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.
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