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Hollywood doesn't like you.  That, I think, is the primary message I've derived from the slew of horror remakes that have been coming in the past couple of years and will be coming out for years to come.  Sure, they'll try to convince you that they like you by releasing films that you supposedly want to see, but really they just care about your money and they'll defile any legacy in the process to get it.  Friday the 13th is a prime example of this.  Though Marcus Nispel's latest stab at mediocrity avoids the nauseating "re-imagining" of a franchise, of which his The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Rob Zombie's Halloween were guilty, Friday the 13th is, if possible, even more guilty of blasphemy than those titles.  While those films at least tried something new with their established stories, Friday the 13th adds absolutely nothing at all, content instead to simply re-hash everything we've already seen.  Add Nispel's uninspired and bland directing and Damian Shannon and Mark Swift's half-assed screenplay to the mix and Friday the 13th becomes that which no horror film - original or remake - should ever be: boring.

Almost 30 years after the closing of Camp Crystal Lake, 5 youths seeking an unimaginable crop of marijuana disappear while camping near the derelict scene of multiple murders.  One of the vanished youths was a girl named Whitney Miller (Amanda Righetti), whose brother Clay (Jared Padalecki) has returned to the area to look for her 6 weeks later.  In the process, he runs into Jenna (Danielle Panabaker) and her group of college-aged friends who are spending their break at the vacation home of Trent's (Travis Van Winkle) family.  Unbeknownst to the group, their upper-crust dwelling is just a short walk from the infamous camp.  Also unaware are they of the rumors that Jason (Derek Mears), the "deformed or retarded or something" son of the murderer from nearly 3 decades ago, still lurks around the camp grounds, wanting to be left alone and defending his territory.  Brutally. 

Welcome to Camp Crystal Lake, where there's so much predictability and cliched filmmaking techniques that you deserve a medal if you haven't fallen asleep by the end of the movie.  Horror movies these days don't contain much substance (if any) so they're mostly judged on how effectively they incorporate boobs, gore, and scares.  Even in these regards though, in other words, in adhering to the archetypes and requirements of a slasher film, Friday the 13th is a failure.  The movie makes sure to include all the necessary slasher elements, but like a jock teenager half-assing a research paper, it jams them all in without any inspiration or creative spark, as though the filmmakers only wrote in the elements in order to satisfy an unspoken mandate. 

It really doesn't seem possible to screw up boobs, gore, and scares, but Nispel manages to pull it off:

1. Boobs: First and foremost, there are plenty, but part of the inherent necessity for them in slasher films stemmed from underlying idea that those who bared their breasts would soon die in a symbolic elimination of vapid morality.  While the girl with stupendous breasts is killed shortly after initiating infidelity, the other interchangeable/disposable girl is killed after an innocent yet unnecessary topless water skiing session that screams "you want boobs, here they are."  It's one thing to be formulaic, it's something else to be obligatory.
    
2. Gore: The body count in this movie is in the double digits, but the number of inventive deaths, the kind that really make you go, "oooooh daaaamn," can be counted on the single finger it takes for the movie to flip you off and say, "give me your money."  Alright, I get it, Jason carries a big knife, but it's not sewn onto his hand.  Stab, stab, stab, yawn.  This becomes boring, repetitive and above all else, robs us of the joy we would normally derive from seeing the morally vapid picked off one by one.  The barren wasteland of creativity also seems to have rubbed off on cinematographer Daniel Pearl whose work on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre - original and remake - was a selling point for both films.  Remember the gritty, documentary feel that saturated the original TCM?  Remember the dolly out through the hitchhiker's gaping head wound in the remake?  There's nothing remotely memorable or noteworthy about his camera work here.
    
3. Scares: Jump-scares are a part of modern day horror, I accept that, but Nispel overuses them so pathetically here that you can almost set your watch by their predictable timing.  There's no tension, no drama, no suspense built up anywhere during the movie, so Nispel instead overcompensates by throwing in a lot of loud noises, quick cuts, and figures jumping out at people.  By the end, if you're still startled by any of these cheap thrills, maybe you deserve to be one of those victims who brainlessly inches further into the dark room to investigate the noise you heard, which you hope is just your friends playing a joke on you, even though it never is.

Part of the problem lies in the fact that the first 15 minutes is so effective that the other 80 minutes can't match up.  In this epilogue of sorts, we're given an abbreviated summation and homage to the original classic film in which a group of tongue-in-cheek, overstimulated, irresponsible kids are killed in spectacular fashion.  Savor the moment where the boyfriend caught in the bear trap watches his girlfriend burn alive as she hangs upside down over a fire while trapped in her sleeping bag because Swift and Shannon apparently tapped their creative wells with it.  What does it say about a movie when it essentially summarizes and tops itself before the 20-minute mark? 

Swift and Shannon also apparently confused themselves while they were writing, filling the script with little nuggets of incongruities and contradictions.  Just to name a few:

• The cliched, foreshadowing old lady tells Clay "he just wants to be left alone," seeming to imply that Jason is merely territorial, yet it's him that actively seeks out our rambunctious teens without rhyme or reason.
   
• We're told briefly in the prologue that though Jason drowned as a child "he came back," but this information is never relayed to the group with whom we spend the majority of the film.  We know the mythos behind Jason, but they don't.  To them, he's just some crazy guy in a mask.  Why are we let in on the secret and they're not?  Where's the fun in that?
   
• Why is Jason keeping Whitney alive - because she looks like his mother?  Jason doesn't let people live.  Jason is revenge. 

The cracked and collapsing wooden sign that welcomes people in the movie to Camp Crystal Lake should have read, "Welcome to Camp Crystal Lake, Where We Don't Try Very Hard."  That way, maybe Pamela Voorhees would've known better than to send her son to a camp where the likelihood of his drowning was significantly high and we could've been warned not to expect very much from the movie.

If after reading this you'd like to see me wander alone through Camp Crystal Lake, leave a comment below or email me at jr@magnetmediafilms.com

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