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

Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)

Rated R

Score: 3 out of 5

Affectionately referred to as "Jason vs. Carrie" by some fans, Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood is mainly known for three things. First, as that nickname suggests, it is the one where the final girl has telekinetic powers, building on the foray that Jason Lives made into the supernatural when it revived Jason Voorhees as an undead monster. (A neat twist, or a sign that they were running out of ideas? You decide.) Second, it marks the arrival to the series of horror legend Kane Hodder as Jason, the only actor or stuntman to wear the hockey mask in multiple films and often praised as among the best of the bunch even if the quality of the movies around him was on a steady decline. Finally, it is notorious for the utter butchery that the MPAA inflicted upon it, with several minutes' worth of footage cut from the film in order to avoid an X rating; rather odd, given that the deleted scenes (the raw footage of which is included with the DVD) aren't that much worse than some of the grisly kills in prior films. (Or maybe I've just been desensitized by one too many Saw movies.) At the end of the day, however, what remains is still a pretty decent late-period slasher flick, one that shows signs of growing long in the tooth but still has a number of neat tricks up its sleeve, most notably with Jason himself.

Our heroine, Tina Shepard, is a teenage girl with the unique gift of being able to move objects with her mind. Having accidentally killed her father with her powers as a child when they were vacationing at Crystal Lake, she has since spent much of her life in psychiatric care; as of now, she, her mother, and her psychiatrist Dr. Crews are all staying at the lakefront cabin where her father died, in the hopes of helping her get past her trauma. In truth, however, Dr. Crews is a sleazeball who wishes to exploit Tina's powers, causing her to run off next door to a group of rich kids hoping to throw a surprise birthday party for one of their friends. Unfortunately, Tina's powers wound up reawakening Jason, who was chained to a rock and dumped at the bottom of the lake Mafia-style at the end of the last movie. And we all know what happens when you put Jason in the presence of horny teenagers.

Jason gets a hell of an introduction, emerging from the water having rotted even further since being dumped at the bottom of Crystal Lake at the end of Jason Lives. His spine and ribcage are visible through his tattered overalls, and a chunk of his mask has broken away revealing the corner of a mouth that lost its lips long ago. Jason looks absolutely sick in this movie, and Hodder does a great job employing his physicality on set as he both slaughters teens (a highlight being when he picks up a girl in her sleeping bag and slams her against a tree) and gets back up from everything thrown at him over the course of the film. Unfortunately, the grotesque makeup on Jason is just about the only special effects work in this film that managed to get through the censors. I don't know if the MPAA was on one of its usual uptight streaks; they famously got into one after John Lennon's assassination in 1980 (leading to the original My Bloody Valentine, among other films, having many scenes cut) and again after the Columbine massacre in 1999 (which had a chilling effect on films ranging from Scream 3 to Cherry Falls, the latter of which saw its theatrical release outright canceled). While I can't find a singular event when this came out that might've caused such a reaction, I wouldn't be surprised if, by 1988, general public outrage over the violent content of slasher movies was forcing the MPAA's hand and making them come down a lot harder. The result is quite possibly the most bloodless film in the series, even next to the original, and one that, if not for the nudity and the cursing, might've almost earned a PG-13 had it come out twenty years later. If the deleted scenes are any indication, this was a movie that was very much hoping to capitalize on gore, and as such it doesn't really have much going for it in terms of suspense. While there are a few scenes that do a pretty good job at being scary, and Hodder's Jason is definitely a menace I wouldn't want to be in the same room with, overall this felt like the TV edit of a Friday the 13th movie, right down to the painfully obvious edits where they cut out the blood and gore.

Fortunately, we have some interesting characters here. While Tina is pretty obviously a poor man's Carrie White, the film takes the "Jason vs. Carrie" conceit and runs with it pretty well, all things considered. She especially gets to shine during the finale, where she takes everything inside the house that isn't nailed down and throws it at Jason, including, eventually, the house itself, enough to make up for her actress Lar Park-Lincoln's flair for the overdramatic. There are also a surprising number of interesting characters in the supporting cast. Dr. Crews wishes to use Tina to further his own career by proving the existence of psychic powers, going so far as to abuse Tina in order to get her to show them off; he winds up making for a particularly hate-worthy human villain. Among the teenagers, Melissa is an entertaining and highly quotable rich bitch who leads boys on to make her boyfriend jealous before insulting their prowess in bed, and I was quite entertained by the nerdy girl Maddy and her attempt to make herself popular. Nick felt like a poor man's Tommy Jarvis, but I still found myself liking him as the only guy among the teens who didn't treat Tina like a freak. Overall, while they weren't the best in the series, the characters here weren't the worst either.

The Bottom Line

"Not the best, but not the worst" sums this up pretty well. This series' best days may be in the past, and the MPAA may have done an utter hatchet job on it, but even so, it still works on a fundamental level as a Friday film, largely thanks to a great Jason and some good use of its premise.