Jason died in the previous “final” chapter of this series but Paramount will be damned if a little thing like that will stop them from milking a profitable franchise. I was kind of hoping that this would be the “new beginning” of the zombie Jason films but my hopes are crushed like so many horny teenagers. Instead we get a wet fart of a generic slasher that has the sleaziest direction of the franchise so far. Apparently, the director was an absolute piece of shit that sacrificed cool kills to the MPAA so he could have more extended shots of boobs. What fun.

In a series that ends up being way more interconnected than I figured, Part 5 follows Tommy Jarvis, the kid Corey Feldman played from the previous movie. It’s several years later and Tommy is now 17 and extremely fucked up over what happened in Part 4. He has been at a psychiatric ward and is just now being sent to the Pinehearst Home for Horny Teens with Mental Problems. He is promised that it’s different here and there are no guards, which is unfortunate because immediately after he gets there one of the kids murders another one for the temerity of being awkward and offering him chocolate. This random murder is just the precursor to a whole slew of new murders as Jason(?) returns(?) with a vengeance(?).

Spoiler alert but it’s not Jason. The movie wants you to think it’s Tommy having a psychotic break or something but it’s just that murdered teen’s estranged father who uses the Jason persona to kill everyone. Well, everyone except the teen that killed his kid. This whole set-up makes no sense since we hear that the murdered kid was abandoned when his mom died in childbirth and floated around all over the place before ending up in Pinehearst. Coincidentally, he winds up in the same town where his dad is a paramedic that somehow knows this teenager is his abandoned sone and also we see later that his dad somehow had a recent picture of him in his wallet and honestly most of the plot is kind of a jumbled mess. But then the director pretty much didn’t give a shit about anything in this movie unless it had nipples and jiggled, so whatever.

We do get some stellar performances from some of the actors of the minor side characters in here that were mostly improv since the director was also often doing coke and hand waving them to just do whatever. Goddamn, the more I learn about this film, the more I feel bad for the people in it. Those few shining spots, however, can’t save the rest of this lame-ass film as we trudge from unlikeable character to unlikeable character being killed in the most tame and off-screen ways I’ve yet seen. The ending also has like 3 fake-out dream sequence/hallucinations because they still really wanted to push the idea that Tommy was definitely for sure going to be the new Jason of the franchise going forward. Another spoiler: He was not.

This for sure feels like the weakest of the franchise so far. With the excessive focus on tits, a distinct lack of Jason, and murders that look, for the most part, exceptionally boring; A New Beginning was more like a false start. Apparently audiences felt much the same way I do. Because of the lack of Jason, this one gets compared to Halloween 3 (the one without Michael), which is terrible because that movie was at least bonkers in a fun way.

Score: 1.5 out of 5