Friday The 13th: Ranking Every Movie From Worst To Best

8. Friday The 13th: A New Beginning

Less than a year after the success of The Final Chapter came, well, A New Beginning. The film starts promisingly with Corey Feldman reprising his role as Tommy Jarvis as, in a pre-cursor to the first scene in Part VI, he witnesses two grave-robbers get hacked apart by the reanimated corpse of Jason. We then move forward ten years as Tommy is being driven to a halfway house in the woods miles away from Crystal Lake.

Tommy is haunted by the apparition of Jason and when a local man, Vic, hacks apart another halfway house patient, Joey, suddenly a series of murders start again as teenagers and hicks are murderer willy-nilly. Whether having sex in the woods or parking your car in the wrong place, that puts a target on your head. As events grow increasingly, and rapidly, violent, halfway house worker Pam and young kid Reggie flee for their lives from a resurgent Jason but is it him or is it Tommy...or someone else?

This was a series high, for the body count at least, as 21 people meet their end in a variety of ways from heads being crushed with leather straps to flares in the mouth, but it all feels a bit, well, boring. John Shepherd, as the grown-up Tommy, puts in a good performance and you do let out a little cheer when he takes on Jason in the barn, but the film is primarily saved by Melanie Kinnaman's Pam and Shavar Ross' Reggie.

Amidst kill after kill after kill, you sort of root for this mismatched pair of heroes and, on the final unmasking of the killer (the paramedic who was at the scene for the murdered Joey and who it turns out was his estranged father in a plot device no-one saw coming because it's so ludicrous and in the end no-one cares to the point where you say "Who's that?!" when you see his face and "As opposed to killing all those people, why didn't he just kill Vic, the man who murdered his son but who never meets his end. Oh well.") you're glad they're still alive.