Friday the 13th (2009)

When most people hear Camp Crystal Lake in a conversation they're probably imagining a camp in the middle of east Jesus nowhere where you went when you were a child to make crafts, swim in a fish filled lake, and told camp fire stories about the three campers who went missing and were never found. When most people hear Friday the 13th very few of them think of the classic horror movie. When most people hear the name Jason they think of hockey masks, machetes, and well... Jason.

In the year 1980 director Sean S. Cunningham, and writer Victor Miller introduced us to a boy named Jason who had drowned in Crystal Lake while at a camp. The counselors weren't paying attention - mainly screwing in a near by cabin - and they didn't hear the boy's cry. several years later, a few people are set on re-opening the camp and thus the movie Friday the 13th is created.

The original is actually poorly made, even for a movie made in 1980, with the traditional corn syrup and red dye number 3 gig and everything. I do own it, and I do still watch it. Jason Voorhees is one of my favorite creepy crawly of the night along with Freddie Kruger of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Sadly for a while, Jason has been loosing slack in the movie world, that is until the year 2003 when the movie Freddie Vs. Jason came out, showing Jason as the ultimate victor, and the more recent this years remake of Friday the 13th

I've never been excited about remakes. Nothing is as good as the original - case and point, the unknown remake of The Shinning or the remake of Halloween, you simply can't beat it - but for some reason, I was actually counting down the days until Friday February 13th when the remake of Friday the 13th was coming out to theaters. For some reason unknown to me, I was excited to see if it was going to be better than the original.

So you can only imagine my reaction to the film once it was over....

I literally left the theater feeling... violated and less self confident. The entire movie was nothing but college students getting high and girls - two are excluded from this - showing their breasts. The opening scene is of a group of five - two girls and three guys - and within the first three minutes of the movie, a girl goes topless. The rest of the scene pans out to show a girl who looks a lot like the mother of Jason, and her friends. Sadly there are no survivors.

Then 6 weeks later we see a group of friends, three girls and three guys, are going on a trip to one of their houses for the weekend, and they bump into Clay Miller (Jared Padalecki) who is looking for his sister - who was one of the girls from the opening scene. And the movie plays out, in the traditional horror movie way of everything happening over one night and the only thing keeping everyone alive is the adrenaline that pumps within their systems.

The deaths in this movie are very disappointing. An arrow through the head, an ax through the chest, stabbing - the saddest of them all happening to a character named Chelsea (Willa Ford) who gets her head banged with a speeding boat (quite comical if I do say so myself) and a knife shoved through her head. The most original deaths happen to one of the girls in the opening scene who is trapped upside down in a sleeping bag over a fire, and to a character named Chewie (Aaron Yoo) who gets a screwdriver through his neck.

The few things that were good about this movie were the acting skills of Jason (Derek Mears), and the fact that Jason went from wearing a burlap sack to a hockey mask - yes, sadly that is seriously it.

So rating wise, this remake gets a 2 out of 4. One boobs are nice, but very unnecessary, two were these deaths or accidents?, three the theater I went to was way too loud taking away from the movie scaring me rather then when someone moved a chair - loud scratching noises are not good friends to the audience, and four no one man or woman likes leaving the movies feeling violated. So sorry, Jason. Mommy couldn't help you make this one better. Maybe someone going through the wood chipper would have helped but we'll just save that for the Saw franchise.