Friday the 13th (2009 Remake)

 

And we come full circle. It’s remake time! Once a popular horror franchise has existed for a while, they stop making sequels and start making remakes. It’s an easy way for filmmakers to cash in on nostalgia and name brand recognition; remaking a movie doesn’t require as much thought or creativity as making a completely new one, and the fans are already there. That’s essentially what’s happened here with Friday the 13^th remake. They didn’t try anything new or different; they just made a slasher under the F13 brand. It’s a Platinum Dunes film, a production company that specialises in remaking horror movies that was created by, of all people, Michael Bay. They’ve produced some good ones (the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake is actually pretty good) and a lot of garbage (the Nightmare on Elm Street remake is horrendous). Friday the 13^th sits in the middle. It’s bad, but not as bad as it could have been. Compared to downright awful nonsense like the Nightmare on Elm Street remake (a film so entirely joyless and tedious it probably could put you to sleep), Friday the 13^th Remake is at least watchable and fulfils its purpose as a slasher. It’s just full of annoying characters, bad writing, dumb plot points and other nonsense that drags it all down.

Interestingly enough, this movie is essentially a remake of the first three Friday the 13^th movies, with its first twenty minutes (before the title even comes up) being a quick run through of the main points of the first two movies. It begins instantly with a girl being chased through the woods by Pamela Voorhees, who has just massacred a group of people at Camp Crystal Lake as revenge for the apparent drowning death of her son Jason. The fleeing girl manages to fight back and behead Pamela. Some thirty years later, a camping group of horny college kids head to Crystal Lake, ostensibly to seek out a fabled marijuana field. While there they come afoul of Jason Voorhees, who slaughters the group, with the exception of Whitney, a girl who resembles his mother, who he kidnaps. A title card and several weeks later, a group of college kids are heading to a summer home on Crystal Lake to hang out and have fun. Also in the area is Clay (played by one of the guys from the TV series Supernatural), searching for Whitney, his sister. But Jason is lurking around and begins another massacre.

 

The characters suck. It’s true. They’re horrible, boring or annoying. The writing is absolutely atrocious with bad dialogue as well. The first group of characters who get hacked through in the first twenty minutes have nothing going on, and the main group suck. Besides Clay, who is boring with ‘I need to find my sister’ being his only character trait, and his love interest Jenna, who is boring and only exists to be around Clay, we’ve got the Asian stoner, the black guy, the slut, the asshole (more on him soon), and the two blonde idiots who disappear and get killed early on and nobody notices or even tries looking for. Whitney isn’t a character so much as a plot device, and she’s only around for maybe five minutes tops.

The biggest issue is with how badly the characters work together as a group. They don’t come across as groups of friends, they seem more like are strangers who happen to be around each other. The crux of the problem is Trent, the asshole alpha-male dickhead asshole character. It’s his family’s summer home they’re going to, and the guy is just a total fucking prick to the point where he spends the entire movie being an unreasonable asshole to everybody. It brings up a question you’ll be asking a million times over; why is anybody friends with him? He openly hates everybody, nobody has any good, natural interactions, and all he does is complain about them being in his summer home. Why did he invite them? For what reason? Boring, wholesome heroine Jenna (who suddenly gets killed in the last five minutes, her death having no impact because of how boring she is) is dating Trent, but once again you have to question why since he’s obviously such a dickhead, to the point that he cheats on her with the slut because she dared to talk to the guy who is looking for his missing sister.

From a technical perspective for the most part it’s seemingly alright actually. It’s mostly dark and atmospheric and Jason really is an imposing figure. The lake looks like a lake, the woods are wood-like, and when we eventually head to Camp Crystal Lake it looks and feels like an abandoned camp. The set design in that respect is pretty great. Unfortunately at times the film messes things up a bit. The atmosphere drops in some parts due to just how clean and produced it can be. It also has issues with light and dark – the stalking and killing during the day aren’t scary or atmospheric, and at night it’s far too dark to tell what’s going on.

 

The film has the requisite amount of nudity and gore. The sex and nudity is pretty blunt and silly and the tits are fake (always disappointing). The gore effects are mostly pretty good actually, seeming to be mostly physical effects and prop work. A lot of the kills are pretty bland or unimaginative though, even compared to many F13 movies. Most are rudimentary stabbings or impaling, the sort seen more impressive a hundred times before in other, better movies. This film was released in a post-Saw world, so there really needed to be a bit more gore and creativity in the kills. It does give at least one good one. Early on one girl is tied up into her sleeping bag and hung over a fire until she’s cooked to death – that was pretty freaky. Far lower on the quality scale is the awful, amateur film effects on the stoner's death - Jason jams an ice pick into his throat, but you can clearly see the pick going next to his neck and not into it. It's like a stage play's version of gore.

Jason gets a fair share of attention and he’s looking pretty good here. He’s human though, meaning he moves faster and can be hurt. In the first part of the movie he’s even got his burlap sack on his head, before he gets his hockey mask, and there’s a shrine to his mom’s severed head. Weirdly they’ve attempted to go deeper into his character a little, though I don’t know why. There’s a scene of Jason sharpening his machete (revealed to be the machete used to decapitate his mom) and at one point he uses a bow and arrow (why he doesn’t keep it is beyond me). The attempts also get weird, with Jason running at times, and having an angry tantrum while thinking about how his mom died. The film gives an explanation as to how Jason can seemingly appear anywhere at Crystal Lake: there’s a series of underground tunnels connected to his lair that reach across the entire campground area. This feels pretty damn stupid really, and the fact that Jason has Whitney chained up down here doesn’t fit his character at all. It also serves zero purpose other than to have Clay be looking around.

Besides the awful characters and writing, some parts smack of misguided attempts of pandering. At one point one of the girls is topless and neck-deep in the lake, hiding under a jetty from Jason. Suddenly a machete bursts through the jetty and into her head, and then she’s lifted out of the water so you can see her breasts before the blade is yanked away. It’s obvious, unsexy, unfunny and just feels like empty pandering to what they assumed the fans like, as though some committee of executive idiots said ‘F13 fans like boobs and gore right? So let’s combine the two’. A lot of the film is full of stupid crap that’s baffling as to why it’s there. There’s a hillbilly who starts making sex talk to a mannequin, the token black guy prepares to masturbate to an underwear catalogue and some of the dialogue is painful. In particular alpha male dude-bro dickhead Trent’s sex talk to the slut girl is laughable; “You have perfect nipple placement” he says in mid-coitus as though he’s detailing a car. Who the fuck wrote this crap?

I hate the ending since it seemingly only exists because they smugly thought they were going to be making a sequel. Jason has a length of chain wrapped around his neck and it’s dragging him head-first into a wood chipper. His head is just about to hit the blades and then Whitney, our last minute heroine, stabs him in the chest with a machete and turns the machine off. What in the actual fuck? Then the two survivors, Whitney and Clay, drag Jason’s ‘dead’ body to the lake and push him in and, for extra dumbass points, also throw in his machete. About two seconds later Jason bursts out of the water to attack them and the film ends. It’s a crap ending for a remake that should have known better than to pull that tired shit.

 

The movie doesn’t have a sense of humour, which is a shame. It’s serious the entire time which, coupled with the awful characters and terrible writing, takes the fun out of it. A lot of remakes tend to try for the serious, gritty route, trying to ‘scare a new generation of fans’, but it rarely ever works. It certainly doesn’t work here, since the movie isn’t scary. It lack any good jumps, doesn’t know what to do with its atmosphere and all its attempts to scare are painfully obvious and clichéd. It’s not a complete wash, since the basic F13 slasher film formula still works fine in making watchable movies. Compared to some of the worse remakes, it’s at least watchable. A bunch of assholes get killed, and it works as a lukewarm slasher. Compared to the better remakes, it’s a waste of time. In terms of F13 movies however? It’s very ‘meh’, sitting in the middle I’d say. It's entertaining, but having watched all the F13 movies it feels pretty standard and safe.

While it didn't blow up at the box office it still made good money, but oddly a sequel hasn’t materialised yet in the six years since its release. There were rumours of a found footage Friday the 13^th movie being in the works, which is just about the dumbest thing ever, trying to cash in on mixing an unnecessary remake with a tired trend. A new Friday the 13^th videogame is also in the works, a multiplayer experience that has one player as Jason hunting down seven other players who have to try and survive. I doubt anything good will come from that either. So for now Friday the 13^th is done. It had its ups and downs (mostly downs). As a horror series it was fairly unremarkable for most of its run, only getting interesting in its weird detour, quality aside. The reason the series has lasted so long is simple: Jason is a memorable villain, even if only for his appearance.