That the producers of Friday the 13th - Part V had the audacity to subtitle this entry A New Beginning says a lot about the perceived gullibility of the slasher film audience. For instead of being a "new beginning" in the way that John Carpenter's Halloween: Season of the Witch attempted something different with his title franchise, director Danny Steinman's Friday basically returned to the central plot of the very first 'un.
In both flicks, the mad killer proves to be the parent of a kid who's died due to their overseer's negligence. In the first Friday, young Jason "drowned" in Crystal Lake when a pair of horny summer camp counselors weren't paying attention to the boy; in Part Five, it's the death of a fat mental health patient at the hands of a rageaholic fellow camper that sparks the body count.
Both victim and killer are summering at Crystal Lake courtesy of the Unger Institute of Mental Health, though how the two teens transferred from a locked institution to a camp that only appears to have two working counselors with a decidedly lax attitude toward letting its clients handle axes isn't explained. All we know for sure is that the camp is sparsely populated by a group of marginal teens who no one will particularly miss after they've been cut down.
Our entry to Camp Pinehurst and its population of ever ready slasher victims is via Tommy Jarvis, who we last saw in The Final Chapter as a bespectacled Corey Feldman, though he's sprouted over the space of a year into a muscular teen played by John Shepherd. Tommy, we'll remember, "killed" Jason at the end of the previous film - and has since spent his days institutionalized as a reward for this "brutal" act of self-defense. To establish that this rapidly aged figure is indeed Tommy, Shepherd wears a pair of wire-rim glasses at the start, though he quickly discards 'em without so much as a blink.
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