This is the fifth article in a series revisiting one Friday the 13th movie every Friday the 13th. Read parts one, two, three, and four.

Let’s start with the most interesting thing about Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning: Jason Voorhees is dead. Not Jon Snow dead—actually dead, at the hands of 12-year-old Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman), who slaughtered him with a machete at the end of Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter.

A Jason-less Friday the 13th is not as stupid an idea as it might sound; after all, the entire franchise began with a movie in which Jason Voorhees wasn't actually the killer. And just as the prior movie, The Final Chapter, made a promise it actually delivered when it let Jason die, A New Beginning promises to take Friday the 13th in a bold, new Jason-less direction. It might even have worked, if A New Beginning weren't so terrible.

Friday the 13th Part V starts with a canny inversion of a trope that the franchise had already beaten to death: Where the first few movies ended with gory dream sequences, Part V begins with one. Though Corey Feldman was off filming The Goonies, Part V managed to wrangle him for a brief opening cameo to bridge the gap between the movies. As 12-year-old Tommy Jarvis watches in gape-mouthed horror, a couple of idiots spend a rainy night digging up Jason Voorhees' grave. A particularly thoughtful undertaker has ensured that Jason—in death as he was in life—has been buried in his hockey mask, with a machete in his hand. It is not, suffice it to say, the most shocking of jump scares when Jason rises out of the grave to get his stab on again.

Jason rises from the grave

Smash-cut from the dream sequence to the present, where we meet the older Tommy Jarvis (John Shepherd) as a pair of orderlies drive him to Pinehurst Halfway Home. It's experimental new treatment facility for troubled teens, and it handily doubles as a summer camp-esque setting for those teens to do drugs, have sex, and get murdered.

In the throes of PTSD ever since his fateful encounter with Jason in The Final Chapter, Tommy is psychologically scarred, heavily drugged, and near-catatonic, and Part V's first mistake is building its narrative around a protagonist who spends most of the movie in a mumbly, bug-eyed stupor. (John Shepherd, who played Tommy, later said he was "really doing Boo Radley.") A trained method actor, Shepherd took the role seriously enough that he spent a few months volunteering at a state mental hospital. "The problem was, maybe there came a point when I thought I really was the character," he says.

"It wasn't until I saw Part V that I realized what a piece of trash it was," said Dick Wieand. "I knew the series' reputation, but you always hope yours will come out better."

There was only one problem: Shepherd had nailed the audition before he realized it was for the lead role in a Friday the 13th movie. Part V was produced under the winking fake title Repetition, and Shepherd was "really disappointed" when he eventually learned that this stark character study of a young man with PTSD was actually the new Friday the 13th. "I was counseling kids at a church up in L.A.," he recalled in the series retrospective Crystal Lake Memories. "I had all these moms who were going to freak out if they saw my picture in the paper with a machete. And that’s exactly what happened."