A Review of "Friday the 13th" (2009)

Why should I only pick on Freddy? Why not Jason?

The remake of Friday the 13th was the second in the "Platinum Dunes remake trilogy". Beginning with 2004's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, then this one, then A Nightmare on Elm Street. Unlike Nightmare though, Friday the 13th comes off as a very good remake and definitely pays homage to the atmosphere and 80's slasher goodness of the original franchise as well as takes liberties and makes changes that keep the viewer invested.

The movie starts off with a flashback that loosely remakes the ending of the original Friday the 13th, with a young disfigured boy named Jason Voorhees watching as a young camp counselor runs through the woods, being chased by his deranged mother, Pamela. The camp counselor cuts Pamela's head off, and then runs, screaming, into the night. The movie then flashes forward thirty years later. Five friends arrive at Camp Crystal Lake, looking for marijuana that's growing in the forest somewhere. In glorious fashion, and in the same manner as the previous films, the teens drink, do drugs, goof off and act like dipshits, have sex in tents and get picked off gruesomely by an adult Jason Voorhees, one by one. One of the girls, Whitney, is chased into an old cabin, where she sees Jason's decapitated mother's rotting corpse surrounded by candles. Jason bursts into the cabin and captures her, as she appears to look like his mother when she was young. Six weeks later, the runners-up to the Jersey Shore season four casting call arrive as seven more kids: Trent, Chewie, Bree, Jenna, Chelsea, Nolan, and Lawrence, arrive at Trent's dads summer cabin off the shore of Crystal Lake. With that, the seven friends each begin goofing off and acting like dipshits and...you know where this is going, don't you? Well, there's actually a main plot riddled underneath all the cheesy 80's slasher homages. You see, Whitney's brother Clay arrives in Crystal Lake searching for his sister, who was captured by Jason six weeks earlier. He goes to Trent's beach cabin to help look for her, and Jenna agrees to assist him in finding her.

Meanwhile, Jason kills some hillbilly idiot whose name I can't remember and finds his trademark hockey mask. He dumps the burlap sack, which pays homage to Friday the 13th Part 2 and locates the hockey mask that has been his staple for thirty years. With the hockey mask, Jason arrives at Trent's dad's summer cabin and dispatches of Trent and his friends one at a time in his usual gory fashion. It all comes down to Jason chasing Whitney and Clay into a dilapidated old barn. There, Whitney pretends to be Pamela before stabbing Jason brutally with his own machete. Clay dumps Jason's body in the river. The next morning, Clay and Whitney are looking for something to help them escape, sitting on the pier, when Jason rises out of the water....

The Friday the 13th remake does not disappoint. It can come off a little hokey and cheesy at times, but I mean, if you were expecting anything more, then you clearly never watched the original films. That's all they were, I mean these movies came out less than a year apart throughout the 80's. Hell, 1983 and 1987 are the only two years in the 80's without a Friday the 13th movie release. That close together and that frequently, the quality was sure to go down, but I mean, they thrived on it almost. These were just moreso expensive exploitation movies than high-art horror movies. Friday the 13th movies are notorious for their legendary ass-suckage, but it's a weird, notable kind of ass-suckage. I mean, the first one's alright, but they just get dumber and fucking dumber with each one. Most of them don't have great stories, all of them have ridiculous over-the-top characters that annoy the living shit out of you, and a lot of them have crazy kills that were too gruesome to be released, so they had to be cut down. Still, while all of them are pretty schlock, they each have their own memorable "moments". Each Friday the 13th film had memorable scenes and kills that kept bringing the viewer back. Really, if you just cut out all the major kills from the franchise and spooled them together into one film reel, you'd probably get about an hour long movie in and of itself. I'd call it the "Friday the 13th: Gorefest" edition.

The characters that aren't Clay and Whitney aren't very memorable. I mean, again, how can you expect them to be. They're Friday the 13th characters. They have no morals, no souls, and nothing to do except drink booze, consume narcotics and fuck each other like rabid beavers building a dam. I'm not kidding, there's a ridiculously long sex scene that shows the actors getting way too into it. While Friday the 13th was never a franchise of subtly, this one stands out in my mind. I mean they just go at it on and on. The guy even says things like "I'm going super nova" or "Your tits are fucking astounding" and the girl still decides to fuck his brains out. You can't call the scene dumb nor can you call it high art. It's a no-win situation defending it.

The kills are pretty great, as usual. The movie has big shoes to fill in terms of how it was going to depict Jason killing people. The machete through the head was a great kill, in the beginning. Jason running up to the girl and spinning his machete like a tae-kwon-do expert seemed a tad out-of-place for me. You never saw Jason being anything more than mildly mobile, and here he is jogging and spinning his machete like he's a fucking feudal Japanese samurai. I do also like the sleeping bag over the open camp fire that literally cooks the girl alive inside. You can tell being the twelfth damn movie in this franchise, they had to get pretty creative. It's reminiscent of the "Sleeping back whack-a-mole" death from Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood.

While not "high art" by any means, Friday the 13th is a cliche 80's slasher movie, much like its predecessors, that came out in a different time altogether for a whole new audience to enjoy. It was the perfect homage to that simple time, when a horror movie could only spend nine months in production and nobody would care. It takes new concepts and new ideas, and then surrounds in the aura of a 1980's slasher movie made for the 21st century. Beyond its camp and cheesy acting, its characters aren't memorable at all (except maybe for Chewie) and its acting is on par with an episode of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Still, it has some creative kills and you can get to see Jason in all three of his famous forms: Disfigured kid, sack over his head, and trademark hockey mask, all in one movie. Being so radically different from the original, it doesn't even feel like a remake. It's not one of those new releases that falls under more than one categorizations, it's clearly a reboot. With A Nightmare on Elm Street a year later in 2010, you couldn't really tell if it was a remake, a reboot or a re-imagining of the original film.

Still, I enjoy this remake very much. In my opinion, it's better than the Nightmare on Elm Street remake. It's dumb, fun popcorn entertainment, much like the eleven movies that came before it. It's just mindless violence and sex to stimulate the adolescent mind...or the adult mind, but lets face it, adolescents watch these movies way more than adults.

A Review of "A Nightmare on Elm Street" (2010)

Avast ye land lubbers. There's a floating block of feces off the port bow.

Was there really any call for remaking A Nightmare on Elm Street? Hollywood's full of a bunch of useless remakes nowadays. With the Death Wish remake on the horizon, one begs the question what constitutes the apparent "need" for a remake. Whether it be because times have changed and the story could use some updating, the special effects in the original were lame enough to want to stretch the horizons with these days' computer sciencey magic, or...the producer's just need to cash in on a well known title that basically replicates everything the original did. This...is where 2010's A Nightmare on Elm Street comes in.

"How do I look?"

The remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street does so much to try and change what the viewer remembers about the original movie in order to make it feel like it needed to be made. It makes enough changes to where you can differentiate between remake and original and compare and contrast the ideas behind each one. Then there are the things that are carried over from the original for no reason that have no bearing or meaning in the remake. Like...Freddy's finger gloves. In the original, you watch a charred hand build the glove and assemble it from various bits. You can guess that Freddy has some kind of tool-building experience and the first nightmare shows a boiler room, confirming this. In the remake, Freddy's just some perverted gardening child-molester who just so happens to have the glove...somehow.

The original movie originally had Freddy as a child molester, but changed it to a child murderer to avoid exploitation of recent child molestation cases that had been happening in California at about that time. The remake decided to restore that idea, which makes it just a teeny little bit uncomfortable. Especially where the plot takes it. It's not necessarily a bad change, because making him a child molester has better substance that a measly old child killer. Both seem to work, because a child killer means Freddy just kills at random, which would explain why he decided to target random kids on Elm Street. The remake's also works because having him target a specific group of kids for "getting him killed" is also a good twist. However, this change doesn't make a whole lot of sense in the context of the title of the movie. In the original it made sense, the killings occurred on around Elm Street, and solely on or around Elm Street. With the remake, Nancy lives on Elm Street, sure, and gets stalked there a few times, but hardly any murders take place on Elm Street. I think maybe just Kris's murder...and that's it...

"You have something in your hair. Let me get it."

So, the movie opens in the Springwood Diner. There's a guy who demands for more coffee, but the waitress ignores him. The bitch. He walks through the back of the diner only to be slashed at by some burned weirdo in a fedora hat, tattered Christmas sweater and finger-knives. Later, we see him kill himself apparently on the influence of the burned man in his dream. Kris, the girl he was with, tells people that she thinks someone in his dream was forcing him to do it. Surprise, no one believes her. She begins suspecting that something is rotten in the state of Springwood, as at the dude's funeral, she sees a picture of him and her together when they were kids, which she didn't know they knew each other when they were kids. Interesting, but this begs the question: If dude's mother didn't give a shit about posting the pictures and reminding everyone that the kids knew each other in their youth, then was it really a huge point to keep such a secret from them? Jesse tries to console Kris at the funeral (i.e. pick up on her) but her and Nancy confirm that they're both seeing the same man in their dreams. Kris decides to go home, but Jesse joins her and consoles her that night. She has another nightmare where Freddy kills her and Jesse is pegged for the murder, having her blood splattered all over him. Jesse is put in a cell, and falls asleep himself. Their, Freddy kills him too. So, again, following the story scheme of the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, the girl we're introduced to as the first main character dies, then we get a second and actual main character in Nancy.

Nancy's new actress...sucks. The acting in the movie is pretty dry from pretty much all parties. Nancy's a block of wood and her mother Gwen is the pallet she came on. A few of the kids try though, like Kris and Quentin. Kris sobs quite a bit and Quentin has really intense screaming matches with his father. The other kids are just...horrible. Hayden Christensen-style horrible. Nancy's the worst. Heather Langenkamp showed a lot of emotion and intensified horror during the entirety of the first movie. Rooney Mara just sort of injected herself with novacane and prozac and washed it down with a gallon of gin before each take. She was just bad. There were times she got a little intense and panicky, but most of it followed the same kind of formula: dry to the bone.

Jackie Earle Haley's reaction when he read the script

Jackie Earle Haley is the man who dons the fedora and sweater as the new Freddy Krueger. He's referred to in the remake as "Fred Krueger" as well, just as in the original. In the original, Freddy was a boiler room worker who also doubled as a homicidal child killer in his spare time. In the remake, Freddy was a gardener at a pre-shool where the main characters attended as children. He molested them all and then their parents found out about it, chased him into an abandoned steel mill, threw a gallon of gas through the window and burnt him alive. Years later, Freddy begins stalking them in their dreams. Where and when he got this power to return and start killing the kids in their dreams isn't explained at all. Another example of something from the original that just carries over into this one without any explanation. Sure, the original didn't get its explanation until like the third or fourth movie, but by then the franchise was so out-of-control that it was a pretty crazy, 80's-style explanation that "dream demons" came to Freddy at the time of his burning and granted him such powers. In the remake, he was just an ordinary guy who burned alive. Plus, it's a little like it's..not Freddy. Freddy was and always will be synonymous with Robert Englund, who made him a wise-cracking homicidal child killer. Robert Englund played Freddy in all of his on-screen appearances except for this one, so yeah...the role is basically his forever. Casting Jackie Earle Haley just made people know that it wasn't going to be Freddy, but some guy pretending to be Freddy. His voice? It's just his Rorschach voice from Watchmen. The way he says "Look at me!" near the end says so itself. What I did like about this Freddy was the realistic burn sars on his face. The other one was decent for it's time, but as it wore on it got to look more fake and rubbery. I guess latex technology just never improved. This Freddy looks like a guy who literally got set on fire.

There's a few scenes that either rip-off or pay homage to the original movie. The body bag scene in the hallway, the glove coming out of the bathtub water during Nancy's bath, Freddy's line "I'm your boyfriend now"; all of which serve to remind you that you are, in fact, watching the remake.  There's points where you forget this movie is a remake when it starts to stray from the original movie's material, then an homage like that comes through and you're snapped out of a daze like "Oh yeah, this is the remake".

Looks like a nu metal reverse album cover

The movie ends when Quentin and Nancy return to the pre-school years after it had shut down to face Freddy once and for all. They realize that Freddy had indeed molested them, and rather spend the rest of their lives fearing him and staying awake, they both decide to go to sleep to fight Freddy in the dream world. Freddy terrorizes them and does some rapey-style things to Nancy (except actually really anything). Quentin stabs Nancy while she's asleep with a syringe of adrenaline and wakes her up. With her hands on Freddy, she brings Freddy out of the dream world and into the real world with her. There, while he's mortal, Quentin and Nancy tag-team fight Krueger. The movie ends with Nancy slitting Krueger's throat and killing him...again. Then she sets the pre-school on fire and watches it burn to the ground, leaving the burnt-Krueger to burn alive again. It's not really a solid ending. Bring Krueger back to life just to kill him again. Wouldn't that send him back to the dream world? The Blu-ray ending is even worse. Krueger literally changes his appearance back to the way he was before he was burned, then the same ending happens then, with his skin still looking like he did, Nancy and Quentin burn the school down again. So instead of double-burning him, now they just burned him again. Lame-sauce. The ending-ending is where after killing Freddy, Nancy and her mother return home. Nancy says "Hey mom, thanks for just protecting me". Nancy's mom then goes to respond, but Freddy bursts out of a mirror, kills Nancy's mother, and sucks her back into the mirror, leaving Nancy to scream as the credits roll. Wow.

So, in a nutshell, was A Nightmare on Elm Street in need of a remake? Yes and no. Basically, the original is such a staple of the 1980's slasher horror movie renaissance that remaking it basically had no hope from the get-go. It's like remaking Back to the Future or The Godfather, you're just not going to beat what's already been done, and if your intention is not to beat it or change everything then there is no point of remaking it. (I'm looking at you, Gus Van Sant, with your shot-for-shot "must change nothing" attitude). The 2010 remake is okay. It's definitely not great, but it also takes a lot of liberties, way more than it needed to. There's a lot of material that's original, but it pulls you back in with its homages to the original. I enjoy it occasionally, but Wes Craven didn't so I guess it sucks. Na na na-na naaaa. Give it a go if you haven't, but don't expect to break new ground.

Sorry Freddy, but I liked Jason's remake a little better....

My Honest Reaction to "The Last Jedi" Trailer

By now, you're all probably wondering what my thoughts are on the latest trailer for the upcoming Star Wars adventure. It's episode number eight in the saga, titled "The Last Jedi". Of oourse by "you all", I mean my three-or-four faithful readers. You guys would each get a Prius if I could afford to just hand them out like compliments.

The trailer was...okay. I mean, I'm not one of the yuppies out there that cries at every Star Wars announcement anymore. Truth be told, I'm kind of tired of Star Wars being pumped into theaters every single year. I thought it'd be a good idea in the beginning, but then it happened and took it's toll. Wait, hang on, let's be clear, I need to put you in the right mindset. It's 2013, the last new Star Wars movie was eight years ago. Eight fucking years. That was Episode III. Sure, you had The Clone Wars movie in there somewhere, but who gives a flying Millennium Falcon about that movie or the TV series that mutated from it. Not I. If you do, that's fine. I'm not here to shit on it or you. I've kinda always had a love-hate relationship with all the tie-in garbage that's been rolled out in the past forty years, mostly because the expanded universe has turned these six simple movies into a universe of weird, sometimes redundant, ridiculously numerous levels of storytelling. I mean, how many adventures can one guy go on? When do Anakin or Obi-Wan just get to sit and chill on the couch with a case of beer or whatever alcohol space-monks drink and veg out from any adventures? You have adventures with Anakin at age 8, at age 9, at age 11, at age 13, at age 15...just shut the f-- I don't care! That's too much reading and life's too short to give a shit about every single detail--Okay I got way off track here. Backtracking!

It's 2013, Disney is in full-motion swing with Star Wars Episode VII coming out in two years. You're hyped. It's the newest Star Wars adventure I was going to get to see since junior high school. I was a super-senior in fucking college by the time Episode VII, the Force Awakens came out. That's a ten-year hiatus out of theaters. I've let you know about my opinions of The Force Awakens loosely (which you can view here) so we won't go into that. Once you watch The Force Awakens, you sort of have that olden-days mindset of "Okay, so now the movies are going to take two more years before they come out. I have to wait (x) days before the next Star Wars related thing is shoved into theaters". Except, I didn't. Rogue One was literally in theaters that very next year. The very next year after that, Episode VIII, now known as The Last Jedi is on its way. It's just about here and they just had their latest trailer for it. So...being a Star Wars fan practically out of the womb...why didn't I really react to it?

The trailer itself was alright, I mean it didn't feel like it was groundbreaking by any means. You saw funky-looking First Order walkers, you saw Rey doing some new force-things, you saw Mark Hamill finally act on the big screen for the first time since the Carter administration, you saw Porgs....whatever-the-fuck Porgs are...so why did I just not care? Rian Johnson keeps telling us or at least hinting to us that this one's going to be epic. That it's going to be one of the greatest Star Wars stories to ever come down the pike. Is my being-jaded toward everything Star Wars the reason for my blase reaction? There were even some things in it that made you think. Like Kylo Ren struggling to hit the button that'll shoot a laser into a ship that'll kill his mommy, Leia. Then in the very end, Rey is talking to Kylo all like "show me my place in all this" and Kylo extends his hand. For how much I can't stand the character of Rey, it'd be pretty badass if she turned to the dark side. Not gonna lie, that'll make me go "Woah". Of course, you can't have Rey turn to the dark side because 99% of the current Star Wars fan base is behind her and supporting her and loving her action figure so again Lucasfilm really has to make a call between merchandising and storytelling. Luckily Lucas isn't at the helm anymore or we would've already seen Rey kill everything that opposes the Resistance within the first five minutes...just to sell those fucking Rey action figures to the kiddies. You see Snoke in his true form, which makes him look like the bubblegum a sixth grader slaps under the desk at school. Also his line "Fulfill your destiny" is literally the most recycled line in the saga, so way to be original on that one. As I mentioned, Luke Skywalker is back in full-force. He looks like a grizzled hermit you'd find living under the bridge asking to give you a handjob in exchange for some heroin money. Plus, his robotic hand technology went backwards. In Return of the Jedi, his robotic hand was literally a human hand with cybernetic components inside. In The Last Jedi, it looks like a regular robotic hand. Some backtracking in tech there, Luke.

When you're playing limbo and you go back too far...

I just, I don't know. It looks like just another manufactured, pumped out Star Wars movie to me. It's hard for me to get crazy about all this, especially at this age. I mean, we've been given a teaser and a trailer, both that kind of show the same material, just the longer trailer being a little more elaborative. Whether Rian Johnson just hates the idea of trailers and doesn't want anything of any value to be seen, or he just doesn't know how to make trailers, its anyone's guess. I just hope they do something fresh, for goodness sake. Something crazy, something that'll shock everybody. Not change something, not that kind of shock. Lord knows Lucasfilm is really good about backtracking and changing history. I just want this one to stand out, some how. The Force Awakens was awesome on the first, midnight screening, pretty cool on the second 'middle-of-theatrical-run' screening, and just gets more dull each time you watch it. None of the imagery really stands out. Literally the only thing that's really memorable about VII, is BB-8. You think of VII, you think of BB-8. You also think of Rey, but that's only because of how shoved-down-your-throat she is. Finn gets no love and Poe may as well not even be there. When this new trilogy was announced, everyone was like "Aww yeah, a new trio of fresh faces!" Then one gets 80% of the character development and 75% of the screen time, while the other two split the rest.

Again, take my comments with a grain of salt. All this hype and building up of things and the constant "Hey we have a new Star Wars movie coming out this year is wearing me out." The love and hype for Star Wars was there in full when The Force Awakens came out, but only two years later with TWO Star Wars films to tie me over, the hype for The Last Jedi just isn't there for me. If you're hyped and excited, good for you. I hope you enjoy it. As for me, I have yet to decide if I want to spring for those midnight movie tickets, or just sit that out and wait for it on a Sunday matinee, or something.