friday the 13th Part VII - The New Blood (1988)

• (c) Paramount Pictures
• Directed by John Carl Buechler
• Written by Manuel Fidello & Daryl Haney
• Rating: Rated R
• Genre: Horror, Thriller, Slasher

Who is in the movie?

The main focus of Friday the 13th Part VlI - The New Blood is our cast of character which includes:

• Tina Shepard (Lar Park Lincoln) / Young Tina (Jennifer Banko) - Tina is a girl with telekinetic abilities. These are brought on when she witnessed her father being physically abusive toward her mother.

• Amanda Shepard (Susan Blu) - She is Tina's mother. She is trying to help her daughter deal with her PTSD over killing her father with her telekinetic abilities.

• Dr. Christopher Crews (Terry Kiser) - Tina's psychiatrist who is studying Tina's telekinetic abilities.

• Michael (William Butler) - His girlfriend is throwing him a surprise birthday party next door to the Shepard's house.

• Jane (Staci Greason) - Michael's girlfriend. She's the one responsible for getting Michael's birthday party together.

• Russell (Larry Cox) - He is one of the friends at Michael's birthday party. He fulfills the trope of being the preppy character in the group.

• Sandra (Heidi Kozak) - Russell's girlfriend.

• Ben (Craig Thomas) - He is one of Michael's friends at the birthday party.

• Kate (Diane Almeida) - Ben's girlfriend.

• Eddie (Jeff Bennett) - He is one of Michael's friends at the birthday party. His thing is that he's an aspiring science fiction writer.

• David (Jon Renfield) - He is one of Michael's friends at the birthday party. His character fulfills the
  stoner trope.

• Robin (Elizabeth Kaitan) - She is Maddy's friend. Robin fulfills the trope of being the outgoing one of the group.

• Maddy (Diana Barrows) - She is Robin's friend. Maddy fulfills being the shy one of the group. She has a crush on David.

• Melissa (Susan Jennifer Sullivan) - She is one of the teens at Michael's birthday party. She fulfills the trope of being the group's snobby character.

• Mr. Shepard (John Otrin) - Tina's deceased alcoholic and abusive father. She accidentally killed him using her telekinetic abilities.

• Nick (Kevin Blair) - Michael's cousin. He is present at the birthday party. Nick fulfills the role of being Tina's love interest.

• Jason Voorhees (Kane Hodder) - The undead killer of Camp Crystal Lake. He was accidentally brought back to life in the previous film by a lightning bolt.

What is the movie about?

The film opens up with a voiceover talking about the death curse of Jason Voorhees that's wreaked havoc on Crystal Lake while a montage of clips from previous films plays. Explaining how he keeps coming back no matter how many people have tried to stop him. They show how the final confrontation between Tommy Jarvis and Jason Voorhees plays out in Part VI. Jason currently resides at the bottom of Crystal Lake with a large rock chained to his neck to hold him down there.

A young girl named Tina Shepard stands on her front porch, listening to her alcoholic father being abusive to her mother inside the house. When she can't take it anymore, she flees to a boat on their dock at Crystal Lake and rides it out there. Her parents come running after her. Tina begins to yell at her father to stop fighting with her mother. After wishing he was dead, Tina goes into a trance and the dock begins to shake before crumbling into the lake. Tina's father dies in the wreckage.

Cut to the present. An adult Tina wakes up with a jump from her dream while she's in the car with her mother, Amanda, implying the previous scene must've been a nightmare. They are on their way back to their old home to meet. Dr. Christopher Crews, a psychiatrist who is supposed to help Tina with her problems.

We meet a few teens who are staying in the cabin next door. One of the teens, Nick, attempts to help Tina with her luggage after one of her suitcases falls open onto the ground.

Tina seems to be apprehensive about the situation. She doesn't care for Dr. Crews and doesn't care for the idea of going back to the place where her father died. It is revealed that Tina has telekinetic abilities and seems to be having hallucinations recently. Dr. Crews takes Tina up to a room to start a new session. He sets a pack of matches on a table in front of her and tells her to concentrate on making them move. In order to get a reaction out of Tina, Dr. Crews begins to berate her that she's not trying. This distresses her and causes her to make the pack of matches move. Tina says she's able to do it by thinking about Dr. Crews. It looks like her abilities manifest when she gets emotional and feels guilty about her father's death.

Tina flees from the house and goes out to the dock on Crystal Lake. She remembers the night when the dock collapsed with her father on it. It becomes clear that Tina is responsible for her father's death because she used her telekinetic powers when she was angry about her parents fighting. This causes Tina to start crying and her telekinesis starts going wild.

Unfortunately, this seems to be the same area from Part VI where Tommy Jarvis had trapped Jason Voorhees and Tina inadvertently causes the chain around Jason's neck to snap. This frees Jason from his imprisonment and he pops out of the water. Tina gets scared and faints.

Jason walks out of Crystal Lake and heads into the woods.

Amanda and Dr. Crews come running out to the dock to where Tina had fainted. They take her back into the house where Tina tells them about the man she saw come out of the lake. Dr. Crews writes it off as another hallucination due to her guilt over her father's death, but Tina is adamant that what she saw was real and it has nothing to do with her father.

We cut to two teens, Michael and Jane, with their car broke down on the side of the road. They decide to abandon the car and camp out in the woods for the night. Jane is upset because they were supposed to be going to meet their friends where a surprise birthday party would be waiting for Michael.

Nick arrives at Tina's house to return one of the shirts that she left behind earlier. He invites Tina to come to Michael's birthday party and the two leave. Dr. Crews doesn't approve of this because he doesn't want there to be any distractions with Tina.

We return to Michael and Jane continuing forward into the forest, on their way to his uncle's house where everyone else is waiting. They pass by a sign that reads "Crystal Lake". Jason Voorhees is in the area and things do not end well for Jane and Michael.

Nick and Tina arrive at the party and we meet the rest of the characters. There's Eddie the science fiction writer, the stoner David, Russell and his girlfriend Sandra (no relation to Sandra from Part 2), Ben and his girlfriend Kate, the perky Robin, the snob Melissa, and the shy Maddy to fill our group of teens tonight.

Jason Voorhees has made it to the party and stalks from outside.

While Nick is showing Tina around and introducing her to everyone, Tina has a vision of Jason killing Michael in the same way we saw earlier. It seems like she's able to predict when someone is about to be killed by Jason for some reason. She drops her drink and runs away from the party. Tina goes back home and finds a spike sticking out of the front porch. She goes inside tells her mother and Dr. Crews about what she saw. Again, Dr. Crews still thinks these are delusions conjured up by her guilt and Tina tells him to go look at the spike in the front porch. Thinking it must've been left there by Jason. When they all go back outside to investigate, the spike is gone. This shakes Tina's confidence and she starts to question whether or not what she saw was real.

We cut to another couple camping out in the woods. Two more souls with bad luck who have the misfortune of meeting Jason Voorhees. He gets his trademark machete here.

The next day, the teens are having breakfast after the party last night. Everyone is kind of concerned because Michael and Jane never showed up.

Nick and Tina are together outside at the lake. Tina explains to Nick about the whole situation with her father's death and that she's here with her mother and her doctor from the mental hospital. Nick seems to be taking a liking to Tina and they kiss. Melissa is spying on them and gets jealous.

Tina goes inside her house to see her mother, but Dr. Crews walks into the kitchen and Tina decides to leave.

Tina decides to go back next door and try to find Nick again. Melissa decides to make fun of Tina and reveals to everyone that she was in a mental hospital. Tina gets emotional and ends up breaking Melissa's pearl necklace with her telekinesis. She flees from the party.

Later that night, Tina tells Dr. Crews and her mother that she's afraid of her powers, she keeps seeing things, and she doesn't want to stay anymore. After Dr. Crews starts yelling about how it's a bad idea, Tina throws a television at him with her powers. She begins to run away again and bumps into Nick. Tina asks Nick if Michael ever showed up and tells Nick she believes she saw him get killed by the man in the lake. Amanda comes downstairs and tells Tina that they'll leave in the morning.

Next, we cut to Russell and Sandra going skinny dipping in Crystal Lake and Jason appears. They are killed.

We switch back to the teens back at the birthday party, waiting for Michael to arrive. Jason stalks from outside. It's killing time again...

When does this movie take place?

The film doesn't specify, but the director has gone on to say there is supposed to be a 10-year gap between Part VI and Part VII. Yeah. I remember that brief time in 2001 where everything looked like the late 80's too.

Where does this movie take place?

The Shepard's home on Crystal Lake and their next door neighbor's house.

SPOILERS AHEAD
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Why is this happening?

It was all an accident.

This is another time where the "Why?" has already been revealed ahead of time. There's no real mystery here.

After one of Tina's sessions with Dr. Crews goes bad, she runs off to the dock to think about her father's death. She begins to wish her father could come back from the dead and her telekinetic powers begin to act up. Her abilities seem to be strongly linked to Tina's emotions. The problem comes when Tina's use of her telekinesis here ends up breaking the chain holding Jason Voorhees under Crystal Lake and inadvertently frees the killer from his watery home.

Considering Jason is undead at this point and he wasn't actually killed by Tommy Jarvis in Part VI, all he had to do was wait for something to happen. He wasn't dead. He was just trapped. Tina accidentally freed Jason. He goes right back to killing like nothing ever happened.

How no one noticed a body being submerged in the lake for 10 years... I haven't the slightest clue.

It turns out that Dr. Crews had no real interest in trying to help Tina with her telekinetic powers. No. His plan was to learn more about them and find some way to exploit Tina for his own personal gain. If we're looking for someone to blame for the events of this film occurring, I guess you can put the blame of everyone's deaths on Dr. Crews' lap then. If he wasn't interested in Tina's abilities, they might've never come out to Crystal Lake. If they'd never gone to Crystal Lake, Tina wouldn't have had an emotional break on that dock and broke Jason free from his chain. Maybe Michael and Jane would've made it to the party and everything would be hunky dory.

Then we wouldn't have a movie, though.
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How was the movie?

Two things are special about this movie. It is the first film to feature Kane Hodder behind the hockey mask. He's often considered to be the best Jason Voorhees out of everyone who's gotten the chance to play him. Kane Hodder would go on to play Jason Voorhees in the next three films after this. It's unfortunate his talent was wasted in some of the weakest films in the franchise though. Kane Hodder's portrayal of Jason has been considered to be the definitive version of the character. There's just something more menacing and scary about how Kane Hodder carries himself and there's a real anger felt behind his actions. The special effects team also do a really good job at highlighting all the wear and tear on Jason's body over the course of the series.

The second thing that makes this movie special is that it was the film that kind of put the idea in the air for a crossover versus film with Jason Voorhees. This was actually supposed to be Jason vs. Freddy, but things didn't pan out that way. Friday the 13th was slipping lower and lower at the box office and it seemed like New Line Cinema wasn't interested in doing a crossover film at the time. So, we ended up with this sort of pseudo-crossover film that's often been nicknamed Jason vs. Carrie.

As for the film itself, it's kind of a weird one. It still feels like a Friday the 13th movie. We are still dealing with partying teenagers and the setting is still in Crystal Lake. The whole thing with giving our survivor girl special abilities just feels off. I'm all for trying new things and I'm not going to hate on them giving the survivor girl a leg up on defending herself from Jason Voorhees. It just feels weird that we're introducing something like special powers and supernatural things seven movies later.

I know they technically did this is Part VI first when they brought Jason back from the dead, but that doesn't seem as strange as introducing Tina's character in the franchise. Making Jason an undead monster seems like a natural progression for a horror series with an unstoppable killer. Tina's character feels like she got lost at Crystal Lake on her way to Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters.

I will say this. Of the last four films in the core franchise (I'm not including Freddy vs. Jason and the 2009 reboot), this is the least offensive of the bunch. Like I said, it still feels like it belongs in the series because we're still dealing with teenagers partying at Crystal Lake. Things don't feel like a completely different movie until it's time for the big showdown between Tina and Jason. That's about the only time it begins to feel weird. It's almost like two different movies were happening at the same time and they ended up colliding with each other.

I'd say check it out. It's not as awful as it sounds and it's certainly better than the previous film.