Friday the 13th

OPENING: 02/13/2009

STUDIO: New Line Cinema

TRAILER: Trailer

ACCOMPLICES: Official Site

The Charge
Welcome to Crystal Lake.

Opening Statement
And goodbye to Crystal Lake! Exactly what is the point of rebooting and re imagining a beloved iconic horror franchise if you just go and make the exact same film again? I’d ask the producers of Friday the 13th, but they seem too busy counting their large stacks of money. I guess we’ll never know.

Facts of the Case
Except for the drowning of a young boy named Jason, the systematic murdering of its teenage camp counselors by his deranged mother and her eventual beheading, Camp Crystal Lake was your everyday, normal happy camp. Now long abandoned, it sits unattended. It makes sense then that drunk and horny frat students would vacation up there looking for pot fields and places to get laid.

A few weeks after her mysterious disappearance (after just such an outing) Clay Miller (Jared Padalecki) ventures into the Crystal Lake area looking for his sister Whitney (Amanda Righetti) and runs into a group of frat guys and girls out for a good time. Trent (Travis Van Winkle), along with his girlfriend Jenna (Danielle Panabaker), and their friends Chewie (Aaron Yoo), Chelsea (Willa Ford), Nolan (Ryan Hansen), Bree (Julianna Guill), and Lawrence (Arlen Escarpeta) shack up at Trent’s father’s wealthy palace-like castle overlooking the lake for a weekend of drugs, sex and mischief. Unfortunately for them, a masked man lurks the woods, murdering all who come to Crystal Lake for a weekend of drugs, sex and mischief. Why he does this, we’re not always sure. He doesn’t say a lot, and his face is always covered. Also, he has a machete.

The Evidence
So what happens when you take the archetypal horror film franchise, the template in which all slasher films emerged naked and bloody from the womb and give it a modern re imaging? Not much, as it turns out. Why mess with a good thing?

One should not be surprised that the reboot of Friday the 13th delivers a paint-by-numbers version of the timeless tale of a malformed malfeasant named Jason, the masked man who machetes his way through an endless string of scantily-clad teenagers. It is, after all, what make the franchise great. Oh sure, there is pathos and back story about a lonely boy at Camp Crystal Lake and his overbearing, slightly serial killer mother, but let’s face it: we all go to see Friday the 13th films to see a seven-foot tall dude with a big knife carve his way through hapless nubile teenagers doing the nasty in the woods. If it ain’t broke, why fix it?

Well, why indeed? The inherent flaw with this reboot is how aggravatingly faithful the film takes the franchise in certain ways—naked girls, machetes, endless shadowy creeping shots around trees in the woods—and retardedly divergent in others. Why, for the love of Fangoria was it necessary to make Jason an ill-tempered marijuana farmer? Aside from giving the idiotic teenagers fleeing for their lives GPS devices (which break within minutes) and iPods, exactly what modern twists have been added here? The same dumb horror clichés still apply—mindless exploration of clearly deranged and ghostly cabins in the woods, sex in tents that conveniently illuminates the shadow of the approaching mass murderer, the acquiring of (and then prompt losing of) weapons of defense, a total inability to run in a straight line without tripping or falling over invisible objects and, best of all, the Houdini-esque ability of Jason, a seven foot, three hundred pound axe killer, to vanish into thin air and appear in whatever place audiences do not expect him to be. Even for horror films, where one must suspend disbelief, Friday the 13th stretches credulity to incredulous ends. By the end of the film I was convinced Jason traveled via silent roller-skates that allow him to travel through walls. It’s the only explanation for his near-magical ability to vanish and then re-appear with machete in hand in impossible ways.

Even if you strip away all Jason-related associations and try to appreciate the film on the sheer merits of being a horror film, Friday the 13th is redundant and ill-conceived. It is a serial killer movie in which the killer has about ten minutes of scree time combined, and the rest of the film is spent hanging out with annoying teenagers who never seem to meet their end fast enough to save audiences from falling asleep. Even when compared to recent, more challenging and gorier horror films, Friday the 13th feels repetitive, repeating the same chase-style sequences again and again. Aside from a few well-placed strikes, Jason dispatches twenty or so people in near-identical fashion: he puts a machete in them. No fuss, no muss—just a big blade protruding from a chest cavity, then he vanishes into the night again before emerging spontaneously from a closet ten miles away. He studiously ignores rooms full of creative items that could gorily and noisily dispatch annoying teenagers—band saws, chainsaws, hockey sticks, industrial machinery of all shapes and sizes, the stuff that horrific dreams are made of. Hell man, we don’t even see limbs get hewn by the machete. That’s no fun.

Logic dictates that Jason should not be standing here.

The best part about the film, truth be told, is everything prior to its credits. We get flashbacks of pre-Jason fun (essentially the entire first film compressed into sixty seconds of screen time) and a delightful and pointless romp of Jason putting the screws to some unfortunate teenagers who happened to wander into his… um, weed plantation. Drug peddling aside, it is pure Friday the 13th glee: silly naked teenagers being dispatched in brutal fashion in order of virginity lost. Then the actual film starts, and with it a colluded attempt to bring plot and structure to a franchise that never needed any. If you’re going to make a film rebooting the franchise, could they have at least made it about Jason? You know, about his messed up childhood, and his deformation, and his motivations for being a serial killer? Instead, we get some whining tale about a guy looking for his sister who vanished in the Crystal Lake area and a bunch of frat boys partying in a mansion, playing beer games and having relationship fights. Hey, maybe he’s the same Jason who vanished all those years ago at Camp Crystal Lake… ah, never mind that. Let’s light up that bong!

(This actually happens in the movie. I am not even being hyperbolic here. )

When you boil it down to its base elements, one grudgingly must admit that Friday the 13th is a passable entry in a franchise that had derailed so spectacularly as to send its swamp-dwelling psycho to Manhattan, Hell and then outer space. This is not difficult to improve upon. In one sense, this is a return to form, a back-to-basic approach for Jason—haunting Crystal Lake and murdering anyone dumb enough to show up looking for a swim. It is the first film that people remember from their childhood memories, but ironically a film that actually never existed. After all, Jason wasn’t even really in the first film at all, now was he? People seem to forget this, and it irritates people who attend horror film conventions to no end.

Instead, Friday the 13th is a reduction; a rendering down of all the iconic elements of Jason in the last two decades and crammed into a single film. Fans of the franchise will lose count of how many sequences, kills and shots are lifted directly, frame for frame from previous films in the franchise (specifically the first four). It is a technically proficient and handsome treatment, but one devoid of originality and substance, and for modern horror-seeking audiences, one that feels surprisingly dated. In making the archetypal Jason film, Friday the 13th accidentally underwrites its own argument for existence. Twenty years of slasher clichés and genre films have heightened the craft of horror construction to almost mathematical efficiency. Times have changed, my hockey-masked friend.

Imagine being presented with a replica of that car you loved back in high school, with a new gaudy coat of paint on it. Once the initial nostalgic thrill wears off, you’re left riding in a slow-moving vehicle with a mechanical inability to make smooth left turns. Perhaps some things are best left remembered than relived.

But hey, at least Jason doesn’t turn into a slug this time. Thank heavens for that.

Closing Statement
An uninspired rebooting of a franchise best left dead and buried, Friday the 13th is predictably gory and painfully derivative of the eleven films that preceded it. It tosses in enough naked girls, bloody murders and tense chases through dark woods to quantify itself in the franchise, but fails to improve on the source material in any substantial fashion to justify its own existence.

If all the resurrection of Jason meant was getting another round of chasing naked teens through the woods, better to have let the poor guy slumber. It’s what audiences will be doing by the end of the film.

The Verdict
6/10