Movie Review: Friday the 13th (2009)

How many words are there in the English lexicon to denote bland? Uninspired? Lifeless? There probably aren’t enough to adequately convey the degree of mediocrity to the much-ballyhooed reboot of the iconic Friday the 13th franchise.

By now, anyone past potty-training age is familiar with the tale of Jason Voorhees, mongoloid drowning victim and casualty of his oversexed camp counselors’ indifference. He’s the hockey-masked psychopath with the really big machete and an even bigger Oedipal complex who’s made mince meat out of countless vice-engaging teens over the course of eleven films. Now, make that an even dozen.

Friday the 13th is a loose amalgamation of the first four Friday films, although the franchise’s second installment seems prevalent here. We’ve got a rushed pre-credit re-enactment of the infamous Alice/Mrs. Voorhees showdown during which Betsy Palmer’s stand-in (I mean, can we really call her anything else?) summarizes the thrust of the first film before losing her head. We’re then treated to a relatively effective extended prologue in which a group of sexed-up young folk on the hunt for a marijuana patch enter the hallowed perimeter of (wait for it) Camp Crystal Lake twenty years later. Jason comes, Jason kills.

Flash forward an additional six weeks and we’re introduced to carload #2 of over-sexed young folk on their way to the lakeside cabin of hoity-toity Trent (Travis Van Winkle). There’s the usual assortment of Jason fodder: the jokester, the token African-American, blonds with boobies, and an interchangeable stud or two for good measure (and extra kills). But, wait, this is a fusion of four films, so we’ve also got a nod to the Final Chapter with Clay Miller (Supernatural's Jared Padalecki) doing a door-to-door search for his younger sister Whitney (The Mentalist's Amanda Righetti), who’s seemingly among the victims from the prologue. Before you can say “Is Corey Feldman going to make a cameo?,” Jason comes and Jason kills. Only this Jason (played with relish by looming Derek Mears) is bigger, leaner, meaner, and faster. A lot faster.

The movie is equidistant between decent and abysmal, and it wears its mediocrity like drywall sports wallpaper in a doctor’s office. Although there are some inventive murder set pieces (the water skiing scene is particularly well-done), for all its speed and a production budget Cunningham and company would have killed for in the original 1980 film, the movie feels like it’s just plodding along. Director Marcus Nispel shows zero acumen for the slasher genre (leading one to believe that his arguably superior Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake was a fluke) and everything here comes across like he’s making a slasher film by how-to manual. There’s no heart, soul, or an ounce of energy anywhere to be found. Missed opportunities abound — from the criminally underused original score and summer camp setting to the confounding lack of a few well-placed winks to fans of the original (myriad actors assembled for the recent His Name Was Jason documentary and no one thought to give one of them a cameo? Come on, even Black Christmas managed to scare up Andrea Martin!). There’s also the mystifying addition of catacombs beneath Camp Crystal Lake, populated with more old collectibles than an episode of Antiques Roadshow. Jason the junk collector? Underground passageways beneath a summer camp for kids? Thirty years of films to cull from, build upon, and re-imagine, and this is what the filmmakers offer up? Even a diehard slasher fan (present company included) is going to balk.

It’s hard to review the new Friday the 13th without compare to that other high-profile slasher remake of late — Rob Zombie’s Halloween (2007). Say what you will about Zombie’s reimagining, but at least he had the guts to actually re-envision the source material. With Friday the 13th, Nispel merely re-edits. Whereas Zombie – for better or for worse – added to the Michael Myers mythos and expanded upon that iconic killer’s back story, Nispel and screenwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift offer nothing new, revised, expanded, or otherwise. It’s just another casual Friday at the office.