Tina (Lar Park Lincoln), a teen with telepathic powers, has come to Crystal Lake.
Her psychiatrist, Dr Crews (Terry Kiser), has brought her back to the site of her original trauma to instigate her powers.
Instead, she resurrects Jason Voorhees (Kane Hodder) who has been lying at the bottom of the lake.
As Jason gets back to work on a nearby house of teens, he finds his rampage thwarted by Tina’s powers.
Has Jason finally met his match?
After the muted response to Jason Lives, the Friday the 13th franchise took a break for a year.
While my knowledge of the production is limited, I am guessing the delay was a result of indecision.
The idea of a crossover with Freddy Krueger started around this time, but that project would take over a decade to get going. Considering the relative commercial performance of the two franchises (1988 saw Nightmare on Elm Street 4 reach the series’s box office high point), trying to work out a version which would please both groups at this point would be difficult.
Now that Jason was a legitimate movie monster with supernatural leanings, filmmakers were probably bored by the idea of the zombie Terminator going against another group of horny teenagers.
The winning pitch for Part VII would be Tina, a young woman with Carrie White-like telekinetic powers.
Special effects specialist John Carl Buechler was hired as director, and he was the one who cast the series’ most consistent Jason Vorhees, Kane Hodder. Hodder would play Jason in four films, be interviewed by Arsenio Hall and provide the motion-capture for Friday the 13th - The Game.
I was really looking forward to The New Blood. After the transition to supernatural horror in the previous instalment, I was looking forward to some kind of escalation.
Sadly, the relative failure of Jason Lives meant the budget for Part VII was not boosted.
The picture’s exteriors (filmed in Alabama) provide some interesting backdrops, and Buechler does some effective work with the setpieces, but otherwise the picture is a little flat.
Even if you do not know that the film is directed by an effects expert, The New Blood has the feeling of an effects reel spliced together with indifferently made dramatic scenes around them. I’m that respect, this movie feels like the inverse of A New Beginning where the characters are bizarre and the kills are non-descript.
Despite some iconic aesthetic choices, The New Blood is a bit of a fumble.
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