The Non-Remake of Friday the 13th
Why Jason Voorhees' Latest Incarnation is Entertaining but Mediocre
Feb 23, 2009
In fact, in Europe and Canada the film was released under the title Friday the 13th Part XII. After all, how can something be called a sequel when it contains direct references to the original movie? For instance, when the sexy, pre-carnage teens are sitting around the campfire, one of the things they discuss is what happened at Crystal Lake years ago: a woman went crazy over the drowning of her son Jason and starting killing campers, only to be killed herself. Meanwhile, Jason was inexplicably resurrected. That is an exact summary of the plot of the original Friday the 13th. The 2009 film takes place years after Mrs. Voorhees’ death, featuring a grown-up Jason whose has taken up his mother’s murderous mantle. If this new film doesn’t fulfill the definition of a sequel (as opposed to a remake) what on Earth does?
No Surprises in Marcus Nispel's Film
Of course, it would probably be difficult to remake the original when part of what made the original great was its surprise ending: the killer was not a lurching monster, but a middle-aged woman in a bad sweater. By now, the novelty of this twist has worn off - everybody knows that Mrs. Voorhees turns out to be the killer, it's a fact that even gets a nod in 1996's mock-horror flick Scream. And frankly, it seems hard to imagine today's cynical audiences being afraid of Mrs. Voorhees. Unfortunately, instead of coming up with a twist of their own, or some clever way around this, the filmmakers simply replace her with the lurching monster that audiences in 1980 could only imagine. It almost feels lazy.
The Cheese Factor of Friday the 13th
All this aside, the 2009 version of Friday the 13th has something else that the original (and the various other sequels) do not: realism. Okay, “realism” may not actually be the right word – a malformed behemoth child comes back from the dead to kill teens in the name of his equally-homicidal mother – but the film is dominated by a sense of grittiness, and the creepy sets (most notably, Jason’s childhood home) are full of traditionally-creepy elements like dust, cobwebs and broken toys. Plus, there is plenty of violence, but no neon-red geysers of fake blood. Factor in that the feathered hair and tube socks of the original film have been removed, and what is left is far less cheesy than the original.
This is not to say that there is no cheese involved. At one point, one of the blonde female campers (predictably, there are several blonde female campers) removes all of her clothing except for a bikini bottom and goes wakeboarding. That this is impractical beyond reason goes without saying. And there is enough sex-and-drugs jokiness in the dialogue to make this a slasher film that, like so many others, is an odd combination of cautionary tale and winking tribute to the excesses of American teenagers.
New Thrills and Old News
At the end of the day, this Friday the 13th calls to mind the recent Halloween remake (which, unlike Friday the 13th, actually was a remake). Released in 2007, Rob Zombie’s film was indeed hipper, slicker and, yes, more frightening than the original (at least in some ways), but in the end, it just seems kind of unoriginal, kind of regurgitated, kind of … unnecessary. Of the two films, at least Friday the 13th retains a bit of its original sense of fun; the same cannot be said for Zombie’s Halloween remake. After all, it is doubtful that anyone – anyone besides Zombie, at least – ever watched the original Halloween and decided that it was a pretty good movie, but it could be made better with a few scenes of child abuse and rape scene spliced into it.
