Friday the 13th

(2009) ***

And my roundup of remakes plodded on in 2010. You may recall that I bitched mightily about Rob Zombie's Halloween remake, but I felt no such ire at the rebooting of the Friday the 13th franchise. People will say (not so much people here, but some other people) "O why bother making a remake?" But I ask you: with this particular bucket of beans, why not? We're talking about a series that already racked up eleven movies -- eleven! -- that ended with a goddamn horror movie franchise crossover event a la Dracula Meets the Mummy -- which only sounds crazy until you remember that by that point they had already sent their killer woodsman to New York, Hell and freakin' outer space. Friday the 13th was already a knockoff in 1980 and by Freddy vs. Jason the franchise had already autosodomized itself every possible way. A reboot makes perfect sense. All they have to do is stick to the four Ts: Trees, Tits, Tachetes and Tockey Tasks.

I do have some gripes about some of Jason's behavior. In the first volley of murders he keeps one girl alive and imprisons her in his lair because she looks like his mom. Whuaah? Jason doesn't imprison people, he kills them. And later on he sets a trap by stuffing a girl in a sleeping bag and suspending it over a fire; when her boyfriend runs in to save her, he steps on a bearclaw trap. For me, that's way too much dipping into The Hills Have Eyes's bag of tricks. He's not one of those damn cannibalistic, psychologically bullying hillbillies, he's a big 'ol walking pile of murder. I dimly recall these deviations really honking me off when I watched it, but 11 months later they seem like minor complaints. (Who writes movie reviews eleven months after they watch a movie? I mean, seriously, who does that?)

It may be hard to say what, if anything, the 2009 Friday the 13th adds to the world, but I feel we here at Horrorthon Ltd. will never miss the value of a few more pretty pretend corpses added to the pile. There's even some great opportunities to yell at the movie, like the final stinger scene in which Jason returns from the dead to springboard another sequel. You'll yell because this happens when the surviving characters take Jason's body to the dock to dump it in the water. Why? Whyyyyyy??? Why would you not save it for the cops? Why would you bother carrying that heavy dude all that way? You idiots.

Hee hee hee...