Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)
(On TV, October 2019) For cinephiles such as myself who don’t have any affection for the slasher genre and the Friday the 13th series in particular, the most interesting element of its movies is the narrative that holds the instalments together—the way Jason is brought back and dispatched in between the gore and the murdering of horny teenagers. Considering that the Friday the 13th series (justifiably) jumped into supernatural territory during its sixth instalment, it makes sense that its sequel would lean even more heavily in that direction. So it is that Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood features nothing less than a protagonist with telekinesis powers, able to break a mean girl’s pearl necklace at a distance, send a TV flying across the room and (far more crucially) free Jason from the underwater tomb in which he was placed at the end of the previous film. The ending also features a more interesting showdown than usual between zombie Jason and a final girl with the power to fight back. Alas, that ending peters out in an uninteresting finale, concluding the film on a sour note. I haven’t discussed anything in between the beginning and the end of the film because, in many ways, there’s nothing to say: It’s the usual killing-the-teenagers routine with little to distinguish it. (Although, strangely, this instalment intriguingly avoids the over-the-top gore featured in other films of the series—murders aplenty, but always cutting to another shot before the blood sprays out. Maybe it’s the TV version?) Jason is a more formidable menace here thanks to being played by Kane Hodder for the first time, and as a kid who became a teenager in 1988, I still find some of the girls and hairstyles in the film cute rather than dated. Still, that’s a not a whole lot to recommend—Much like the entire series, Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood is not particularly good, and you really have to dig in order to find something interesting to say about it.