REVIEW: Friday the 13th

Machetes. Breasts. Blood. Sex. Death. Booze. Axes. Pot. Hockey masks. Severed heads. The formula is pretty simple if you’re making another Friday the 13th flick.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that the powers that be decided to remake… err.. reboot the franchise for a modern audience. So how exactly does it fit in with the previous nineteen movies? Well, much like last years Incredible Hulk, this Friday the 13th isn’t so much a remake as it is a sequel to the original film. In fact, just like in Incredible Hulk, the opening credits of F13 take us through a montage of Jason’s origin to get us up to speed. What we see is pretty faithful to the original film, with Pamela Voorhees, Jason’s mother, getting her head removed via machete courtesy of a buxom blonde camp counselor. The story itself is pretty… well… there is no story. Aside from the one set in space (which was ridiculous and awesome), none of these films have a story. It’s a bunch of teens in the woods drinking, smoking weed, having sex and having their insides torn out by an abnormally large, mentally underdeveloped (see, retarded), hockey mask wearing lunatic. So lucky or unlucky for us, the new F13 doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel. But does that mean its any good?

On the whole, not really.

The thing about the previous films, what makes them oddly charming, is that they don’t take themselves seriously. At all. The acting is bad. The directing is bad. The cinematography is… well there is none. These are not good movies. What they are is incredibly fun, for those reasons and the ‘kill factor’. If it werent’ for each film’s increasingly inventive methods of murder they wouldn’t be worth watching. I mean, the franchise couldn’t even bank on that after six entries and had to shift the character into new territories like telekinesis, Manhattan and outer space. This alone makes me wonder why they thought they could bring anything fresh to the franchise while still keeping so faithful to the mythos. What they’ve ended up with is the most boring scenes of the franchise edited together and modernized. And there you’ve lost all that 80’s charm.

Let’s get back to the kill factor. This film has none of it, thus defeating its purpose. The movie plays it too close to the chest, I would assume to capture some sense of realism or gritty rawness. So there’s no punching some mouthy bitches mouth into a concave mass of teeth and throat, or tightening a belt around a hapless campers head until their eyeball shoots out. With the exception to a naked girl being barbecued alive in her sleeping bag, every kill is via stab wound. I didn’t pay for that, I paid to watch Jason tear a kids arm off and use it to impale another kid through the mouth with it.

Jason himself is treated fairly faithfully, except this time he can run negating the ridiculous time-space continuity glitches from the old films. Jason always moved at a snail’s pace in pursuit of a screaming broad, who ends up running into Jason 100 yards out. Now he just runs after them, which I’ll give it to the new one, was kind of intimidating. Derek Mears, who plays this incarnation of Jason Voorhees is arguably the largest of all to have stepped behind the mask. So the physical presence is there and works well for the film, as opposed to the horrendous Halloween remake.

Ultimately, the film doesn’t fail the franchise as much as Rob Zombie’s Halloween did. In terms of continuity and effort F13 works as a nod to the rest of the series. There’s no doubt you will really like the film a lot more if you are a) unfamiliar with the previous entries, b) are a total lightweight when it comes to horror/slasher films or c) have no/poor taste in film in general. If I were you I’d wait for the home video release so you can enjoy it with some beers and chase it with some vintage Jason.

A for effort. D for entirely unremarkable.