Movie 105: Friday the 13th (2009)

In 1980 Jason Vorhees drowned in the lake when his camp councillors should have been watching, but were shagging and boozing instead. So mamma kills them all bar one. But Jason isn’t dead and she tells him to get revenge. 20 odd years later a bunch of campers come to the wood, and Jason is a good boy and does what mamma said. A few months after that another group come up to one of their dad’s cabin, and the brother of one of the last batch comes looking for his missing sister. What is a Machete wielding maniac to do?

This isn’t a remake, or reboot, or Friday the 13th. It’s a remake of part one for the first 2 minutes, part 2 for the next 15 to 20 and then part 3. Sort of. You get to see Major Kira from DS9 as mum doing a bit of her thing, then potato sack Jason does his thing a lot, and finally the hockey mask gets put on.

I’m fine with that. At this point the fact that the mother was the original killer is moot. You hear Friday the 13th or chichichi papapa and think Jason, so we get Jason but with the original set up. And we want hockey mask, so we get it with the original lead in. All very good.

In fact I’m over all happy with the remake. Jason is the right amount of supernatural unstoppable and he’s not been overly humanised as can happen now. He’s a very fucked up little boy in a giant elephant man body who cuts people up. In fact we have a smarter, better skilled Jason in this one than you’d expect. He’s a bit like a mute Rambo at times. And that’s fine. You can only get so much out of a guy who stalks about after all.

The main problem the film has is the unlikability (that a word?) of the majority of the cannon fodder. They are douches, plain and simple. But if you want a hack and slash where you don’t have to care about most of the characters that’s fine. The first group aren’t so bad actually, it’s the bulk of the films kids that are dicks.

To balance it we have the hero leads. Jared” the not all that cool one from Supernatural” Padalecki is the brother hunting for his sister. He’s a likeable guy, a bit quiet, not some kind of Jason hunting superman. Fine. And Danielle “Cute daughter from Shark” Panabaker is the main douches girlfriend who wants to help out the brother as she feels sorry for him. She’s a nice girl who you don’t really get why shes with the dick head, but she obviously apologises for him a lot. There’s no overt sexual tension between the two of them, she’s not a cheating bitch and he’s not a dick moving in on a girl who has a guy. Two likeable kids. All well and good.

But for you classics fans, you will get two things here that are god damned requirements. There are plenty of boobs, 3 pairs I believe. One is incredibly fake looking to me. And you get plenty of stabby blood kills. Nothing over the top like in modern gorenography, Jason is actually quite a clean killer. Just well done stabbing stab stabs. And a few creative ones too. Nice.

Honestly I couldn’t have hoped for a much better Friday the 13th film. Less annoying kids would have improved it a lot but I think they did a damned fine job.

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