To say I didn’t hold out a whole lot of hope for the reboot of the Friday the 13th franchise would only be a slight understatement.
I was relatively happy with the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, so seeing the same team involved kept my expectations from being totally negative. There was some small spark of hope that it would cut to what I think is the core of the character and story, that it would get at least some of the terror right, that it would fix what I saw as some of the problems with the original.
Well, I’ve just finally gotten around to seeing the new Friday the 13th and it managed to disappoint me more than I thought possible.
What it has is a pretty cast and a pretty good production value.
What it doesn’t have is pretty much everything else.
If you’ve been living under a rock since the early 80s, you may not be familiar with the basic plot of a Friday the 13th movie. Let me run it down for you: Kids go into the woods to party, most of them end up dead, killed by a dude named Jason in a hockey mask who is, eventually, subdued and apparently killed by the end of the film. That pretty much covers the bulk of the other 11 films that have carried the Friday the 13th name.
And, really, it sums this one up, too.
The big difference is that the most recent incarnation of the film lacks pretty much everything that makes the franchise unique.
Jason is one of the iconic killers of the golden age of slasher films. Along with Freddy, Michael Meyers, and Leatherface (who, in my opinion, really doesn’t fit, but is typically put in the grouping… I’d be more prone to add Norman Bates) he’s part of a deeply ingrained pop culture of dark morality tales and nightmares. Like the rest of the familiar names in that list, he exists to kill. What has always set Jason apart was that he was a more blunt killer–not witty like Freddy, not single-minded like Meyers, not full of rage (or hunger?) like Leatherface. He killed in direct ways, approaching slowly, always up close.
This move got rid of all of that.
The film is populated with an overly-large cast of paper-thin stereotypes of social detritus: douchebags, pot heads, sex-hungry vixens, and horny dudes. So eager are the filmmakers to top the kill count of all the previous iterations, they give us nearly three groups of mostly white trash that get taken out. (The first is mostly implied in the poorly done prelude that more or less runs through the plot of the very first Friday the 13th in less than ten minutes.)
There are only three characters that even come close to being decent human beings. Bad news is, they’re not fleshed out much more than the cannon fodder… and one of them doesn’t make it (kind of spoiling any message one could attempt to read into the film).
The worst thing, though, is the complete and utter lack of anything to differentiate Jason from any other random serial killer. Sure, there’s the hockey mask and the oft used machete, but those don’t mean anything if anyone could be behind them.
In this movie, Jason runs. There’s none of the ominous slow stalking that upped the tension of many of the previous films. He also kills from a distance using a bow and arrow. Perhaps worst of all, he makes use of numerous tunnels and traps that betray a much higher-functioning personality behind the mask than was ever present in Jason.
He was, after all, a slightly mentally challenged 8-year-old at heart.
And then there’s the kills. While there was plenty of blood and gore in the deaths in this movie, there was no real creativity–and especially not any creativity that would be in line with Jason (if he were a unique character in the film). More than a few of the killings are convoluted and none are anywhere near as forthrightly brutal as what’s been shown in older Friday films.
(As a side note: While I was bouncing around looking for some art to put with this post, I came across a nice review of the film from James Melzer. He touches nicely on the lack of uniqueness of the Jason character as portrayed in this film as well as a few other important things. Check it out.)
The bottom line is, this film would have been just as good–or bad, in my opinion–without having the Friday the 13th brand on it. Of course, without that, no one would have gone to see it and I most certainly wouldn’t be talking about it at all now. So, good business decision, I guess.
Especially since they’re all ready to roll on a sequel. (Which I most certainly won’t be seeing in the theaters.)
I recommend you stay away from this iteration of the classic slasher flick. You’d be much better served going back and watching the originals.
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