Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (1985) - Tommy

I took a nice break Wednesday knowing I would get right back to it on Thursday but as I was mulling over The Final Chapter (1984) in preparation for A New Beginning (1985) I was thinking about how franchises often flirted with the idea of “transference of evil”. Such as the end of A New Beginning where Tommy Jarvis lifts up the butcher knife, now wearing the hockey mask, “assuming” Jason’s “spot”, perhaps paving the way for the next sequel in the franchise. 

And just Monday, I had watched “Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers (1988), and, sure enough, at the very end, little niece Jamie had stabbed her foster mom while dressed in clown costume, with a similar mask as Michael’s in the 1978 masterpiece, indicating the possibility she was assuming her uncle’s spot as the next sequel’s killer. 

And even in the “last” Nightmare on Elm Street film, “The Final Friday” (1991), Freddy was hoping his daughter would “join him”. Of course, all these franchises failed to take that plunge into moving away from the iconic killers, but the dalliance with the idea are there for us to think about. 

The Final Chapter certainly offered their own dangled carrot for Friday fans to contemplate…could Corey Feldman’s Tommy Jarvis replace Jason, the hockey-masked, machete-wielding, body-count machine? A New Beginning sort of plays with the idea in the continuation of the Tommy Jarvis story, in the form of Shepherd, mute and suffering PTSD, keeping to himself, lost in his mind, seeing Jason out a window on the lawn of the wilderness “mental health refuge” in the woods. Feldman, returning in a cameo (I remember feeling so disappointed as a teenager that he wasn’t in it longer, not yet understanding the entire back story of how he was tied to another childhood favorite, “The Goonies”), is “killed off” in a nightmare, perhaps only one of three times Jason is in the film, a product of Tommy’s tormented mind, a hallucination he just can’t shake. 

Much like Alice in A Nightmare on Elm Street (the fourth and fifth sequels; later to be discussed when I focus my attention to revisits to the Freddy franchise), Tommy has the unique distinction of surviving the franchise’s iconic blood-letter.

 I did like that Feldman was at least featured at the beginning of the film, even if it was as brief as it ended up. It was a nice tie-in connective tissue to the previous film, not abandoning the idea that Tommy has been “influenced” by Jason’s “presence”, unstable and seemingly ready to outburst at any moment, such as when he pummels Junior (Ron Sloan) and tosses Tina’s (Deborah Voorhees) lover through a table before breakfast. Shepherd, to his credit, is quite incredible…I always have to brag on him when I discuss A New Beginning, as he really offers an expressive, intense, tormented soul, whose frame of mind is a rattled cage, with a broken lock, with something inside that if released could be quite volatile and dangerous. 

And The Final Chapter touched on that when Feldman’s Tommy swings for the fences with the machete onto Jason, broken and in beast mode, on the attack with a release valve that seems to be letting off quite a bit of steam. His mad eyes when hugging Trish, as the screen goes to credits, the production of A New Beginning might have decided to go in a different direction, with Roy, the paramedic (Dick Wieand) assuming the Jason role as body-count machine, but Tommy is the continuation piece that connects the fourth and fifth films (and sixth, eventually resurrecting Jason into some ridiculous rotted corpse once again carrying on his legacy of murder). Wieand, though, seems interested in besting Jason in the body count check list. I didn’t want to fail to mention the opening nightmare sequence…this at least gives us Jason for a few moments before hitting a reset button that lasts only for this film.