Hola all. Massawyrm here.
I’ve finally come to grips with it. I love remakes. It’s not like I count the days until a new one comes out or anything – but I sure as hell appreciate them. It took a while to fully understand and embrace, but it struck me just this weekend as I dove into a chicken fried chicken platter at Austin Diner. The radio was playing a program focusing on “The Number 2 Records of 1955” and I noted that I knew every single one of the songs. And dug them. Except that I wasn’t at all familiar with any of the 1955 versions. I was familiar with either the originals..or the subsequent covers. But there I was, grooving along with versions with which I was entirely unfamiliar and appreciating what each had to offer that differed from the version I knew by heart. And then my mind, as it often does, turned to film.
And it was then that I began to become excited about Friday the 13th.
I’ve never been the world’s biggest Jason fan. I love the mythology, I love the story, shit, I love the look. But the movies? As a series they have issues. Once Jason came back in 6, the mythology was slipping away. By part 9, Jason was just some crazed, demonic worm from hell simply inhabiting the body of Jason Voorhees and took to inhabiting others once his body was completely blown to shit by the military. By part 10 the only thing left to do was launch him into space and make a fun of him. Jason, as a movie villain, was no longer scary. He was THE cliché. Even the early films have a hard time holding up. Despite how magical they seem in our head, they really are only good for the kills. And the boobs…if your internet connection is down.
I’ve written this before, but it bears repeating. Freddy, Jason, Michael, Pinhead. These are the Universal Monsters of our generation. You simply SEE a bladed glove or a hockey mask or that white painted Shatner mask and you see the monster clearly in your head. Ask your friends about who these guys are and they’ll tell you. Hell, ask your parents. They know the legends. They know the stories. And everyone has their own campfire version they’d tell. And that’s all this is. Another campfire tale about the mad murderer of Camp Crystal Lake. And before we go any further it is imperative that you know that’s exactly how I see these movies. Because keep in mind that I’m the guy that liked the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, and the guy who loved TCM: The Beginning, and the guy that digs the everloving shit out of Rob Zombie’s Halloween. I don’t like any of them BETTER than the originals. I like them different. I like them as retellings of great stories the filmmakers are simply borrowing. Of course, this Friday the 13th gets two additional passes as A) it is executively produced by the original producer/director Sean S. Cunningham, and B) let’s face it, Cunningham was just ripping off Carpenter to begin with. This isn’t exactly sacred ground.
Now, that said, I dug the hell out of this thing. Easily my favorite Friday film to date, this is effectively a trimmed down conglomeration of all the best, essential moments of films 1-3. And the sucker is LEAN. 97 minutes of Jason chasing pot smoking, alcohol drinking, over sexed teens through the woods and killing them in brutal, inventive ways. You know, when he’s not just taking them down with a machete. His mom is in here, her shack, the camp, how he gets the mask. Everything you need to tell the Jason story is present and accounted for. Nothing more, nothing less.
Which of course will lead to a problem with anyone expecting more. There’s almost zero character development here. And the film doesn’t try to branch out and create a brand new version of the story filled with twists and turns and whole new angles. It’s like Marcus Nispel set out to make the perfect telling of the tale. Only it’s not perfect. It has its flaws. And the real measure of how you feel about this film is how you wrestle with its two biggest.
The biggest and most glaring problem is that it suffers from Swordfish Syndrome. The first 15-20 minutes of this movie are bad ass. No. Strike that. They are FUCKING AWESOME. A group of teens show up in the woods and what you get is an abbreviated Friday the 13th story. The characters are readily established, all of their sinful ways are quickly tallied on screen and then guess who shows up. The deaths are fast and furious and have an exceptionally brutal, post-torture porn feel to them. The gore is great and the deaths are so fucking awful to look at that you begin to squirm and writhe in your seat. It is everything a Friday the 13th movie should be. EVERYTHING.
And then the screen goes black and the title comes up, almost with an attitude. IT’S FRIDAY THE MOTHER FUCKING 13TH BITCHES! The audience applauds. Not a drafthouse, film loving audience mind you. A regular beer and pretzel crowd that won their tickets off the radio and brought their 5 year old kids because they were too cheap for a baby sitter. THEY applauded and hooted. And then the film proceeds to kick ass. But never quite as awesome as it was in the beginning. No death is as dastardly as one you will see and no wound as gruesome as another in almost the same shot (but on a different person.) And having ramped up the audience and set the bar so high, the film, while very entertaining and every bit what you want from a Friday the 13th movie, can never quite catch up. So it feels like it’s floundering. Holding back. It led with its best kills, a cardinal sin in a medium that owes a lot to the law of diminishing returns.
The second problem is a story choice. It is the one thing they do differently from any other moment in the previous series (that comes to mind, anyway) and seems counter to the mythology. And while it gets explained away in a manner that I was willing to accept, I have to admit it took me out of the film for a moment or two – and I can see how some folks might never get pulled back in. Odds are you’re going to hear about it a lot after the film is out, from those that don’t care much for the handling of the material. Personally, I like the angle and feel it keeps in line with abandoned storylines – but I also can’t honestly fault those who get annoyed or even angered by it. It’s a substantial enough change and something people will talk about.
But on the whole I found the film entertaining as all hell. It’s pretty breathless, speeding through all the crap and lacking a single bit of fluff or filler. They make very little effort to make you like the cast, as they really are just corpses waiting to happen. And everything works. Jason has a real menace about him again and the mythology feels more like the story we all tell…rather than the one we see in the original films. It’s a fun ride, a thrilling riff on a tale we all pretty much know by heart. It is by no means definitive, but it is a great way to enjoy a classic tale.
Love it or hate it, this one’s going to be talked about.
Until next time friends, smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em.
Massawyrm
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