Movie Review: Friday the 13th

The time: summer, 1980.
The place: Camp Crystal Lake.

Mrs. Voorhees is more than a little miffed because her son Jason almost drowned. The camp counselors were supposed to be watching little Jason, but they were fucking and/or doing drugs, taking part in whatever scandalous activities teens did in the 1980’s but do no longer. After watching an episode of Solid Gold and listening to her Air Supply tape Jason’s Mommy dispatches all the counselors in a rather grisly fashion.

Except one. A girl who will remain nameless because I don’t remember her name. Armed with only her big-ass 80’s hair, Jelly bracelets, a newfangled Betamax machine, a wet t-shirt and Daisy Dukes, she manages to behead Mrs. V.

Yeah!!! Camp Crystal Lake is saved, with only a dozen teenage corpses rotting underneath the field where everybody does that potato sack race. Nobody will notice because apparently the rest of the town is filled with ignorant hicks.

Or is it?

There was a little deformed boy who was watching. No, it wasn’t Eric Stoltz from Mask, or that dude from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, but little Jason Voorhees. He saw his mother get beheaded and apparently that kind of thing can be damaging to a juvenile, underdeveloped psyche. But we’re sure Jason will be okay...

Or will he?

The time: The present
The Place: The Kingdom of the Crystal Lake

There’s a bunch of teenagers/20somethings whose names you don’t need to remember driving up to Crystal Lake for camping and whatnot. Why don’t you need to remember their names? Because they will ALL be dead within a matter of minutes. Ostensibly, they’re here to camp and fuck because that’s what they heard teenagers did in the 80’s but no longer do now, and it’s cool to be a little retro once in a while, just as long as you don’t overdo it because then you just look sad, like that overly-friendly physics teacher that tries to hard to relate to the young folk but ends up looking like a Chi-Mo (that’s child molester for non Frank Portman fans).

Future Dead guy #1 has another reason for going to the Lake where the Crystals roam. He heard from a guy who heard from a guy that there’s a prime patch of marijuana untouched and ready to be harvested and sold for any willing entrepreneur.

At a campfire, Future Dead guy #1 tells a story to all the Future dead Guys and Gals with him. It’s about a boy named Jason at a place named Camp Crystal Lake. How odd that the place where they’re at is called Crystal Lake. Could it be the same one? It’s a tale of murder and mayhem, but it’s probably not true because stories like that are never true...

Or are they?

Because Jason’s been watching them, and soon future Dead Guy and all of his Future dead friends learn that it’s not cool to fuck with J’s weed...

The time: the Present, or rather 6 weeks from that previous present, which I guess makes it the Future.

The Place: The Lake where Billy Crystal’s acting career went to drown

This time an entirely new set of young adults go to the boarded up Camp Crystal Lake. There’s not much difference between them and the previous victims/tourists, except that there’ll be a longer duration in terms of screentime before all/most of them are killed.

We meet-

Trent (played by Travis Van Winkle- stop laughing...that’s not nice...okay, you can have a minute, but he can’t help being named Van Winkle)- Trent is a preppie rich boy who you really want to see get killed. And no matter how painful his death may or may not be, it never really seems painful enough for a douche like Trent. During the movie, you’ll find Trent screams like a bitch
Fun fact: Last famous person with the last name Van Winkle: Robby Van Winkle AKA Vanilla Ice...so reach for those stars, Travis.

Jenna (played by Danielle Panabaker)- Jenna’s actually kind of a nice person, and one of the few female members of the cast who doesn’t doff her bra, so it stands to reason that she’ll survive Jason.

Or will she?

Nolan (played by Ryan Hansen)- swear to God, this guys looks like Matthew McConaughey’s younger brother...Chet. Chet McConaughey.

Chelsea (played by Willa Ford)- Yes, the singer of ‘02’s pop hit ‘I Wanna Be Bad’ is topless in this movie. And she gives an Academy Award Winning performance. I’m lying about one of those statements and I’m pretty sure I know which one you want me to be lying about.

Lawrence (played by Arlen Escarpeta)- Lawrence is the token black guy and is well aware of that fact. Lawrence also smokes a lot of weed and wants to start a rap label. Good thing Lawrence doesn’t fall into any stereotypes.

Chewie (played by Aaron “I wanna get with” Yoo)- He’s the token Asian guy and knows it. He knows how to fix stuff. He’s not a developed enough character to even get stereotypes. At least make him good at karate or do complex math in his head.

Bree (played by Juliana Guill)- she has perfect nipple placement. I’m not lying, it’s a direct quote from the movie so it has to be true (“You have perfect nipple placement”). See...

They’re all going to Crystal Lake because rich Trent has his Daddy’s cabin unoccupied and ripe for a weekend of debauchery if they don’t all get killed first. But there’s another person inadvertently along for the murder-ride this weekend, and his name is...

Clay (played by Jared Padalecki)- He’s at Crystal Lake because his sister Whitney (Amanda Righetti) is missing. She had been on a trip with some friends to Crystal Lake about six weeks ago and Clay hadn’t heard from her since so he’s not feeling so Pada-lucky. The Police haven’t found any trace of the missing party because the police are morons. But that doesn’t satisfy Clay because he has to know if little sis is dead so he can raid the shit from her room (the panties he’s secretly fantasized about wearing because they’d look good with his CW goatee, the diary he’s always wanted to read but would only open if and only if she got hacked up by a merciless killer, those Dawson’s Creek DVD’s she never returned and probably got smudges on James van Der Beek’s face).

And wouldn’t you know it? Sooner or later Jason ends up killing most, if not all of these characters, though never the same way twice, and the audience thanks him for that. Jason seems angry all the time, which is odd considering how much weed is at his disposal, you’d think he’d be a lot mellower and maybe kill people by taking them to college “poetry” readings or making them watch those shitty Friday movies (the ones with Ice Cube, not the actual Friday the 13th original movies- I guarantee you, some wigger you know has a copy of the original Friday on VHS and thinks it’s the best movie ever). But no, Jason takes his my-mommy-got-killed-in-front-of-me aggressions out on stupid kids who invade his space. Seems fair...

I’ve seen the previous 26 Friday the 13th movies and don’t really remember much about them because they seem so moronic and interchangeable. What do I remember? Kevin Bacon getting gutted into...bacon after sex in the first one, being genuinely surprised by the killer in the first one, Freddy vs. Jason, and that dim-witted embarrassment where Jason goes to Space. You can send monkeys and Pigs to Space in movies, but unless it’s being marketed as a comedy, don’t send Jason into space because it’s s stupid as having skeet shooting competitions at the Special Olympics. You want the participants to do well, but you know they’re just going to end up shooting theirs/others ears and eyes off.

How does this incarnation/re-imagining/remake of Friday the 13th stack up? Fine, but like last month’s My Bloody Valentine, you really weren’t expecting quality, were you?

I had a good time in the theater with a nearly packed crowd opening night, partly because I didn’t expect much and I didn’t really care if any one of the characters lived or died, I just wanted to see if they turned into carnage Croutons to maximum gory effect. Which they were.

You expect going into a Friday the 13th movie to see lots of young people getting killed.
You will get lots of young people getting killed in this version. Nothing more. Nothing less.

If that’s good enough for you, then you’ll have a grand old time seeing Jason on the big screen again. And if last weekend or even this Valentine’s Day weekend you were SO/Spouse-forced to endure He’s Just Not That Into You, then you can watch this to try to wire-scrub the stench off that movie and fantasize about Jason taking his trusty machete to that cast of mopey losers, specifically the Drew Barrymore/Ginnifer Goodwin/Justin Long characters. One can dream, can’t they?

What works about the Friday the 13th 2009 model-

1) The redneck who talked about “Gin” taking his virginity got more Ewwwwwws from the audience than most of the gory scenes (“You were about to press the start button on the whoopass machine”). You hope he’s kidding about “Gin”, but he’s probably not. Ewww

2) You see Jason’s face for a couple of moments, and it is pretty gruesome. What if he had something to iconically cover his face with, like a hat...or a pair of oversize glasses or maybe something sports-related, like a football helmet or a Lebron James headband or he could plaster his fleshy dome with all of Alex Rodriquez’ prescriptions, just something to conceal his melon...

3) Lawrence’s Wok Shield

4) Oily breasts and topless skiing fill the gra-titty-ous nudity portion of the review

5) My favorite Kill involves a sleeping bag

6) Chelsea getting bonked by a boat. That had to hurt.

7) Jason’s room, including his very special “ornament”

What doesn’t work-

1) A cheap fake scare involving a dog

2) An awful final shot that left the audience I was with groaning, and I can’t say that I blame them.

3) An even worse fake scare involving a refrigerator

4) Minor Spoiler- There’s no reason, except for idiot plot convenience, why Jason leaves a character alive for a good portion of the movie

Overall. Lowered expectations = fine time seeing other people die. Could we have done without ANOTHER Friday the 13th movie? Probably, but at least this one’s not horrible as we’ll wait for the inevitable sequels to really suck ass. And at least this one’s not brainless enough to be set in space. What would really be sublime is if Jason took his machete to any Academy voters who voted The Reader for Best Picture over the past couple of weeks and strung them up at next week’s ceremony. Now THAT would bring ratings...