Frank Mancuso Jr had by now understandably decided he'd rather not be forever known as the series producer, so whilst still attached as Executive Producer overseeing them. he turned the main duties to Timothy Silver - a promotion for him from Production Manager.
Continuation of quality was evidently a secondary consideration when assigning a director. The studio chose Danny Steinmann, who most recently helmed the Linda Blair vigilante exploiter SAVAGE STREETS (1984). He had also directed 1973 hardcore porn feature HIGH-RISE starring genre favourite Harry Reems. Whilst it's not totally fair to hold this background against a director since many started out moon-lighting in porn (or the quaint term 'nudie flicks'), the difference is that you expect their mainstream work to look like a graduation beyond dumb prurient sleaze. A NEW BEGINNING isn't. The original and earlier casts were on the whole fairly innocent or at least healthy. Here, two of the couples are coke-heads amid a pervasive general air of tawdriness. There's no attempt at making them anything more than fodder you'd like Jason to dispatch, which robs the movie of some much-needed threat level.
To be fair to Steinmann, on the documentary he recalls that the producers made him include a kill every seven or eight minutes. That's an underestimation - there are actually twenty in this film (a record?). Possibly due to the censorious attention always paid by the MPAA, almost all the killings settle the camera on the brandished implement then a sound effect to denote the actual impact off-screen.
The premise of A NEW BEGINNING is that Tommy, the heroic tweener of THE FINAL CHAPTER has now grown into a post-traumatic, virtually monosyllabic late teenager, John Shepherd. We are shown a nightmare in which his younger self, a rain-soaked Corey Feldman (who gamely agreed to a night's filming in between better projects), watches Jason being exhumed by a couple of thrill-seeking chuckleheads who are promptly offed. As Jason rounds on his young nemesis, the terrified older Tommy awakes. He is about to become the latest resident at the Pinehurst Halfway House, a residential treatment clinic for bad actors.
Aside from a notably higher boob count than usual, what also betrays Steinmann's pedigree as a hackmeister is how he directs many of the cast to play gratingly broad stereotypes reminiscent of x-rated fare. The redneck Hubbard mother and son, Ethel and Junior (Carol Locatell and Ron Sloan) are respectively a forced pantomime dame and a sub-basement Randy Quaid devoid of any hoped-for intentional humour. To signpost that Dominic Brascia's portly Joey is a greedy teen, he enters his sole scene outside clutching a chocolate bar melting over his fist and smeared across his face like a comic strip school glutton. Perhaps it is a kindness that he is suddenly hacked to death by fellow resident wood-chopper Victor (Mark Venturini).
What follows in the tackily-dialogued script by Martin Kitrosser, David Cohen and Steinmann is a dull, systematic culling of the residents by a lackluster Jason, after which our endurance is rewarded by finding out we've been had. All along fans have been palmed off with a fake Jason! It was actually vengeful paramedic Roy Burns (Dick Wieand) who turned hockey-masked homicidalist after discovering his son Joey was the axed chocoholic. If it wasn't for you meddling kids... (Hey, at least Scooby Doo's unmasked villain bamboozled a bunch of teens you cared about.)
After Sheriff Exposition drops this steaming denouement bowel movement in the hospital on Melanie Kinnaman's facility director Pam, Tommy hallucinates a vision of Jason in his room. For him to then don the mask and finally threaten her signals that the mind-meld of plot stupidity with the rest of the franchise is once again established.
With a box office result of ten million dollars less than THE FINAL CHAPTER, Paramount now seemed to be losing their ailing franchise patient due to an overdose of poisonous decisions. However, an unlikely rejuvenating shot of humour and a fond embrace of the series' inherent absurdity would soon come to the rescue...
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