Day 7, and it's at this point that the Friday the 13th timeline becomes somewhat convoluted. If Jason Lives was set around 1989, and according to the script the main events of Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood takes place approximately ten years after that, then that means that canonically we're now at about 1999, but everyone dresses, talks and acts like it's still the late 80s. Well I guess that's not so bad. Having them try to predict future trends and make a slasher movie would have just gotten too messy.
Originally, the plan for Part VII was to have a crossover between the Friday the 13th series and the Nightmare on Elm Street series, with Jason Voorhees and Freddy Kruger going head-to-head. The two companies that owned the rights, however - Paramount and New Line Cinema - couldn't come to an agreement over rights and so the filmmakers had to go to Plan B instead: Jason Voorhees versus Carrie. Well, not quite Carrie, but a telekinetic teenage girl at any rate.
So the plot this time is that Tina Shepard is returning to the family home at Crystal Lake about 10 years after she accidentally dropped her father (her drunken abusive father, it should be noted) in the lake with her psychic powers and killed him. She and her mother think that her psychiatrist is trying to help her deal with the trauma, but in reality he just wants to write a paper on her and make his name off her abilites (this is also the first appearance in the series of the sub-plot of the adult, always male, who is exploiting or abusing the female lead for his own purposes). The first night she's there, Tina accidentally frees Jason from the bottom of the lake where he's been since Tommy Jarvis chained him to a rock in Part VI, and conveniently there's a house full of partying teenagers just next door to the Shepard residence...
The biggest problem with Part VII is that it feels like two movies stuck together to make one - a generic Friday the 13th movie and a movie about a psychic teenage girl. This is probably because this movie was of course the second choice after the proposed Freddy Vs Jason movie fell through, and may well have been rushed out to meet deadlines, and possibly even put together out of spare plots they had lying around. Another problem is that, after the high point of the series that was Part VI, The New Blood seems like something of a damp squib. While it does have some good moments and is an important movie in the series in its own right, it doesn't have any of the black humour of the previous movie and seems to be going backwards into the old trap of taking itself too seriously - a sin made even bigger when the female protagonist at one point drops part of a house on Jason.
But it's not a terrible film. It's still trying to bring something new and original to the table, and it's original enough that it doesn't feel anything like the terrible dullness of Part 5. It's also the Friday the 13th movie that introduced us to Kane Hodder as Jason Voorhees - Hodder of course became synonymous with Jason Voorhees over the next several films in the series. Finally, Part VII also features the first appearance of one of the strangely most-recognised kills in the series, where a woman is trapped in a sleeping bag and beaten to death against a tree. This kill is of course revisited to great effect in Jason X (it is in fact one of Hodder's favourite kills from his time in the movies).
The series was really starting to struggle by this point, though, and the weariness was showing. Plot holes were starting to show (apparently they never dredged Crystal Lake in its history, which makes you wonder just how many more bodies are down there) and the films were becoming more and more formulaic and were obviously being pumped out just for the profits rather than any enjoyment of the series. The death-knells of the series, while still some way away, could be heard in the far distance...
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