Well, here we are again, Dear Reader. As you know, the remake machine that is the horror industry has shit out another film. The victim this time is FRIDAY THE 13TH. But "remake" isn't exactly the best term to use in discussion of this film, just as "sequels" aren't really the best term for the dozen or so FRIDAY films to be unleashed over the past two decades. With the exception of THE FINAL CHAPTER, A NEW BEGINNING and JASON LIVES - or as the fanboys call them, "The Tommy Jarvis Trilogy" - none of the FRIDAY films have bothered to tell an ongoing story. Take out the various resurrection scenes from the films and you'd have no indication that you were watching a sequel at all. All those "sequels" are, in reality, simply rehashes of the first film. They take the template set by the original film, replace the old obnoxious teenagers with new obnoxious teenagers, add Jason, shake and serve. This new version does the same thing only with the volume cranked to 11.
We start with a brief - very brief - reminder of how the series started. In fact, this new film seems to recognize just how pointless everything about the original film was. It skips right to the ending, with a young woman decapitating Pamela Voorhees on a rainy night in 1980. Skip to present day. A group of five college kids are off looking for a crop of weed near the old Camp Crystal Lake. All but one are killed. The unlucky survivor, Whitney, is taken captive by Jason and stored away in an underground tunnel. Six months later - that's right, we flash-forward twice in the space of twenty minutes - her brother Clay sets out to find her. Convinced that something awful has happened to his sister, Clay spends his time passing out missing person flyers in hopes that someone has seen his sister. He makes the acquaintance of a pretty young woman and her obnoxious friends. From there... well, take a guess.
Marcus Nispel's film is a lot slicker than Cunningham's but just as brainless. Remaking FRIDAY THE 13TH - a hopelessly flawed film - was actually a good idea. By taking the series back to it's beginning, Nispel and writers Damien Shannon and Mark Swift could have done anything they wanted to with their film. Unfortunately, all they do is make yet another tired, boring, pointless and ridiculous FRIDAY film. The only thing they got right was Jason himself. Unlike the Jason of JASON LIVES, THE NEW BLOOD, JASON TAKES MANHATTAN and so on, this presentation of Jason doesn't walk calmly after his victims. This Jason is the proverbial bull in the china shop. More feral, more agile, and a lot more lethal, the masked monster of Nispel's film manages to elicit fear, something the Jason of the Kane Hodder years rarely managed to do.
But no matter how many flashes of greatness this film produces - and there are quite a few - FRIDAY simply can't overcome the sheer stupidity of it's characters. It's either a lack of faith in the audience or simply a bad habit that slasher film screenwriters still rely on dimwitted caricatures for their protagonists. While the central duo of the film are treated seriously, everyone else is a walking joke. Make this argument to a die-hard slasher fan and you're likely to get a response along the lines of "Well, DUH! It's a slasher movie!". That's the worst excuse for lousy screenwriting you're likely to find and an even more pathetic attempt at genre apology. Where is the law written that all slasher film characters have to be dipshits, sluts, or half-retarded, immature fratboys? Why is that still, almost three decades after the birth of the slasher film, acceptable? Either slasher fans have to grow up or the screenwriters do.
This is the most technically accomplished FRIDAY THE 13TH film ever made and, at times, it really is a stunner. It's a genuinely good looking film. But it's also strangely paced and under-scored. I have rarely experienced a film with so much action that generated so little excitement. The whole film feels blase with no real momentum. A few great scenes - the final chase scene, especially - can't make up for all the tedium. This is a film that will make a good deal of money and win over a lot of horror fans - most of whom are FRIDAY fans to begin with - but it just left me cold. This was one of those films that had every opportunity to surprise me. All it did was strengthen a stance I've held for a long, long time:
It's time to bury this franchise for good.
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