Thank God It's Friday the 13th: Friday the 13th Part 7: The New Blood!!

Spoilers throughout.

Part 7 immediately endears itself to the series connoisseur because it opens with a "previously..." narration by Walt Gorney, the actor who played Crazy Ralph. Whether this is Ralph's spirit speaking to us from beyond the grave, or his son grown up to take his place, we'll never know. We then get a nice intro in which young Tina flees from her fighting parents onto a boat on Crystal Lake. Her father runs out after her but in her upset state she manifests telekinetic powers that bring the front porch down on him, knocking him into the lake.

Don't you hate it when that happens?

Flash forward to the present day, which we'll call 198X. The signs no longer identify Crystal Lake as Forest Green, so this is obviously some time after Part 6, but it's also very obviously still the 80s. Tina, now a teenager, has come back to the lake with her mother and sleazy therapist. She's now played by Lar Park Lincoln, who sounds like a nu-metal band.

"I am Lar" - how this chick introduces herself

The therapist has ostensibly brought her back to resolve her guilt complex over her father's death, but is secretly trying to agitate her to make her show her powers. This is like one of those old meme South Park gnome plans:

Step 1: piss off budget Carrie.

Step 2: ???

Step 3: profit!

The real reason in plot terms, of course, is so she can raise Jason from his watery grave to kill again for no particular reason.

It's a fair response to being woken up imho 2bqh

Director John Carl Buechler also did the makeup effects and it's obvious that's where most of the attention went on this one. The characters are mostly an afterthought, extremely lazily sketched out stereotypes haphazardly jammed together into one group, including a bitchy preppy, stoner, "nerdy" girl with big glasses, and so on. Their antics are phoned in and pointless and a ton of characters are telegraphed arriving on scene only to be killed. This is the first entry in which the filler feels like filler, as opposed to comfy ambience or quirky retardation. The only enjoyable oddball is this goofy fuck:

"I've been rejected by some of the finest science fiction magazines in the continental United States" - G. Fuck

It really comes through as an effects picture though. The final fight between Tina and Jason is great and Jason has never looked better before or since, with his skeleton showing through after all the years of beatings, mutilations and floating around on a chain at the bottom of the lake he's been through.

He looks fine by UK standards.

He also seems to be really obsessed with switching up his weapons this time out. After finding Tina's mom and the sleazeball shrink out in the woods, Jason spears her but then presumably goes all the way back to the house to grab a weed whacker with which to whack Fink Freud. Does Jason have OCD? Probably not, as he starts to get really attached to his machete in later instalments, but it took him long enough. Maybe he just hadn't found the right machete.

"Some kills just feel like weed whacker kills, you know?" - Jason

Anyway, one thing leads to another and Tina magically brings her long-drowned father back to life to drag Jason back down into the water. Or it just happens, idk. It's no more nonsensical than the endings of most of these pictures, but it definitely got a good laugh out of me the first nine times I saw it.

So it's a film of two halves. It was the best of films; it was the worst of films. I think I'd place it top of the lower tier (so below 1, 2 and 4) maybe narrowly beating out 6. Then again, Jason still has yet to go to space and fight Freddy, so we have all that to look forward to.