Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood

MOVIE #1,205 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 10.23.23 50 MOVIES IN 32 DAYS! For the first time in a few movies, this sequel starts with a recap/refresher full of old clips, only this time it's accompanied by some very bad narration. And this is incredibly odd because none of the characters have any clue Jason exists in this version of Crystal Lake. When Tommy Jarvis chained him to the bottom of the lake at the end of Part VI, nobody thought to look for the body and then everyone got collective amnesia about his ever having existed!

The concept of this one is essentially “Carrie vs. Jason” and our lead character is Tina, who we see accidentally killing her father with telekinesis as a child. His body also fell to the bottom of the lake and nobody thought to look for it either (more on this later!). Many years pass and she returns to the scene of the crime for some exposure therapy led by Terry Kiser, best known as Bernie from Weekend at Bernie’s. There she accidentally reawakens Jason with her powers. Whoops!

And so then Jason does what he does for the majority of the movie: goes on a killing spree, slashing and smashing young coeds in the woods. One larger point about the franchise is how these kills get more and more tame and less gorey as the films go along. I’m not sure if it was a mid-80s censorship thing or what, but the lack of creativity and decrease in violence is striking. Jason just slams a girl in a sleeping bag against a tree at one point (which is actually kind of funny)...



They sprinkle in some of the telekinesis stuff here in there — Tina throws a TV with her mind at one point and almost hits Bernie…


— but it’s mostly just the same old shit. We do see much more of Jason, though, as famed stuntman Kane Hodder would become the first actor to take over the role for more than one movie. But I don’t think this is very good (until the climax). This was first time composer Harry Manfredini didn’t write the score and it’s noticeably weaker and there’s some incredibly awkward editing…


But they gotta play the hits, and there are some incredible window-crash sequences, like this one which looks like a recreation from Part IV…


And this lovely looking one towards the end which is as good as any in the franchise: the lighting, the balloons, the stunt work, all excellent…


Then we get to the final fifteen minutes which are, honestly, very well done: having Jason fight a telekinetic mind warrior allows for some cool practical effects that we haven't seen much in the series…


At one point she lights him on fire and it’s phenomenal. Fun fact:

Hodder was actually set on fire by an apparatus rigged so that the ignition could be captured on film (as opposed to being edited in later with trick photography). Hodder was on fire for a full forty seconds, a record at the time.

Everything’s going great until the VERY end when we get one of the most bonkers conclusions to any Friday film: after Jason survives getting blown up in a very good house explosion, Tina summons her dead dad out of the lake to drag him back down into it. Umm, WHAT. It's the kind of batshit, out-of-leftfield ending that feels like it was cooked up at the 25th hour with next to no thought. But I will say this: while I was pretty damn bored and unengaged for most of the sub 90 minute run-time, the finale is easily one of the most memorable moments in the entire saga (for better or worse, and probably both). And while I don't necessarily think it was the best performance, Lar Park Lincoln in the role of Tina is a unique character and I appreciate them trying something so different. I definitely don't want to oversell it as the first seventy minutes of the picture are scraping the bottom of the barrel, but the ending here saved it for me.

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Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood is a 1988 American supernatural slasher film directed by John Carl Buechler and starring Lar Park Lincoln, Kevin Blair, Susan Blu, Terry Kiser, and Kane Hodder in his first appearance as Jason Voorhees, a role he would reprise in three subsequent films. It is a sequel to Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986) and the seventh installment in the Friday the 13th franchise. Set years after the events of the previous film, the plot follows a psychokinetic teenage girl (Lincoln) who unwittingly releases Jason from his tomb at the bottom of Crystal Lake, allowing him to go on another killing spree in the area. It was released on May 13, 1988.