MOVIE REVIEW : ‘FRIDAY THE 13TH’--AGAIN

Like Dracula, you just can’t keep Jason Voorhees, that maniac in a ski mask, down.

In “Friday the 13th--A New Beginning” (citywide), he quite literally rises from the grave to go on his fifth murderous rampage, this time zeroing in on the inhabitants of a rural halfway house for emotionally disturbed young people (one of whom turns ax murderer before our very eyes; so much for halfway houses).

Writer-director Danny Steinmann and his co-writers have done the smart thing and sent everything up, poking fun at horror-movie cliches such as cars that don’t start at the crucial moment and having a damsel in distress defend herself with a chainsaw only to find that its electric cord is not long enough. Yet even if Steinmann, who directs with energy and confidence, mercifully allows us to complete the slaughter in our imagination, it’s slaughter nevertheless--and on a grand scale.

Even as you feel grateful to be able to laugh off this film, you realize that its humor is really only inuring you to a nonstop series of stabbings, slashings, impalings, stranglings and yet other means of killing. Be warned: For all its laughs, “Friday the 13th--A New Beginning” (rightly rated R) is just one more nauseating sick joke.