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Friday in Gautham Part XII: Friday the 13th (2009)

F13 2009 Poster

I’ve said it here before. I’m not opposed to remakes. There have been some really good ones. Cronenberg’s The Fly, for instance. Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead is another. I even like the Peter Jackson King Kong. I think that if there’s good material at the base, or at least interesting material, and you get a good writer and director, you can make a damn good movie.

Platinum Dunes went for a while producing remakes of horror classics. The production company, led by Michael Bay, Brad Fuller, and Andrew Form, has been responsible for the remakes of classic movies that I grew up watching: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), The Amityville Horror (2005), The Hitcher (2007), A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010), and, of course Friday the 13th (2009).

Of that list, the only movie whose original I still haven’t seen is The Amityville Horror (1979). Of that list, the only other remakes I’ve sat through were The Amityville Horror (aka Ryan Reynolds Takes His Shirt Off Too Goddamn Much) and, well, you know. And now, of course, Friday the 13th.

So, what’s to say about the remake? Well….

The Day

The cast and acting aren’t terrible. Honestly, my only problem with it is that the cast is too damn pretty. The girls, the guys, everything is a little too slick, a little too polished looking. And in terms of characterization, it’s not terrible…for a Friday the 13th movie. It’s not my favorite cast, but it’s not a terrible one either.

Boring people doing boring things.

Boring people doing boring things.

The writing is also not terrible. With a story by Damian Shannon, Mark Swift, and Mark Wheaton, and a screenplay by Shannon and Swift (the duo who wrote Freddy vs. Jason), the script is fairly solid. Are there plotholes? Yeah. Are they major? Meh.

Jason Voorhees (Derek Mears) is returned to his roots as a really mean hulk of a man. He’s not just shambling around and appearing places. His body language is quick and vicious. He’s imposing and unsettling.

Back to the sack...for now.

Back to the sack…for now.

The Night

By now, call it a remake or a reboot or a re-imagining, it’s still Friday the 13th. The very premise of these movies is young people getting slaughtered in the woods. So whether you call it a remake/-boot/-imagining or call it Part XI, it’s pretty much the same. There’s nothing really new here. It’s a rehash and condensed version of the first four Friday the 13th movies retold for a modern audience. The characters are little more than stereotypes and the suspense is non-existent. Jason is as Jason does, and what he does is kill. The writers and director Marcus Nispel try to bring more pathos to the victims but it never really works.

Don't look behind you. Ah, shit. Go ahead, end your suffering.

Don’t look behind you. Ah, shit. Go ahead, end your suffering.

A Quick Aside

I’m going to take a moment here to digress. I want to talk about the two Platinum Dune remakes that I’ve seen recently and know well: Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street. I saw Amityville on a date and remember very little about it. One of my problems with the company that’s at least one-third Michael Bay is that, like most of Bay’s movies, they’re all flash and little substance. The idea that Bay, Fuller, and Form think they are rebooting and re-imagining these movies is troubling or silly, I can’t decide which one.

Their idea of re-imagining is giving us the same story, the same characters, and the same situations, and changing little things for the sake of changing them. In the case of Friday the 13th, it doesn’t matter much, but in the case of A Nightmare on Elm Street, their hubris and their unwillingness to acknowledge the good of the original hurt the material. I suspect their other remakes have the same problem. By taking these original tales and putting their own spin on them, they trivialize the classics the producers claim they love so much and turning them into modern messes.

That's basically how the original movies they remake feel.

That’s basically how the original movies they remake feel.

Saturday the 14th

The thing with the remake of Friday the 13th–and I refuse to call the Platinum Doom (I meant, uh, Dune) movies reboots, they aren’t original enough to hold such a pretentious title–is that, unlike A Nightmare on Elm Street (and presumably their other remakes), it’s not actually much worse than the movies that inspired it. If anything, it’s more of the same. Taking a movie (or series of movies) that have a thin foundation to begin with and just doing the same damn thing isn’t going to be unfaithful to the original, it’s just going to be another one.

There was supposed to be a sequel but as recently as this past summer, news is that the sequel has been scrapped due to New Line Cinema selling Friday the 13th and Jason and the rest to…drumroll…Paramount. And guess what Paramount plans on doing?

Yeah. A reboot.

A fan anxiously awaits the next reboot.

A fan anxiously awaits the next reboot.

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