Friday The 13th VII: A New Blood (1988)

FRIDAY THE 13TH VII: A NEW BLOOD (1988)

Dir: John Carl Buechler

11/31 #31daysofhorror

By the late eighties, slasher films, especially the sequels to our beloved icons had a new foe. The MPAA sought to ensure the purity of America, not through censoring nudity or sex scenes, but getting rid of the red stuff. Paramount bowed to the ratings board. The last thing the distributors wanted was an X-rated horror film, especially when the amount of gore and violence would have easily been a regular R in the early 1980s. But you don’t hire John Carl Buechler to create something tame. No, the visual effects maestro should be brought in to make your film a batsh*t crazy joyride through solidified slasher film tropes. While Buechler’s Friday is still a work of art, we can only wonder what could have been if all the gore and effects were kept in. And unfortunately, this isn’t going to be one of those victories that horror fans get from time to time. Unlike the Friday The 13th Part II newly restored footage, the Part VII original footage was all burned in a fire.

What remains in A New Blood is terrific! We still have Jason trapping a victim in a sleeping bag and throwing her against a tree. We still have the final fight between Jason and Tina. And these segments of the sequel make the rest of the film spectacular, even if we’re watching a watered-down version of Part IV. Let me unpack that for a moment. Friday The 13th IV: The Final Chapter created the perfect template for a Jason film. In the first, second, and sixth films we focus on a campground setting with counselors who are all brought together for the purpose of running a camp for kids. The third film brings a group of friends together to hang out at a cabin, but our final girl Chris has the weight of a past trauma that she’s trying to confront by returning. In the fourth film, a group of kids with racing libidos hang out at a cabin they rented for the summer. They are there for sex and debauchery. We understand their motives. There’s cheating, weird dancing, silent film era porn, losing their virginity, skinny dipping, and twins. These characters had chemistry together, and they were the perfect fodder for Jason. The seventh film tries to recreate this but fails to such a laughable degree that their attempt is historically admired.

You may have heard this before, but this film was dubbed Fri-Gay The 13th, the queer sequel, as many of the cast and crew were openly gay. The actors were attempting to play love interests, but had absolutely no on-screen chemistry with one another. Nick (Kevin Spirts) and Tina (Lar Park-Lincoln) fail to produce even an ounce of the romance that their characters were attempting to have. One of my favorite coded gay moments is when lovers Ben (Craig Thomas) and Kate (Diane Almeida), who have been in a fight through the first half of the film, are sharing intimacy inside the sex van outside. We see more characters having sex in the van, then we do in the multi-bedroom cabin. During their sexual interlude, they hear a noise outside. Ben immediately stops coitus and gets really excited at the idea that birthday boy Michael may have finally made it to the party. I’ve always read this as maybe Ben and Kate’s fight earlier could have been about Kate finding out that Ben and Michael had feelings for each other. Obviously, there’s no evidence of this, but when drama between characters is so mishandled, you can add any narrative you want.

You come for Jason, but you stay for the Carrie (1976) rip-off. The story goes that behind the scenes there was already talk of a Jason versus movie. No one wanted to fight or pay for the rights to use another villain, so a pseudo Carrie was born with the name Tina. Tom McLoughlin’s Jason Lives already gave us a Frankenstein beginning. One that firmly placed Jason in the supernatural realm. If lightning was going to bring his rotting corpse back, why couldn’t telekinesis bring him back again? Buechler’s scope was massive, but hindered by the studio at every turn. The final product looks nothing like Buechler’s original vision. But we still have Jason Vs. Carrie. And it is the greatest showdown we’ve seen in the series. Tina hangs Jason, electrocutes him, stabs him, tosses him down through the floor and into a basement, burns him, and collapses a house on top of him. Nothing will stop him. Really, nothing stops Kane Hodder. As Hodder begins his three film run as Jason Voorhees, he uses every trick learned in a decade of stunt work. Even a full body burn, a stunt that left him with third-degree burns years before. But, like Jason, nothing stops Kane Hodder. If the first two-thirds of A New Blood didn’t exist, this would be the best Friday film.

There have been many crushes on the characters in Friday The 13th films throughout the years. I’ve loved Kevin Bacon, Laurie Bartram, Amy Steel, Kirsten Baker, Russell Todd, Catherine Parks, Crispin Glover, Judie Aronson, Miguel A. Nunez Jr., Tiffany Helm, and Thom Mathews from the first six films. But, my biggest crush was always Elizabeth Kaitan (Robin) in A New Blood. Kaitan became Candy in the Vice Academy films from part 3 on. She was in Silent Night, Deadly Night 2 (1987), Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity (1987), Necromancer (1988), and Assault of the Killer Bimbos (1988). She hasn't appeared in films since 1999, but she’s contributed to documentaries for Friday The 13th and Silent Night, Deadly Night. While she may have been my crush in my adolescence, she's also one of the only characters that feels authentic in A New Blood. Robin’s interactions with Maddy (Diana Barrows), while short, feel real. I’d like to think that my teenage brain was interested in the authenticity of the actress portraying a role, and not the topless scene. But probably not.

With all of its issues, the seventh film in the Friday series still gives you everything you want from the original run. Soon, Jason would be off to Manhattan to transform into a boy via toxic waste. Later, he would explode at the hands of a swat team and become a demonic infection. He would experience cryogenics, wake up hundreds of years into the future, and fall from a spaceship onto another version of Earth. He would find himself under the influence of Freddy Krueger, and eventually he’d have to relive his mother dying all over again. Inside the hours of the first seven films, the feeling of Jason lives. Even when he’s not the killer, we’re looking at you part 1 and 5.