Jason Burns

 Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988) really needed to find Jason a suitable foe. Some sort of physical presence that could throttle him. Yes, survivors of the past brought the fight but Jason just seemed to find a way to return (due to factors sometimes not of his own making as seen in the previous film when he was resurrected), and he often cut and slashed (and even harpooned) his way through a lot of bodies. Tina, with her "telekinetic outbursts", was a weapon Jason never encountered before.

You have this corrupt doctor in charge of Tina's mental care (known in circles of the Friday horror community as "Bad News Crews", played by none better than Terry Kiser) always trying to provoke these outbursts that lead to objects shaking and being thrown (like a television set), not to mention the very release of Jason from Crystal Lake (though I always wondered why Jason just couldn't slide out of the chain). That ending, though, remains probably my least favorite next to little kid Jason washing up out of the toxic waste in the fake NYC sewer...the father arising from the lake is just the worst. Not even rotted, and he just pops up all in one piece, resurrected, pulling Jason back into Crystal Lake...makes not a lick of sense. And I am one of those fans who gives the franchise a ton of leeway. But why would he even be in the lake? He would have been pulled from the lake and buried..

Yeah, this cast is probably my least favorite, I think because I find them rather dull as opposed to other casts in the past. Not that the Friday franchise is exactly heralded for their body count victims. I'm not too crazy about the cast in "Jason Takes Manhattan", so it is sort of a toss up. The greatest hits of knife stabs in the torso, axes to the head, and victims going out windows really seemed to lose that effectiveness by the seventh film. And, I'll tell you, as a youth, I watched "The New Blood" a lot. The epic Jason burn and the house explosion, coupled with the "Carrie effects", are serious pluses in the film's favor, though. So I'm sort of 50/50 here on the film. It has some good things, as a Friday fan. But the first four films (the sixth is still a lot of fun, as I noticed yesterday evening) really surpassed the seventh film in favor with me over the years.