MOVIE REVIEW! - "Friday the 13th" (2009)

I have a certain fondness for this review. I had posted this on Facebook (as I did with all my reviews up to this point) when I was also taking newspaper practicum at the time at Henderson State University. My friend, Jacob Bland, told me that I should submit it to the school paper, “The Oracle”.

I did and, thankfully, they published it in the paper. Not only that, but my teacher in newspaper practicum would read articles that he enjoyed in the latest issue of the paper to the other students in the room and thankfully, he chose my review to read that week. Needless to say, it was a turning point for me as a film critic.

Okay, so this movie came out during a period where I was truly done with the horror film genre. I was so sick and tired of all the remakes and reboots that were being released in the 2000s, so this movie really got to me when I watched it.

Given my bias towards the genre at the time, when I revisit horror films released between 2006 to 2013, I have to really look at them again to see if my own negative views wasn’t getting in the way.

Thankfully, I got to check this movie out again when I got a box set of the entire film series from Shout! Factory in 2020. This movie still blows and I pretty much completely agree with this review. It is a useless remake and it’s really no surprise that, along with the legal reasons, this series has remained dormant for a long, long time.

I gave the film one star in 2009 and I’ll stick with that if only because I’ll admit that Jason at least looks cool in this movie. Beyond that, this is a garbage movie.

Jason Voorhees gets ready to stalk his victims again in the remake of "Friday the 13th".

THE ORIGINAL REVIEW

Naked girls? Yes. Cheesy dialogue? Yes. Great “Friday the 13th” film? Far from it. Jason Voorhees returns in a remake of the 1980s classic. The cast is a bunch of original characters but they are influenced by characters seen in the past eleven films and the movie acts as a remake to the first four films in the series. The film takes awhile to get to the point. Clay is the protagonist of the flick and he is looking for his sister that disappeared six weeks ago. Along the way he meets the characters that will inevitably become fodder for the hockey masked psychopath.

When I walked into this film, I expected the bad dialogue and the 2D characters that are a tradition of the series and I was fine with that. Jason looks great and the make-up team deserves major credit for their work. Beyond that, the film falls hard on its face. The movie starts with a quick scene of Jason’s mother (the killer in the original film) and how she got her head cut off. This acts more like a scene from a film that should have proceeded this one. We then follow a group of characters that start to get hacked up right away and this makes you think the film is going to end in fifteen minutes.

If only wishing made it so.

It turns out that this is just the intro to the film before a big “Friday the 13th” title card hits the screen. We then follow a new set of teenagers and finally get introduced to Clay. The teenagers are your basic Voorhees prey. You have the funny guy, the asshole, the promiscuous women, and the pot heads.

Bad dialogue has always been a part of the series but the dialogue here is so bad that it does not even work for the series. An example of this is when one of the characters drops a gun in a small puddle and cannot seem to find it. He then shouts like a kid, “Where are you, gun,” as if the gun is a living thing from “Blue’s Clues” that is just going to pop up out of the water and reply, “Here I am, you fucking idiot. Let’s go to work, friend!” and then they skip away together to find Jason. Anyway, it’s just fucking horrible.

A new group of young people line up to be slaughtered in "Friday the 13th".

Another thing that bothers me is the two things that piss me off in modern day films. Director Marcus Nispel (the director of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” remake) decides to utilize the shaky handi-cam technique. This has become the most clichéd thing to do in film and Nispel does not utilize it well. You end up getting angry that the camera won’t stay still for five fucking minutes. The other problem is that they shoot so close to the actors when they are struggling with Jason that you can’t see what the hell is going on. This style is used in many of today’s action films during fight sequences and, in my opinion, is a lazy way to get around actually choreographing a fight or, in this case, a kill. Also, on a minor not, there are way too many extreme close-ups on people’s faces. Back the fuck up.

Then there is another problem. The Kills. The ones that are seen are the lamest in the whole film and the ones not seen are not all that special either. One example of kills off-screen is a remake of the classic moment where Mrs. Voorhees gets her head cut off. For those who may not have seen the original movie, they actually show the head getting sliced off and her hands automatically reaching for the severed head. In this film, the camp councilor decapitates her off-screen and I feel cheated out of the moment.

The thing that made up for all of the bad dialogue and two dimensional characters in the past films was seeing how Jason would dispatch his prey. This film does not even try to bring anything new to the table. The kills are either really shitty or some cheap knock-off of something done in earlier films.

The final thing that pisses me off about this film is that I felt like I had watched a compact version of the first four “Friday the 13th” films. This is why I hate remakes in general. If the filmmakers are not going to try anything original to update the series for modern audiences, then they should not have even tried to make the movie in the first place. I felt like I should have just saved my money and watched the original series at home for free. Remakes can work only if something new is tried. “Casino Royale” breathed new life into the Bond series by giving us a more serious and realistic Bond while “Batman Begins” made up for the travesty that is “Batman and Robin”. Here, I got nothing.

The only reason this film gets any points is for the nostalgia factor. It was good to see that the writers at least referenced Mr. Voorhees and remembered the potato sack from the second film that Jason wore before getting his iconic mask. However, in the end, this is another unnecessary remake that does not deserve to be a part of the series.