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Friday the 13th

Review By: Dan Deevy
DanDeevy@TheCinemaSource.com

I was really hoping that this ‘re-tooling’ of the iconic story of the drowned misfit at summer camp would live up to the excellence of the recent remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Same director, same cinematographer, and a lot of the same crew so one would assume that the vision for Friday the 13th in the 21st century would be as hard hitting, emotionally disturbing and as inventive as its predecessor. No one expects you to top the original but it would be nice if you could match it in certain ways.

Sadly, this was not the case. This is little more than yet another sequel in a franchise that like its lead character, Jason, will just NOT die. Regardless of how creatively unsuccessful past efforts like Jason X where we find him in Space… yup Space… have been, they always seem to turn a profit thanks to their dedicated fans so they just keep churning them out.

This time around it’s twenty some odd years later and Jason is living in the woods near the now abandoned Camp Crystal Lake. Of course two different groups of young and absurdly attractive collegiate co-eds head up there; one group on a hunt for alleged sprawling fields of Pot and the other for a weekend get away at a rich friends house. Not surprisingly, Jason does not take kindly to the uninvited guests and systematically dispatches them all one by one.

I suppose one could say that this film was made with the intention of mirroring the classic slasher film; intentionally having little to no dialogue or character development throughout. If all it’s about is the different ways people you don’t really care about get killed, then I guess it succeeds. For me though, that’s not nearly enough to hold my interest.

One new trick that the director seemed to be using in abundance was not only punctuating the scare moments with jarring music, but also ramping up the sound to crazy levels so that even if you aren’t scared by what you are seeing, the burst of sound forces you to jump in your seat regardless. Personally, I think that is a complete and total cheat. That’s lazy film making as far as I’m concerned, you have to earn your scares the same way you have to earn your laughs by not using a laugh track to force the reaction out of the audience.

Another disappointing aspect of this film was that they don’t even mention that the date is Friday the 13th. Maybe I missed it; I know it’s in the trailers but I don’t remember it being in the final cut of the film I saw and that just makes no sense. The classic ‘Jason’ theme music that added so much to the original film was also barely utilized showing up only ...