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I think Friday the 13th: A New Beginning gets a bad rap.

This was the first film of the Friday the 13th franchise I was exposed to, and I can admit to a bit of nostalgia coloring my fondness for this film, but over the years, this entry in this franchise has managed to remain one of my favorites in the series.

Even if Jason Voorhees isn't the killer.

Technically.

Hold that thought.

When New Line Pictures took over the Friday the 13th franchise back in the early 90s, I'm convinced they really didn't quite know what to do with it at first. New Line seemed to be interested in re-molding the Jason mythos in the vein of something more Freddy Krueger-like (this is even eluded to in the DVD commentary by director Adam Marcus and screenwriter Dean Lorey when the filmmakers refer to Jason as some sort of assassin in the real world comparing him to Freddy, which they call an assassin in the "dream world"), and their first film in the franchise seemed to pick and choose which pieces of the previous films' continuities the filmmakers wanted to honor. Jason Goes to Hell may have referenced Jason's sister while in the first film, Pamela Voorhees told Alice that Jason was an only child, which does throw a tiny wrench in the overall continuity of the franchise (which was admittedly threadbare to begin with), but Jason Goes to Hell does something else that might make Friday the 13th: A New Beginning a bit more palatable to the Jason fans that complain about the lack of Mama Voorhees' bouncing baby boy in that film.

In the fifth film, we only see Jason - the Jason that existed in the previous three films - in flashbacks and hallucinations. Tommy Jarvis (John Shephard) has grown up a bit since his Corey Feldman appearance in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, and he's not managed to handle the previous film's stresses all that well. He finds himself in a halfway house . . . in the woods . . . and due to some near-unbelievable coincidence, someone shows up wearing a hockey mask and starts killing people.

A common complaint about the fifth film is that the killer isn't Jason. Technically. Instead, the killer is Roy (Dick Wieand) who took inspiration from Jason Voorhees, donned a hockey mask of his own, and went to work. (When Roy wears the mask and stalks the kids, the killer is actually played by Tom Morga.)

I would argue that it IS Jason doing the killing. In Jason Goes to Hell, we watch as the undead-played-by-Kane-Hodder version of Jason is shot to hell and blown up before the opening credits. Yet, in the film, Jason is still killing people. How does he do it if his body was destroyed before the end of the first reel?

In that film, sensationalist television personality Robert Campbell (Steven Culp) interviews bounty hunter Creighton Duke (Steven Williams) who, for some reason or other, knows more about the New Line version of Jason Voorhees than anyone else. During the interview, Duke delviers six or seven lines that makes A New Beginning more a part of the franchise than writers Martin Kitrosser and David Cohen or even director Danny Steinmann intended.

What you think of as Jason is not Jason. That body he's wearin'? It's just meat. The boy knows how to dress. He wears other peoples' bodies like folks wear suits. Oh, he might get blown up; this is just a minor inconvenience for him.

And here's the line that really sends it all home.

He'll just get himself another body.

Connect the dots. At the end of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, the body we've been watching as Jason since the second film is definitively stopped courtesy of Tommy and a well-placed machete shot. No more Jason. We'll learn in later films that the body was buried in a hidden grave.

But somehow . . . somehow the essence, the evil, the spirit of Jason found a way to find a new host, and not surprisingly, the new host was in close vicinity to Tommy Jarvis, the person responsible for forcing this spirit Jason out of the backwoods body it had been using for the previous three films.

Once the sixth film rolled around, circumstance allowed for this spirit Jason to return to its more familiar and now reanimated body, but for one film, Jason's hockey mask had blue stripes.¹

Even if you don't feel the continuity-preserving need to make all the puzzle pieces of a film franchise that spanned nearly 30 years and two different film studios fit together into one cohesive bloody picture, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning is still a solid slasher film, and can be watched apart from the other movies easily as its own beast. But you don't have to, thanks to Jason Goes to Hell.

If only they gave out No Prizes for horror movies.