Friday the 13th (2009)

The 2000s are a decade I don't look back on with fondness.  The music was awful and most of the movies, particularly in the horror genre, were terrible as well.  Often the two made an unholy combination, meaning that because horror films were supposed to be scary, they needed a nu-metal or industrial soundtrack so it would feel dark and foreboding.  It was also a time when Hollywood decided pretty much everything needed to be remade despite the fact that, since physical media still dominated when it came to movies, almost everyone had the originals to watch anytime they wanted.  

Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes was one of the worst at this, bringing us unwanted versions of A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and, of course, Friday the 13th.  The remakes, like many of the original horror films of the time, featured unlikable characters, unimaginative scripts and production values that managed to be even less impressive than some of the straight-to-video material from the 1990s.  Although they didn't stick around in the theater long after release they typically made enough money on their first weekend to keep churning them out well into the next decade. 

One of those was Friday the 13th.  At least Sean Cunningham, who made the original, had a producer credit on it, and a few snippets of Frank Manfredini's original music was used.  Also, to my relief, it used an actual film score rather than soon-to-be-forgotten third-tier metal bands.  Unlike many of the other movies that were remade during this time the original Friday the 13th was a money grab that just happened to have enough style to it that it made money as Cunningham had hoped and spawned a number of sequels of varying quality.  Still, even with that history, the remake managed to still disappoint. 

In 1980 Camp Crystal Lake is the site of a massacre as Pamela Voorhees (Nana Visitor) murders a group of camp counselors in revenge for the drowning of her boy Jason (Derek Mears).  Jason is, however, alive and witnesses the last surviving counselor behead his mother.  Over the years Jason becomes a local legend as he lives on the grounds of the closed and dilapidated summer camp where he defends his territory with deadly force, believing everyone in the outside world to be responsible for his mother's death.  A group of college kids looking for a rumored wild crop of marijuana in the modern day prove to be his latest victims.

One of those is Whitney (Amanda Righetti), whose brother Clay (Jared Padalecki) comes to Crystal Lake looking for her as no trace of her body was found.  He runs afoul of Trent (Travis Van Winkle), the son of a rich businessman with a summer home in the area.  Trent and his friends have come to spend the weekend and, after a confrontation between the two, Trent's supposed girlfriend Jenna (Danielle Panabaker) heads off with Clay to investigate an area near the lake.  Meanwhile Jason, still stirred up from the other visitors a few weeks before, starts murdering anyone near his camp and decides to take out Trent and his guests as well. 

This version of Friday the 13th does a few things right.  It gets the whole plot of the first movie out of the way in the first few minutes as the producers and writers of this version knew that promising Jason and having his mother be the killer was not going to fly.  It worked in the original because the killer was not revealed toward the end and was never hinted as being Jason, who didn't become the main villain until Friday the 13th Part 2.  Early on Jason wears a sack similar to what he did in the first sequel, finding the hockey mask after one of the murders and donning it for the rest of the movie.  Thus, we get a quick run through of the first couple versions of Jason, which Derek Mears does an impressive job portraying. 

The problem is the rest of the movie doesn't live up to him.  The makeup may be good, but I will never know because the one time we see Jason's face it is too dark to make any detail out.  We do get a couple good kills at the beginning, but that's about it.  The rest of it seems silly, the dialog is terrible and most of the characters are worse than they were in the originals.  Jarad Padalecki is a decent lead as one would expect, having co-starred in Supernatural for four years by this point, but he is also given little to do.  There are attempts to liven things up with nudity but even that didn't have any real impact.  

The last parts of the movie, from the time Clay and Jenna find the tunnels that Jason uses to get around Crystal Lake through almost the end, is the point where director Marcus Nispel gets it right.  Jason is always best when he is a killing machine and was always scariest before he became a zombie, particularly in the first sequel.  There is nothing here that gets into that territory, but at least the ending has some excitement to it even if Nispel, predictably, couldn't help aping the end of the 1980 film. 

Friday the 13th (2009)

Time: 97 minutes

Starring: Jarad Padalecki, Danielle Panabaker, Amanda Righetti, Travis Van Winkle, Derek Mears

Director: Marcus Nispel