Rating: 1.5 Pulses
Starring: Jason Voorhees, disposable teens
Directed by Marcus Nispel
Rated R
After tackling Manhattan, future space, and even Freddy Krueger, the only next logical, post-modern step for everyone’s favorite Michael Myers rip-off is to return home. Thus, the creatively bankrupt (or is it lazy?) Hollywood delivers not the next chapter in Jason’s journal of murder, but instead a half-baked gumbo compiling ingredients from the first three. That this film strives to add so little to the series may be a bane for some and a blessing for others.
The film follows a troupe of teens who drive out to daddy’s lake house set in the old pine trees of Camp Crystal Lake. Their interests include sex, drugs, getting laid, booze and sex. Jason, like any conservative morality-merchant, just won’t stand for it, slaughtering anyone involved in such distasteful activities. A little hypocritical aren’t we, Jason? There’s just no reasoning with people like that.
Especially when that person is the hulking behemoth that is Jason Voorhees. A hit-and-miss change from the source material, Jason now chugs along with the clumsy grace of a UFC fighter, no longer the twisted voyeur of yore. The teens, well, they’re the same d-bags taken straight from “The Real World” that infest every Michael Bay-produced horror remake. However, the two minorities present somewhat of a slasher anomaly. Their sole purpose in the film is to fill the role of victim No. 7, etc., but they’re the only intelligent, self-aware characters in the film, yet they still seem content to willfully adhere to the stereotypes they constantly question.
Such is the filmmakers’ staunch resistance against anything truly original, new or innovative. The scares are 30 years old and not scary anymore. The ubiquitous quick-cut accompanied by loudness is expected and worn thin. You jump, sure, but never shake. It’s not visceral.
So where is the appeal? Well, tits and blood mostly. Breasts are an easy sell, but deaths, this is the one and only area of Friday the 13th where even the slightest creative effort shows. But a few cool kills aren’t worth defiling the classics just because you can buy the rights. What’s next, Michael Bay, A Nightmare on Elm Street remake by the director of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video? Oh, right, it is.
? jay Spight
