Premium: How I Would Have Done FRIDAY THE 13TH VII: THE NEW BLOOD (1988)

A few years ago, I saw Friday the 13th VII before seeing a live We Hate Movies podcast on it with some friends. Sufficient to say I didn't enjoy the movie that much, but one thing that stuck out to me was how they did nothing with the implication villainous psychiatrist Dr. Crews knew more about Jason Voorhees than he was letting on. This reminded me a heck of a lot of Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 in which heroine Kirsty Cotton warns the director of the mental institution about the horrors of the Cenobites...whom it turns out the director has been researching for some time and wants to contact.

So here's how I would have written Friday the 13th VII if I had to follow the same basic “Jason vs. Carrie” plot. Assume the cast is the same unless I say otherwise. Beware spoilers...

Act One

*No opening recap of the earlier films in the series. The camera starts on the lake floor and pans up around Jason's body before we meeting young Tina Shepherd and her dysfunctional family. John Shepherd is drunkenly abusing his wife Amanda, and their young daughter Tina flees the house onto the dock sticking out into Crystal Lake. Her father pursues as she gets onto a boat and paddles out into the lake, saying or doing something that triggers her to telekinetically smash the dock. Perhaps she yells “go away!” or “leave me alone!” right before. Drunk and perhaps tangled up in the debris, he drowns. Young Tina is devastated — she wanted him to not mistreat her or her mother. She didn’t want him to die.

(Add that his might be the first manifestation of her telekinetic powers to add to the shock and trauma.)

*Flash forward ten years later. Tina, Amanda, and Dr. Crews arrive at the cabin and the events of the film proceed roughly the same. Tina is still tormented by guilt for killing her father and Dr. Crews, who claims be treating her for her mental problems, is a verbally-abusive bully who really wants to study/exploit her psychic abilities. This is when we start getting hints that Dr. Crews knows more about Crystal Lake's bloody history than is quite healthy. In the canonical film his binder of news articles about Jason Voorhees is discovered relatively late, but here we'll see him reading it and hurriedly putting it away when Tina or her mother catch him. He'll still continue his emotionally-abusive "training" to force Tina to manifest her powers, which will be important later.

*The teens having the party next door are still there, but there are a lot fewer of them and they're more developed. I'd keep Nick as the male lead and Tina's love interest, the rich snob Melissa, the nerdy writer guy, the Robin-Maddy-David triangle, and leave the rest out. This means the two black characters aren't there, but the fact the Teen Slasher Meat don't have any black friends at their party could be used to imply they're racist. Other than maybe Nick, they’re not supposed to be sympathetic, right?

*Tina still frees Jason from the bottom of the lake like in the canonical film, wishing she could have her father back but owing to her poorly-managed psychic abilities reviving someone much worse instead.