Well, Halloween has come and gone, but there are still plenty of Friday The 13th movies left to watch and review. So let’s continue our journey along the shores of Crystal Lake with today’s movie. Now this was another movie in the series that I watched pretty early on. In fact, It might have been listed as a “New Release” at Blockbuster when I rented it (ok, my mom and step-dad rented it but let’s not worry about the details). Even when I first watched it back then, my first thought was that they were getting pretty ridiculous with their ideas on this movie. I am curious to see how bad this movie is now so let’s dive right into today’s movie, Friday The 13th Part VII: The New Blood.
The plot: As Jason Voorhees’ body continues to lie chained to a rock at the bottom of Crystal Lake, a young girl named Tina Shepard is at a nearby cabin with her family. When she sees her father being abusive towards her mother, Tina runs from the cabin and gets into a boat on the dock. As her father comes out on the dock and pleads with Tina to come back, Tina yells at him to go away, then, utilizing a telekinetic ability she didn’t know she possessed, accidentally causes the dock to fall apart and send her dad into the water, where he is buried under the debris and drowns. Years later, a teenage Tina and her mother Amanda are driving back to their cabin at Crystal Lake, where they are meeting Tina’s psychiatrist, Dr. Crews, who suggested going there in order to help Tina get control of her powers. Upon arriving at the cabin, Crews wants to get started with his experiments immediately and as he films the tests, he tells Tina that her powers are connected to her emotions and he brought her here so she could deal with the guilt she feels over her father’s death. That night, after trying to convince Amanda that they should leave, Tina runs out onto the dock, reliving the death of her father and apologizing to him. Sensing something under the water, Tina uses her powers to unwittingly resurrect Jason and when he bursts from the water, Tina sees him and faints. Amanda and Crews finds her on the dock and after bringing her inside, Tina tells them what she saw but Crews thinks it is just a hallucination brought on by her guilt. Meanwhile, Michael and Jane are heading to Crystal Lake, as Jane has arranged a surprise party for him there, when their car breaks down and as they walk to the cabin, Jason kills them both. At Crystal Lake, Michael’s cousin Nick invites Tina to the party, where she meets Melissa, Russell, Sandra, Eddie, Ben, Kate, Robin, Maddy, and David. As she is hanging out, Tina suddenly has a vision of Jason killing Michael and rushes from the house, only to see a tent stake driven through the door frame of her porch. She tells Amanda and Crews what she saw, as well as about the stake, but when Crews goes to check, the stake is gone. Meanwhile, Jason kills another couple that is camping out in the nearby woods. The next day, Nick, who is attracted to Tina, goes over to see her and they end up talking by the lake’s shore. Tina tells him about her father’s death and how she was in a mental hospital, unaware that Melissa, who wants to hook up with Nick, overhears her. Later, when Tina goes to the house to see Nick, Melissa uses Eddie to help her tease Tina, causing Tina to use her powers to break Melissa’s pearl necklace. That night, Tina continues pleading with Amanda and Crews that she wants to leave and when Crews argues against it, a frantic Tina telekinectically throws a TV at him. Tina rushes from the house and runs into Nick, who apologizes for what Melissa did. Tina asks Nick if Michael ever showed up and when Nick says no and shows her a picture of Michael, Tina tells him that Michael is dead before Amanda goes to tell Tina to pack so they can leave. Meanwhile, Jason arrives at the lake and kills Russell and Sandra as they are going for a swim in the lake. Crews takes a walk in the woods and discovers Michael’s body, then races back to the house, where he finds that Amanda had discovered Crews was trying to exploit Tina’s abilities for his own purposes. As the two argue, Tina overhears them and steals her mom’s car keys and leaves but as she is driving, she sees a vision of Jason killing Amanda and ends up crashing the car. Back at the party cabin, Melissa starts flirting with Eddie in order to try and make Nick jealous but Nick simply leaves to go look for Michael. Meanwhile, Maddy, upset that Robin is hooking up with David, decides to give herself a makeover so she can seduce David but as she wanders outside looking for him, she discovers Russell’s corpse and ends up being killed by Jason in an abandoned barn. Tina recovers from the crash and heads through the woods to get back to her cabin, encountering Nick along the way, and the two go looking for her mom and Michael, eventually finding Michael’s body. Back at the cabin, Jason kills Ben and Kate, who were having sex in a van outside, then cuts the power to the cabin before heading inside. Melissa tells Eddie the truth about why she was flirting with him, then sneaks out of the cabin to find Nick while Eddie sulks, unaware that Jason has entered the cabin and kills David, Eddie, and Robin. Tina and Nick return to Tina’s cabin and when she learns what Crews was up too, Tina starts to lose control of her powers again but Nick is able to calm her down. Finding Crews newspaper cuttings about Jason, Tina tells Nick that he is what came out of the lake and Nick wants to get the others to help her find Amanda so they can all leave together but while he heads to the other cabin, Tina leaves to look for her mom. Elsewhere, Amanda and Crews had gone looking for Tina and after finding the car, Amanda goes running through the woods calling out for Tina. Crews tries to convince Amanda to go back to the house when they encounter Jason and Crews sacrifices Amanda so he can escape. Back at the cabins, Nick finds Eddie’s body and races back to Tina’s cabin only to find her gone and Melissa there instead. In the woods, Tina encounters Crews, who tells her to come with him, but when she notices the blood on his clothes, she demands to know what happened and he tells her that Amanda is gone. Tina leaves to find her mom, and Crews ends up being killed by Jason. Tina finds Amanda’s body, as well as Kate’s, Sandra’s, and Maddy’s, and as she heads back to the cabins, she is confronted by Jason. Tina uses her powers to fight Jason, first by electrocuting him, then by bringing the porch of Russell’s cabin down on top of him. Tina heads back to her cabin and tells Nick about her mom and Jason but Melissa thinks she is lying and goes to leave, only to be killed by Jason. Tina continues to use her powers against Jason, eventually setting him on fire and both Tina and Nick run from the house before it explodes. As the recover on the dock, Jason attacks them again, knocking Nick unconscious and tossing Tina aside. As Jason moves towards Tina, she uses her powers one last time and is able to summon her father, who wraps a chain around Jason and drags him back into the lake. In the morning, the authorities have arrived and work to put out the remainder of the fire, while Nick and Tina are loaded into an ambulance to be taken to the hospital.
Friday The 13th Part VII: The New Blood met with negative reviews from the critics, currently holding a 32% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The critical consensus on the site is, “As lumbering and bereft of conscious thought as its unstoppable star, Friday the 13th Part VII – The New Blood finds the franchise in desperate need of the title ingredient.” After the release of Friday The 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, Paramount pictures sought a partnership with New Line Cinema to create a crossover with Nightmare On Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger but after several failed concepts, screenwriter Daryl Haney suggested an idea akin to Jason vs Carrie, where Jason would battle a teenager with psychic abilities. The movie was a modest success at the box office, earning $19.1 million off of a $2.8 million budget, which was slightly less than it’s predecessor but still enough for the studio to release another sequel the next year.
Yeh, over 30 years couldn’t help this movie as it is still pretty ridiculous. The acting was pretty boring to be honest, with the only person that did a good job was Susan Jennifer Sullivan (Melissa), but that was because her role was to be a bitch and she played that part perfectly. The story idea was actually pretty neat on paper, because it kind of added to the supernatural aspect of the movie (yes, I know telekinesis isn’t supernatural but it does fit the theme sometimes). Unfortunately, what ended up on film didn’t quite live up to expectations as the story seemed to move to slowly to really build up any steam to get excited about. Having Tina struggle with her powers throughout the first part of the movie, then suddenly able to fully control them when she is fighting Jason felt like a cheap way to try and ramp up excitement but lacked any real believability in it. The special effects were a little weak when it came to Tina’s telekinesis, as it looked like something from the 70’s instead of the late 80’s. I will say that the makeup for Jason’s costume was good, as he looked even more decayed since he had been in the lake for several years, with portions of his ribs and spine showing to indicate how the fish and aquatic life had been feeding on him while he was underwater. It’s good for some laughs because of the ridiculousness of it, but it’s honestly a poor entry to the series.
Rating: 2 out of 5
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