Instead of opening with an expositional flashback, A New Beginning goes all out with new material, an obvious dream sequence where young Tommy Jarvis (a cameo from Corey Feldman) sees Jason rising from the grave to kill again.
When Tommy awakes, he's now an older teenager (John Shepherd) being ferried to a halfway house for troubled kids. Haunted by his encounter with Jason as a young kid, Tommy has anger issues and still suffers from hallucinations (and bad dreams).
Unfortunately, the day Tommy arrives at the secluded property one of the kids murders another with an axe... triggering someone to adopt the Jason persona and start killing random people in the area, getting ever closer to the halfway house.
It's quite obvious from early on that this isn't the real Jason Voorhees as the killer isn't following Jason's "rules" - the victims have no connection with Crystal Lake and some are quite innocent of any of the 'infractions' that drive him to kill.
Also, some of the kills are too complex for the zombie Jason we saw in The Final Chapter.
We're even told, although the veracity of the speaker isn't confirmed, that the real Jason not only died years ago, but was cremated.
So, who is it? The obvious answer is Tommy, of course.
But it could be that arbitrary supporting character director Danny Steinmann keeps framing in "meaningful" and "enigmatic" shots.
And that's the problem with A New Beginning, it's all a bit Scooby-Doo (but with more blood and boobs) once you figure out that Martin Kitrosser, David Cohen, and Danny Steinmann's script is trying to replicate the twist-that-then-wasn't-a-twist from the first Friday The 13th film.
But the culprit they chose (and the revelation that he appears to have adopted the guise of Jason almost at random) makes him just another mass murderer, rather than an iconic horror film slasher.
He has his "reason" but his method doesn't make cinematic sense.
And the proximity of Tommy to all this turns out to be just one freaking huge coincidence. Even the fact that the killer is revealed to be wearing a Scooby-Doo mask and a point is made, early on, about Tommy still making his horror masks... no connection, whatsoever, just a co-inky-dink!
Although, all this does then lead to the denouement, which seems to really be The New Beginning of the title, as it, presumably, sets up 1986's Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives.
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