By the time I'd made it all the way to tonight's piece I was going on 14 and even then Younger Me could sense the herk and jerk of a movie series tottering on its last legs, begging for a fresh idea to blow through its sagging sails. At the time, Young Me found it odd that this series of films, centered as they are around a homicidal pseudo-zombie, could be so lacking in life.

Older and (I like to think) Wiser Me is nonplussed at this. He (I) no longer finds anything odd in the progressive degeneration of the American horror film--or film in general, for that matter. Older Me (I) possesses enough insight to see these films clearly, both as perpetrators at victims of their own perpetuations. Their downfall and degrading "quality" were as inevitable as a teenage death inside the Crystal Lake Woods, the result of a mass market system geared, not to telling stories, but to making the good people at Gulf Western (who at the time owned Paramount Pictures, and thus Jason Voorhees) that much richer. And they've no one to blame but themselves.

The New Blood marks a second major departure for the Friday series, the first one coming in Part IV with Corey Feldman, the first Final Boy. His character, Tommy Jarvis, went on to triumph over Jason (as much as anyone apparently can) in the next two films (a different actor animating him every time). In this respect, tonight's picture marks a return to form, gifting us with a Final Girl cut right out of the Jamie Lee Curtis mold; you can almost see the scars where they hammered her out. But rather than bring us all the way back into the black The New Blood's screenwriting duo, Manuel Fidello and Daryl Haney chose to throw a curve ball into our midst and in the process created my personal favorite Friday film...however much that says.

After an unnecessary prologue (narrated by Walt Gorney, a.k.a. Crazy Ralph of Friday the 13th Parts 1 and 2) we meet our Final Girl as child (played by Jennifer Banko) so absurdly blonde she might've walked right out of the Village of the Damned. This is Tina Shepherd and right off the bat we know that Tina is cursed to an unhappy fate. Not only are her parents dumb enough to rent (no, wait...to own, honest to God, own!) shorefront property on Crystal Lake, they're dysfunctional enough to argue in front of their tweenage daughter. Young Tina flees this scene of drunken, abusive, familial bliss, making it all the way to the row boat Mom and Dad keep tied up to their rickety old dock. Ominous, no?

By the time Dad comes tearassing out of the house, Tina's already out over the black waters that once dragged down a young boy named Jason Voorhees, as you’ve probably heard. He claims he’s "sorry," that he 'didn’t mean to' hit Mommy "again." Young Tina's not buying. She doesn't wait for him to promise never to do it again or try to comfort her with some lame, wife-batterer's attempt at humor. ("What do you tell a woman with two black eyes? Nothing you haven’t already told her twice.") "I hate you," she screeches at her father. "I wish you were dead." And because this is a horror movie her wish is summarily granted.

First Tina gets all big-eyed, and she might as well be one of the uberchildren from the aforementioned Village They'd welcome her as a long-lost sister. Something supernatural rushes through the dark water up to Dad's perch on the family dock. Then things get interesting. Boards tear loose from their nails. Supporting pillars jump and jive out of their muddy, lakebed sockets. The whole dock moans like a tired cow and Dad (displaying a level of intelligence on par with any teenage Slasher movie character) is incapable of preventing the inevitable. Down he goes, along with the dock, in a rare (for this lake and these films) non-Voorhees-related death. This leaves Tina, still among the air-breathers, to discover that sometimes wishes do come true, though not always with takebacks.

Not that anyone has any business making wishes over Crystal Lake anyway. Christ, you might as well give a schizophrenic napalm canisters for Christmas.

Cut to years later, as an obviously teenage Tina (i.e., a Tina played by twenty-seven year old actress Lar Park Lincoln) comes to in her mom/s car. As part of Tina's on-going therapy, she and Mom (Susan Blu, most famous around these parts as the English-language voice of Token Female Autobot Arcee, who figured "prominently" in the first Transformers movie) are on their way back to Crystal Lake. I guess everything else has failed. And, in theory, a trip to the lake does beat a trip back to the mental hospital.

Still...Crystal Lake? Give me a nice, safe padded room over Camp Blood any day. Would you willingly drive your teenage daughter out to such a place? Linda Shepherd would, and is, immediately alienating her from the audience. A missed opportunity in my book. Mrs. Shepherd one of the few honest adults in these films...so, in a way, her stupidity is foreordained, her age-group forever cast (in Slasher movies, at least) as dim-witted authority figures. Why else would she display such criminal ignorance of Crystal Lake and its mortal effect on teenagers of certain genders and psychological states? You'd think local legend or...oh, I don’t know...national media attention might've clued Mrs. Shepherd into the blood history of her one-time vacation spot. So either their personal family tragedy has left Tina’s mom so myopic that she’s kept her head firmly up her ass for past seven films...or Mrs. Shepherd is an incredible gullible woman, ensnared by Tina's psychologist, the nefarious Dr. Crews (Terry Kiser). Her fate is the fruit of her own stupidity, and thus disserved. Her daughter, in the tradition of all Final Girls, is simply tortured for the fun of it.

The old house is still there waiting for them like a two-story landmine. Amazing how well the place has been kept up after all these years. There's not a cobweb in sight as Tina and Mom settle in to the old homestead. Only Tina appears to notice the gathering of teenagers at the cabin next door. One new neighbor, a boy wearing shorts so short they immediately to mind a small Japanese boy of my acquaintance named Kenny (who proclaimed that "Gamera is a friend to all children" until the day Godzilla stepped on him). This is Nick (Kevin Spirtas), a Clark Kent figure if ever there was one, who stops help Tina when her suitcase explodes, spilling socks and undies into their muddy shared driveway, undoubtedly saving his own life. Tina is somewhat unimpressed with his underwear-repacking skills. "Thanks," she says, grabbing a pair of panties out of Nick’s hand, "you’ve been a great help. I don’t know what I would’ve done without you."

Here we glimpse this film's one and only innovation. That one remark contains, within its folds, Nick and Tina's entire relationship, a dramatic inversion of the classical Damsel in Distress that I've labeled "the proto-Buffy," after the eponymous Vampire Slayer who is this inversion rarified into a motif all her own: the willowy female figure, traditionally victimized by monsters and saved by the dashing, handsome man, rises to herself become a slayer of monsters and a rescuer of the very macho assholes who usually kill themselves defending the Final Girl in these movies.

But more on that later. For the moment, we meet Dr. Crews: a shady son of a gun with a taste for tweed and the kind of obsequious mind-fucking practiced by every evil psychologist in the history of cinima. Upstairs, in the old Shepherd place (that's what I would've called it, damnit) he sets Tina behind a school desk, an enormous 1980s video camera filming her every uncomfortable twitch. Crews sets a matchbook on the table and goads Tina into a state of heightened anxiety. He shouts, he yells, he does a passable, middle-American R. D. Lang impersonation. And suddenly the matchbook scoots across the table with the aid of a little stop motion. Tina, we're to assume, is more than meets the eye.

All part of Tina's "treatment'. We're meant to intuit (though the movie never exactly states) that Tina's been bouncing in and out of institutions ever since she sent Dad into the lake with that ill-made wish. We immediately intuit (though it'll be a half hour before the movie tells us) that, somewhere along the line, Dr. Crews got wind of Tina's "psychokinetic abilities" (his term) and has brought her out here in a crass and unbelievably stupid attempt to goad her into performing on camera where none of his colleagues will see. He'll slip the tape back to civilization and get rich off the tour deals. Come one, come all; see the Telekinetic Freak; only five bucks to see the Telekinetic Freak. Just. Five. Bucks. What could possible go wrong, right?

Tina, no fool in spite of her institutionalization (she's the only person in the film who voices reservations about being in Crystal Lake), accuses Dr. Crews of being "more interested in this telekinetic stuff than you do about me." The good doctor assures her this isn't the case. Heaven forbid. Never mind the camera, let's focus on making little Tina well again. Her psychic superpowers are really nothing more than misplaced guilt, manifesting as blah, blah, blah, ect. As Tina declares this "bullshit" the matchbook spontaneously combusts. Tina runs from the room. So she’s not all that much of a Buffy. So sue me. That's why I stuck the "proto-" on there.

Two of the teenagers next door are having sex in the van parked outside, so right away we know both are destined to die. No need to pay attention to anything they say. Instead I ruminate on the phenomenon of Van Sex, so common in the 1980s, so rarely seen in these gray days of the twenty-first century.

My personal theory? Throughout the 90s and into the twenty-first century, the aging population of latch-key kids abandoned vehicular fucking all together for the comfort of their own homes (or, more accurately, their working parents' homes). The dual increase in teenage pregnancy and two-income households in the United States would seem to bear this out. Must do research.

Back to Tina, who's crying over her dead dad's picture. Dad's picture is remarkably free of dust considering how long the cabin's been abandoned (at least ten years, assuming Tina's supposed to be legal). Indeed, the place is clean and well lit, as if Dr. Crews put in a call to Merry Maids before Tina and Mom arrived...Mom tries to comfort Tina, but Tina flees the room. (Sensing a theme?) Down she goes to the rebuilt dock (sweet Jesus, why even think of rebuilding it?) and the moonlit Black Lagoon that is Crystal Lake. Why does everyone in the 1980s wear their belts synched up to their ribcage? "I’m sorry daddy," Tina says, "I’m so sorry. I wish I could bring you back."

Ah, sweet, bleeding Jesus, there she goes again. No good can come of this. And, indeed, there’s Jason, right where Tommy Jarvis left him in the last film, chained to a rock at the bottom of the lake. Tina's Psychokinetic Ability somehow revives the dead(?) be-masked brutalizer, snapping his chain at the fourth link and rocketing Jason to the surface. The sight of this sends Tina into a faint, leaving the reanimated Jason to trudge off into the woods in search of his natural prey: horny, substance abusing teenagers...though it occurs to me now that Jason could've just climbed the dock right there and then, killed Tina in her sleep, and saved himself a lot of trudging.

Hats off to the special effects team for this one. They've crafted a beautiful makeup job for stunt/journeyman Kane Hodder, who'll play Jason for the next four films. An all-around stand-up dude by all accounts, Hodder does a wonderful job in his mute roll underneath all those tons of makeup. His Jason has a physical presence I find lacking in the previous six films. I can't really explain it as anything other than body language: in the palpable, stoop-shouldered, lumbering menace that this man can exude when he’s dressed up in fifty pounds of latex, a hockey mask on his face.

Props duly given, it's on to the criticisms. And the questions. Like, what exactly is holding Jason together by now? Stubborn backwoods pride? He’s officially "died" (though perhaps that’s not accurate--has he "lain dormant” like a hibernating predator? Or "gone inert" like some powered-down death machine?) six times to date and suffered a baker's dozen supposed deaths (the False endings) along with countless wounds that would be quite mortal to any mortal man. No explanation is given until the ninth film in the series, and that we will consider in turn. For the moment we're left to pretend we’re not thinking about it. Besides, Tina's coming to from her place on the dock.

Dr. Crews makes like a non-believer, knowing full well the proverbial truth is out there, stalking through the night. You can hear it in his bored, materialist contempt for Tina's story. As she shouts him down a picture on the mantle grows a spider web of cracks, as if Tina fired an invisible BB into it. I've a feeling that, had Dr. Crews stood two steps to his left, he'd be spending the rest of the movie nursing a sucking chest wound. Alas, it is not to be. Not yet.

Cut to the unpaved road which leads up to these cabins. There's a guy named Michael (William Butler) and a girl...who's name I've already forgotten (Staci Gearson). Damn. Ah, well, whatever. Their car's (ahem) died on them, but rather than camp in Crystal Lake Woods (NO! YOU FOOLS!) What's-Her-Name insists they truck on to the cabin. The gathering of teenagers across the way from Tina? It's Michael's surprise, lakefront birthday party. Happy Birthday, you dead bastard.

Back at the cabins, Nick drops by, bearing a piece of Tina's escaped luggage and a suspicious resemblance to the young Clark Kent I see in my head whenever I read Superman prose stories. He manages to invite Tina over to the party next door and make a good impression on Mom all in one fell swoop. So while he's no Tommy Jarvis at least the boy's not a complete idiot.

Back to the woods, where Michael abandons What's-Her-Name to Jason's wrath by walking an extraordinarily loooong distance before he takes a whizz. Michael's shy kidneys earn him the sight of his dead girlfriend nailed to a tree, a tent stake through her throat. Happy Brithday, sucker. Enter Jason, stage right. Exit Michael, via that same tent stake. Interestingly enough, in a reversal of trend, it is the girl who dies first and the guy who gets stalked through the (relatively sparse) underbrush, surviving for thirty-seven whole seconds.

Back at the party, Our Heroine meets and greets this movie's parade of expendable cliches. Dead Meat of all shapes and sizes have turned out for Michael's birthday. There's the Token Black Couple: Ben (Craig Thomas) and Kate (Diane Almeida); Maddy the Nerd Girl (Diana Barrows); the Designated Rich Bitch, Melissa (Susan Jennifer Sullivan); the obligatory girl named Robin (Elizabeth Kaitan); they're all here. There's even Eddie, the Science Fiction Writer (Jeff Bennett, who's gone on to do quite the mess of voice acting since this), whom I'll develop somewhat of a sentimental attachment to...and David (John Renfield), the Token Stoner, toward whom I'll oddly cold. I wonder what that says?

In any case, they're all dead, so it's pointless to get to know them. Tina is the only character in the film who could reasonably be called "alive," in that she's the only one allowed to grow and change in some meaningful way. And here's another hint of why I like this movie: while Tina does descend into the usual paroxysms associated with the Final Girl (compulsive crying, screaming, and senseless tripping over occasionally invisible-objects) she is not confined to these things as a character. She also sees dead people. Did I mention that?

It seems to be news to her, as well. But there's Michael, big as life, getting impaled by a walking corpse with a hockey mask for a face. For a moment its right there in the kitchen. No one else seems to notice. Then it's gone and Tina drops her Pepsi (the Choice of a New Generation) before (can you guess?) fleeing the house, her attempt at socializing duly punished with traumatizing psychic flashes.

Of course Dr. Crews and Mom refuse to believe her, and the night passes with no immediate death. Jason has his hands full with some anonymous campers. (FOOLS!) The next morning allows Tina and Nick their only moment of characterization. Hi, I'm a city kid out in the country. Hi, I killed my dad and it fucked me up but good. Well, nice shoes, wanna stare longingly into each other's eyes? Sure. You’re cute. You're cuter. The end.

A scene later and Melissa, the Token rich bitch is fucking things up for our Heroine, convincing Eddie the Writer to help her stage a socially inappropriate sight gag which utilizes Tina's time in state mental institution as its source of humor. Tina is not amused, snapping Melissa's prize strand of pearls with a glare and her Psychokinetic Abilities before (hold your breath, here it comes) fleeing the house. Those who guessed Melissa's pearls were a birthday gift from her "Daddy" receive 4,283 bonus points and +4 Experience.

So fragile is Tina's ego, she immediately declares to Mom and Dr. Crews, "I hate this place." Smart girl. Go with that instinct. After a day and night in the old homestead, Mom is convinced, but Dr. Crews will have none of it. Tina end the ensuing argument by throwing a TV set at him with her Psychokinetic Abilities before...well, you know. Having fled the cabin next door twice in a row, Tina makes in all the way to the back door before her knight in shinning denim appears. Shall he sweep this poor, telekinetic waif off her feet and carry her away from all this death and tragedy?

I say the, Nay. After all, there's so much killing to be done. The next half-hour of movie is devoted solely to that, with the occasional break as a character runs through the woods from one place to another. In fact, I considered nixing this review all together and in its place writing an entire article on the crazed geography of Crystal Lake. I'm telling you, this place makes Wonderland look rational (from a geographic standpoint) and puts Willie Wonka's Chocolate Factory to shame. Time, space and relative distance operate as they please around Crystal Lake, with characters frequently covering miles in minutes of screen time, arriving at their destinations with full breath and not a speck of sweat. We expect Jason to have the power of off-screen teleportation but this time it seems Crystal Lake has extending that power to everyone in its sphere of influence. Happy Friday the 13th to you, too, haunted demon woods.

Ah, but there is that proto-Buffy I promised to talk more about. As the sole reason I rewatched this godforsaken film, it disserves its proper place as the capstone to this review. Tina is not the first proto-Buffy to appear in horror films. Indeed, all Final Girls have a potential stake to this claim. But where Jamie Lee or Heather Langenkamp were largely forced to rely on simple human inventiveness (which frequently failed them, setting up cliff-hanger endings in the process), Tina, and her spiritual sister, Kristen Parker, represent a distinct bucking of this trend as (for once) the Final Girl is empowered with the ability to face down their supernatural stalkers with something other than a coat hanger or a well timed scream.

But wait, I hear you say, who the hell is Kristen Parker? Kristen Parker was Patricia Arquette's character in 1987's Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. In that film (which, damn me, I might actually have to watch now) Parker, is a teenaged former resident of Springdale, Ohio...Elm Street, naturally. As such Kristen (like Tina) begins the film in a mental institution. But where her similarly-aged fellow inmates are helpless before the nocturnal onslaught of Freddy Kruger, Kristen takes matters into her own hands. With a little help from Heather Langenkamp's character, Nancy, Kristen discovers she has the power to enter other people's dreams--and bringing them back into her own. The perfect foil from Freddy Kruger is born.

Being virginal (literally and figuratively, in that she usually abstains from the drug and alcohol consumption rampant in Slasher films—Tina never touches anything harder than that Pepsi), the Final Girl is already bequeathed with semi-magical powers. For one thing, she gets to live throughout the movie in relative ignorance of the horrible goings on…until the last minute, when she usually has the misfortune to discover some grizzly tableau constructed from the bodies of her friends. Admittedly, the Teens Next Door are far from Tina's friends (except for Melissa the Bitch, they largely ignore her--as would Melissa, had Nick not welded himself to Tina's hip), but that's why Mom's here, after all. As the Joker once said, "I always think it adds resonance to a hero’s story to have some defining element of tragedy in his background, don't you?"

As a matter of fact, I do. And the story of a proto-Buffy is a hero's story, no matter what the title might as. Might as well have called it Tina to begin with considering the fact that, by that point, the Slasher movie had visibly lost any steam it might have once had. The murders (which take up the entire middle third of the film--I have mentioned that, haven't I?) are largely played for shock; quick and to the point (pun most certainly intended), they come off as almost perfunctory to Tina's story (such as it is, being mostly one long run through Crystal Lake Woods). That would be because they are, having little place or meaning to the rest of the film apart from their shock value to Tina. Having the Final Girl discover the mangled bodies of her friends as she's fighting for her own life against and seemingly invulnerable foe...well, that's a pretty slick way to add some resonance, and besides, it's how these things go. We know its where things will inevitably fetch up even as we follow her journey from psyche-ward refugee to Final Girl. I can't help but feel an impatient tension as I wait for the incidental character's to die because once they do Tina will have enough righteous indignation in her fuel cells to achieve Critical Mass and become...well...(apologies to Stephen King, but it has to be said)...Carrie.

Because that's really who Tina is: the psychokinetic product of a broken home with a Suburban 80s mother in place of Carrie White's Jesus Freak Mom. Lucky Tina. Too bad Mrs. Shepherd was so criminally underdeveloped. Too bad she has to die...but lucky for all of us as Tina's discovery of her curiously unmolested corpse (perhaps Jason felt, as I did, that Mrs. Shepherd bore an uncomfortable resemblance to his own Dearly Departed Mother) signals the beginning of the end game, the final confrontation, the part of the Slasher movie that shakes even the most casual fans out of their killing-spree stupors.

And thanks to Tina's Psychokinetic Abilities for once, for once the Final Showdown is something more than a prolong exercise in trauma. For once the Final Girl is something of a match for her pseudo-zombie foe. It goes without saying that her initial efforts will be for naught, but that doesn't dilute my enjoyment of all this one iota. It's about goddamn time someone stood up to Jason Voorhees and gave him a disserved taste of his own medicine. Combining the typical Final Girl ingenuity for found weapons with Carrie White-level (that is, cinematically cheap) telekinesis makes Tina by far the most dynamic and entertaining Final Girl in the series. No Whimpering Female bullshit for her (unlike, say, Ginny in Part 2). No hiding behind Nick, either; Tina fights her own battle throughout, largely forcing Jason to fight on her terms and staying alive because of it.

Liz, over at And You Call Yourself A Scientist, came down against this permutation of the Final Girl in her excellent review of tonight's film. And while I love Liz with all my heart, I would argue that any empowerment of a female character inside a Slasher film can only be an improvement over the norm. Anything that turns the Final Girl from Simpering Victim to Active Protagonist is a thing I'll call Good. When I was younger I dared hope that this improvement would continue, and that the Final Girl would in time mature from Active Protagonist, through Interesting Diversion, perhaps even reaching Buffy's level of Genuinely Interesting Character. Alas, this was a delusion, had before I learned how genuinely stupid the Hollywood system can be, to say nothing of how sadistic. Or misogynistic.

But that's a rant for another time. In the mean, we have this fair diversion: a late period Slasher movie with only one interesting twist to save it from its own deficiency. Dime-store acting, poor scripting and pedestrian directing help not at all, hindered as they are by the sub-genre's own faltering inertia. It would take Scream and the triumph of self-referential post-modernism to inject any semblance of life into this format. And if there's one thing that stands diametrically opposed to Mr. Jason Voorhees, it's life.

Though hot chicks with superpowers appear to work in a pinch.