Jason’s Back for a Pummeling Friday
Clay Miller’s (Jared Padalecki) sister Whitney (Amanda Righetti) mysteriously disappeared hiking around Crystal Lake with friends, the local authorities unable to find a single clue hinting at foul play. Obsessed with finding her, the young man refuses to give up the search, encountering a group of partying college kids, including the vivacious and caring Jenna (Danielle Panabaker) and the narcissistic elitist Trent (Travis Van Winkle), on his latest trip to the region.
It's not a good idea to swim in Crystal Lake in New Line Cinemas' Friday the 13th
But the group is not alone, a masked madman haunting the shores of the lake bringing down vengeance on any and all unlucky enough to cross his path. His mother was killed, you see, on his birthday no less, and the present he continually gives to her memory is a stack of dismembered bodies brutalized beyond recognition.
Made by many of the same folks who brought to life the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (including director Marcus Nispel and producer Michael Bay), Friday the 13th is a relatively well made B-movie fright fest full of the requisite blood and gore. It is also remarkably old-fashioned and conventional, this slasher epic so familiar its mechanics are even more tiredly familiar than the already passé ones featured in the 1980 original.
Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. After drowning in so many putridly awful Saw sequels (and they’re imitators) it’s actually kind of nice to watch a horror movie that’s more concerned with the slicing and dicing than it is with the torture and the pain. The filmmakers set the chess board and then knock the pieces off of it one by gruesomely sadistic machete-impaled one, and as these things go for the first 45-minutes at least this one’s not half bad.
Granted, even with the legendary stature of its central hockey-masked serial killer Friday the 13th was already beaten to the punch by extremely similar fellow 1980’s remake My Bloody Valentine. To top it off, not only did that one offer more in the way of visceral punch and sadistic sensationalism it was also in 3D, a pickaxe not truly a murder weapon unless it can come thrusting through the screen right at your left eyeball.
On the flip side, this one’s much better acted than its retread counterpart (both, ironically, featuring the popular leads from UPN’s sensational series “Supernatural”), Padalecki and Panabaker a charismatic couple even if their whole relationship stretches plausibility to the breaking point. There are also a couple of wonderfully inventive kills, and even if you see them coming a mile away watching them happen is still satisfyingly unsettling.
For those who care, the film basically covers all of the events of the original (as well as its initial sequel) in the first ten minutes before the opening credits even come to a close. From that point on, the picture takes elements of Part III and combines them with a routinely uninspired familial melodrama leading to conclusions and scares most of which are retreads from other slasher pictures. It’s a familiar landscape, and if you want a clue as to who dies when just take a look at the order of the cast list and you’ll probably be able to figure it out.
But that’s not what annoyed me about this film. What drove me up the wall was how Jason Voorhees has suddenly become a master underground architect, or how he miraculously manages to grow a marijuana crop the size of Texas that the police have seemingly never noticed, or how legions of missing persons have haunted the region yet authorities have never thought to take a look at the old rundown summer camp where a ton of murders were committed in the past.
It’s one thing to suspend disbelief, it’s another to wrap it around a taffy puller and stretch it out to its absolute breaking point. There are so many head-slapping idiocies going on that, not only did my forehead hurt, but I think I bruised my hand hitting myself. It’s a pummeling annoyance, and even if I liked some of it overall I could have cared less if I’d actually taken the time to watch the darn thing in the first place.
Those who want to see it aren’t going to change their minds based on what I’ve written here and that’s perfectly fine. Films like Friday the 13th have built-in audiences who will support them no matter what the quality, and even if the direction, lighting, editing and, most importantly, the screenwriting are all sub-par fans of blood and guts probably aren’t even going to notice. All they care about is the kill count, and while that number is high the one tracking the brain cells they’re losing while watching it is even more astronomical. Consider yourself warned.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
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