Horror Movie Review: Friday the 13th – Part VII: The New Blood (1988)

The New Blood sadly choses to abandon the more comical fun edge of the previous movie & instead take ideas from the first 5…oh, and Carrie.

Opening with my least favourite thing…the re-cap of the series so far, I guess if this is your first Friday the 13th movie it will help bring you up to speed but who the fuck decides that the 7th is where they are going to start!?

Excitingly though this would be the first time that Kane Hodder would take over the role of Jason arguably the best Jason of the bunch.

So we meet Tina, a young girl who hears her father beating her mother. She runs out of the house which is situated at Crystal Lake & hides near the dock. Pursued by her father she awakens telekinetic powers & accidently kills her father in the lake.

Many years later & Tina is now on her way back to her old family home with her mother & doctor. Tina isn’t handling what she did very well so the idea is for her to confront her demons, however unknown to her the Doc is actually more interested in her powers & plans to exploit her.

Next door to where Tina is staying are a group of nobodies, the usual Jason fodder. Other than Nick there is barely any character development amongst this lot & even then the most memorable thing about Nick is the amount of denim he wears!

So Tina has a bad session with the Doc who pushes her too hard, she runs back to the area her father died & accidently uses her powers to break the chain holding Jason down. He looks great…the time under water has left him a lot more rotten with an exposed back & much more gruesome look.

Tina panics but like all good clichés the Doctor & her mother think it’s just a delusion!

Jason begins rampaging his way through the local area again…you’ve seen it all before & you won’t care too much who lives or dies. However that doesn’t mean there aren’t some amusing deaths with my favourite being the girl in the sleeping bag slammed against a tree. That’s just brilliant.

Some others though are wasted…I got really excited when Jason started using a hedge-trimmer but all we get is a close-up of the victims face. In a movie so light on entertainment having these gory bits left out is very disappointing.

Alongside Jason’s rampage Tina’s powers continue to increase, attempts to make you care about Tina’s story fall flat because she is just so boring. Her guilt over her father is confusing because he wasn’t a good guy; shit the dude was slapping her mother about moments before she killed him!

Ultimately from the start you can pretty much work out how the film is going to play out. Jason is an indestructible super-zombie & Tina has Carrie powers, these two are going to have a face-off at some point.

When they do it is fairly entertaining as Tina does everything she can to try & stop him. Jason gets electrocuted & keeps on coming. He gets a pot plant to the head & still keeps coming (yeah I know that one was more for the lulz). He gets part of a house dropped on him & he still keeps coming. He gets his head crushed by his mask tightening & still keeps coming. This part does have a great face reveal for the first time in a while & Jason has looked a lot better!

Tina ‘Carries’ the fuck out of Jason in this lengthy sequence but eventually works out that fire would probably be a good way to take him out. He can’t keep coming if he is ashes, right?

A burning Jason ends up igniting the house resulting in a huge explosion that must have finished him off…but no.

Jason is still not dead & in possibly the dumbest moment ever…Nick tires to shoot the walking zombie that has just been electrocuted, set on fire & blown up. Yeah, how does that work out d’ya reckon?

Just when you think it’s all over Tina’s dead father (looking very alive) comes out of the lake & drags Jason down with him, chaining him up once again. I don’t have a freakin’ clue what was going on.

Man…what a disappointing entry in the series, Part 6 clearly set the standards too high. Rubbish acting, boring characters & a telekinetic side story that just feels lazy. The star is Jason & it reminds me of how the Nightmare on Elm Street movies went with more focus on Freddy. Kane Hodder is the perfect Jason, big & hulking but able to show more personality then I’ve ever seen in the masked killer before.

Where the hell does this series go from here? Oh…yeah, to Manhattan! *sigh* yay…