“Say hi to mommy! In hell!”
I’m going to present you with a sentence that has never before been written in the history of film criticism or essays: I was really excited to watch the 2009 remake of Friday the 13th. Not because I thought it would be good – and, spoiler alert, it’s not – but because I hated Sean S. Cummingham’s 1980 film so goddamn much that it’s now become part of my DNA, part of my moral code, and in all likelihood that hatred of the film is a precept I will pass on to my children. So, I thought, how bad could the remake be? Well, the answer is “pretty bad,” but also, “a little better than the original.”
Marcus Nispel’s (the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake) film gets off to a pretty decent start, recounting the ending of the 1980 original in stark but oddly beautiful black and white. It’s instantly more engrossing than the first film, but ultimately lacks impact in the same way. But it makes for a cool framing device, in that it wipes away all the subsequent Friday films (including, weirdly enough, Ice Cube’s Friday), because this movie is not a remake as much as it is a decades-later sequel that ignores the (loose, stupid) continuity established by the original’s sequels. It’s shot with a modicum of competence (Nispel is a veteran music video director, so he has a decent eye for staging) and putting it in black and white is the closest this film comes to ingenuity. It’s much appreciated, but, quelle surprise, it’s all downhill from here.
Apart from the score and cinematography, the one thing the original Friday the 13th did right was introduce us to Annie as though she would be the main character and requisite final girl, before killing her. The reason this switcheroo works in the original – and, lest we forget, it’s the only thing that works in the original – is that Annie doesn’t die until almost an hour into the film. Nispel’s Friday attempts the same thing, but is much less successful.
We’re introduced first to the second-most annoying group of people in the world, and in true Friday the 13th fashion, they can all be boiled down to a couple of obnoxious traits (as if traipsing out into the forest to find a mythical field of weed weren’t obnoxious enough). The only ones who make any sort of impression are Richie, played by Ben Feldman, who I most likely remember because I love Feldman on Mad Men and Silicon Valley; Richie gets to make a weird Blue Velvet reference, when someone asks him for a Heineken and he says “Fuck that shit!” before offering a Pabst Blue Ribbon. The only other one of note is Wade, played by Jonathan Sadowski in a role almost certainly meant for Seth Rogen, who told the producers to fuck themselves, so they gave the part to Sadowski and told him to do his best Rogen impression for SAG scale. There are also Amanda (America Olivo), Mike (Nick Mennell), and Whitney (Amanda Righetti), all of whom are carbon-based and breathe oxygen. Jason Voorhees kills them all.
I’ll give the film credit for the variation and creativity behind Jason’s kills. As played by Derek Mears (Moloch on Sleepy Hollow, Kickpuncher on Community), Jason is presented as a fast, single-minded machine, used to living off of the land and thus adept at improvising. He roasts Amanda alive in a sleeping bag while simultaneously snaring Richie in a bear trap. Whitney he keeps alive, it turns out, because she looks like his mother, in the dumbest mother-related plot contrivance I’ve seen since Batman v Superman.
Six weeks later, Whitney’s brother Clay (Jared Padalecki, who signed a Faustian deal allowing him to do a million seasons of Supernatural as long as he did dreck like this and House of Wax) is looking for her, when he runs into the worst group of people in the world. They’re all pretty unremarkable, with the exception of Trent (Travis Van Winkle, who is apparently playing the same Trent he played in Transformers; that these two films constitute a shared universe is a strange, never-discussed fact of life). Trent is one of those characters who only exists in movies (well, mostly): the huge asshole who nonetheless has a ton of friends. He has six people piled into his ostentatious SUV, and none of them can stand him. Neither can the audience, and it doesn’t help that in his bland, forgettable handsomeness, Van Winkle looks almost identical to Padalecki, down to the mop of hair that frames his face like spreading wings. Anyway, Trent is a dick to Clay and everyone is terrible.
At least – at the very least – Friday the 13th starts the killing early. Jason’s first two victims are Nolan (Party Down‘s Ryan Hansen) and Chelsea (Willa Ford). Nolan gets an arrow through the head while piloting a speedboat, in one of the film’s few genuinely effective shots. Chelsea ends up getting stabbed through the head, but according to IMDb, originally she got exhausted and drowned while Jason stood on the lakeshore, waiting for her. That would have been a much more inventive death, so it makes sense that the film saw fit to change it. Why make anything new, or interesting, or cool?
Meanwhile, back at the house, Jenna has left with Clay, Trent is having sex with Bree (Julianna Guill) – sample dialogue: “These would win in a fuckin’ titty contest!” – and Chewie (Aaron Yoo, giving the film’s best performance by a mile) and Lawrence (Arlen Escarpeta) are existing and breathing oxygen. It’s only marginally more exciting than I made it sound.
The one thing I liked most about Friday the 13th is that rather than Jason stalking the group through the woods, it takes on the tone of a home-invasion thriller like The Strangers or You’re Next, with the group holed up inside Trent’s lake house while Jason lurks outside. It brings to stark relief the repetitive nature of these dumb films: people go to a campground and Jason kills them. It’s such a dull and predictable structure that, sight unseen, my favorite movie in this franchise is now Jason X, because it had the common sense to take the character to space.
The take on Jason here is mildly interesting, because it’s rooted in, well, not the real world, but in a world that’s a close facsimile of our own, like The Dark Tower‘s Mid-World. He has a series of tunnels dug under Camp Crystal Lake like it’s fuckin’ Cu Chi, and that helps explain some of his apparent teleportation powers. It’s one of about five things the script (by Damian Shannon and Mike Swift, who wrote Freddy vs. Jason) gets right.
Do I even need to tell you how this ends? Jason kills everyone except for Clay and Jenna. They rescue Whitney. In the film’s only surprise, Jenna is killed while escaping. Clay and Whitney kill Jason (giving Whitney the chance to deliver the god-awful line I quoted at the beginning of this review) and dump his body in the lake. Then, in a twist that will surprise only the very dumbest among us (here meaning “people who like this franchise”), Jason pops up out of the water and attacks them both. Cut to black, and we can all stop watching this fuckin’ movie.
The only cool thing about the Friday series is Jason’s mask – which, by the way, we get an origin story for here. I’m going to sidebar for a second: we didn’t need the origin story. Jason takes it off of some redneck who was about to fuck a mannequin (don’t ask), but here’s the thing: Jason lives at a summer camp. Did summer camps in the 1980s not have field hockey? Boom, there’s where you get your hockey mask.
After Sisqo released his album Enter the Dragon and was riding high off of the success of “The Thong Song,” he tried to brand himself as Sisqo “The Dragon.” It didn’t take, which is why no one talks about Sisqo and he’s reading this due to a Google alert set that he’s set up for his own name (Hi, Sisqo!). Friday the 13th is the Sisqo of horror movies. It’s not good, it’s not scary, and at times it’s actively enraging. But it insists on itself, and because it was made in the 1980s, when everything became a franchise, it was allowed to do so. Not only is Friday the 13th not a good movie, or a good remake, it doesn’t have the potential to be either. It is impossible to make a good movie out of this franchise.
10/1: Dawn of the Dead
10/2: Drag Me to Hell
10/3: Pet Sematary
10/4: The Descent
10/5: Repo! The Genetic Opera
10/6: Desierto
10/7: The Blair Witch Project
10/8: Blair Witch
10/9: Texas Chainsaw Massacre
10/10: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
10/11: Prince of Darkness
10/12: 30 Days of Night
10/13: Friday the 13th (2009)
10/14: Slither
10/15: Tremors
10/16: Pandorum
10/17: It Follows
10/18: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
10/19: Poltergesit
10/20: Paranormal Activity
10/21: Creepshow
10/22: VHS
10/23: Nosferatu the Vampyre
10/24: An American Werewolf in London
10/25: The Witch
10/26: The Rocky Horror Picture Show
10/27: Cronos
10/28: The Hills Have Eyes
10/29: The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
10/30: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil
10/31: Halloween (2007)
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