Movie Reviews: FRIDAY THE 13TH

Saturday, February 14, 2009
Movie Reviews: FRIDAY THE 13TH
IN THEATERS



FRIDAY THE 13TH

Against the advice of locals and police, Clay (Jared Padalecki) scours the eerie woods surrounding Crystal Lake for his missing sister. But the rotting cabins of an abandoned summer camp are not the only things he finds. Hockey-masked killer Jason Voorhees lies in wait for a chance to use his razor-sharp machete on Clay and the group of college students who have come to the forest to party.


Cast: Jared Padalecki, Danielle Panabaker, Amanda Righetti

Director: Marcus Nispel

Opened ..February 13, 2009

Runtime: 1 hr. 35 min.

Rated R for strong bloody violence, some graphic sexual content, language and drug material

Genres: Slasher Film, Horror

Review:

The remake of Friday the 13th boast a shiny new gloss and a fresh faced cast, sadly that’s all that’s new here. The rest of the film plays like a condensed version of parts 1 through 3 offering very little in terms surprises or scares. The scares are there don’t get me wrong but they are more of the cheap variety with massive bass or musical to drive the point home. Jason is slightly revamped, here he’s more human than mystical and the opening twenty minutes are mildly impressive as we see an athletic Jason slice through a batch of twenty somethings with great gusto. Sadly, as the film proceed Jason reverts to what we’ve seen before, he always seems to pop out of no where to get the appropriate scare and is seemingly everywhere. The kills are vaguely interesting if not as original as I would have expected. Strangely, even after the post modern Scream horror films all the basic slasher rules still apply here. Drink, do drugs, have sex and you will be slaughtered with only a slight exception. The cast of corpses is filled with beautiful people whose might as well wear a clock around their neck countdown to their forgone conclusion of a death. Jared Padelecki does the best of the group and puts forth a solid effort as the brother in search of his missing sister. Danielle Panabaker also gives a decent performance as the good girl. Aaron Yoo is another bright spot as the comic relief. The rest of the cast is kind of a faceless, outside of Willa Ford and her topless waterskiing, and really its better that way. The script is filled with flat comedy and bad cliques we’ve all seen in 80’s slashers films, each facing all to obvious ends. Marcus Nispel, who directed the passable Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, can’t seem to decide what kind of tone he wants for this film, sometimes it borders on tongue in cheek and other times it attempts to be seriously scary. In the end, this could have been an opportunity to give the slasher film a much needed reinvention but instead we get all the same paint by the numbers tedium. Expect a high body count, lots of gore and plenty of T&A in this remake but couldn't we say the same thing about the originals?

C-