Friday the 13th: A New Beginning

Friday the 13th: A New Beginning is the fourth sequel to the original Friday the 13th. In spite of the fact that the previous film claimed to be the "final chapter," this installment set out to live up to its title by being a "new beginning" for the franchise. However, these plans fell through when the film was greeted with a massive backlash from fans who felt deceived and betrayed. The film even sat for a period of time at the bottom of IMDb's Bottom 100.

Twelve year-old Tommy Jarvis, who killed Jason Vorhees in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, walks through the woods in the pouring rain to visit Jason's tombstone. He hides when two young men arrive and begin to dig up Jason's grave. They open the coffin to find Jason's not dead, and he was apparently buried with weapons. Jason senses Tommy watching, and pursues him. But it was just a dream.

Tommy, now fifteen(yet being played by a 24-year-old actor), awakes from the nightmare in a van from the Unger Institute of Mental Health. He's dropped off by the attendant, Billy, at Pinehurst, a halfway home for troubled teens, and meets Pam Roberts, the assistant director, and Dr. Matthew Letter. 'Matt' and Pam explain that Pinehurst is run on an honor system, since the intent is to help teens like Tommy reenter society. Tommy then meets "Reggie the Reckless," the grandson of George, who works at the house. Sheriff Tucker and his deputy return Pinehurst residents Eddie and Tina after they're caught trespassing on the land of Ethel Hubbard and her buffoonish son "Junior," whose property is next door. The foul-mouthed Ethel and Junior arrive and Ethel threatens to shoot the next Pinehurst resident on her property.

We then meet several more Pinehurst residents, a Forrest Gump-like Joey, punk Violet who's always listening to headphones, red-head Robin, and Vic who appears to be taking anger issues out on the wood he's chopping. Joey pesters Vic until he snaps & kills Joey with the axe. Vic is arrested by Sheriff Tucker, and ambulance attendants Duke Johnson and Roy Burns come to take away Joey's body.

That night, Pete and Vinnie, some young Fonzie-wannabes, have their car break down near Pinehurst. They are killed creatively by an unseen assailant. Tommy has another hallucination of Jason the next morning, and at breakfast he loses control and beats up Eddie when Eddie scares him with one of Tommy's own masks. A drifter, Raymond, shows up at Ethel and Junior's house looking to work for food. Night arrives, and when the attendant, Billy, goes to pick up a waitress, Lana, for a date, and they are murdered by an unseen axe-wielding assailant.

The next day, Sheriff Tucker is convinced that Jason Vorhees is responsible for all the deaths, but the prosecutor thinks he's crazy and wants a real suspect. Tina and Eddie sneak off into the woods to have sex. The drifter spies on them, but falls victim to the killer, who then kills Tina and Eddie. That night Pam drives Reggie to see his brother Demon, and brings Tommy along for the ride. Reggie and Demon catch up on old times and Demon introduces his girlfriend Anita. Junior comes across Tommy and attacks him, but Tommy fights back, beating him savagely until Pam stops him. Tommy runs off into the night so Pam takes Reggie back to Pinehurst where she finds Matt and George are missing. Demon and Anita fall victim to the killer, who then goes to the Hubbard place and kills Junior and Ethel. Pam goes to look for everyone.

Jake and Robin are watching a movie (A Place in the Sun) when he tells her he wants to make love to her, which she thinks is a joke. Jake goes to Violet for advice, but she's dancing in her room and can't be bothered. The killer arrives and takes out Jake, Robin, then Violet. Reggie discovers their corpses just before Pam returns, and they both run into a hockey mask-wearing figure. A storm rages as they flee to the road where they find the body of Duke Johnson in his ambulance. They run into the woods where they find Matt's corpse. They become separated and Pam runs back to the house where she find's George's body. With the killer just behind her, she heads for the barn, and just as the killer is about to strike, Reggie drives a tractor into him. Pam and Reggie run into the barn to make their stand. Pam is having some success with a chainsaw until it stalls out, and when things look their worst, Tommy arrives to save them by killing the killer. It turns out that Roy Burns had been hiding the fact that Joey was his son, and when he was confronted with his son's mutilated body, he went crazy. He adopted the Jason Vorhees persona he'd read about in the newspaper, and set out to kill anyone he could.

That same night as Tommy lays in his hospital bed, he has a vision of stabbing Pam. He snaps out of it only to find a hockey mask and knife in his room. He stalks Pam and...fade to black. The movie ends with Tommy about to become Jason.
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Trivia

* Originally, the opening of the film actually picks up not too long after the events of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter with Tommy Jarvis taken to the same hospital with Jason's body. In an effort to get to Jason, Tommy murders several of the hospital's staff trying to get to the morgue. When he finally gets there, he finds Jason's body rising from the autopsy table. It's at this point that an adult Tommy wakes up in a van on way to Pinehurst as in the film.
* When the killer is finally seen, careful inspection would allow some to realize that the character is not Jason. Aside from wearing the same kind of mechanic suit that Michael Myers wears in the Halloween films, the hockey mask actually sports blue marks as opposed to the original mask's which were red (which might be perceived as a play on a red herring). This is obvious when compared to how the image of Jason that Tommy sees bares a much closer resemblance to how he appeared in the previous films.
* The producers had originally wanted Corey Feldman to reprise his role as Tommy. But because he was filming The Goonies, Feldman was only available to do a cameo in the movie's opening scene.