Friday the 13th(2009)
Micheal Bay is the kind of director that makes you want to hate movies forever. On his own, he is the man responsible for such cinematic abortions as "Bad Boys" 1 & 2, "Armageddon", "The Rock", "The Island" and his holy grail of crap, "Pearl Harbor." Coming from the world of commercials and music videos, Bay doesn't make movies so much as he makes two and a half hour TV spots. His trademark explosions an indecipherable editing style have helped lower entertainment standards across the board. More recently as a producer, he has seen fit to remake classic fright flicks, turning once revered horror movies into lifeless cash cows. "Friday The 13th" is the latest to be groped by his slimey hand.
Released in 1980, the original film takes place at the infamous Crystal Lake, a summer camp with an urban legend past. Year prior, a young camper named Jason Voorhees drowned in the nearby lake as horny teen counselors did what comes naturally(i.e., sex.) The entire camp was found murdered, leading the local yokels to nickname the site "Camp Blood." Several years later, the camp is reopened, much to the chagrin of the aforementioned locals. As the campers arrive, the new teen counselors begin to get killed by an unseen madman, often in conjunction with their indulgence in sex and the partaking of drugs. The deaths escalate and the tension tightens until the final moments when the killer, and their motive, is revealed.
Along with John Carpenter's "Halloween", "Friday The 13th" wrote the rulebook for the slasher movie, a sub-genre of exploitative thrillers thinly disguised as morality tales. The characters were usually made up of the broadest of archetypes; The jock, the slutty girl(s), the stoner, the outsider(punk, metal kid, goth, etc.), and of course, the "Final Girl"--the sole innocent of the group who inevitably escaped death. The slasher formula resulted in quite a few classics, but sadly was turned to parody by it's own sodomizing, it's unwillingness to experiment with the mold.
The new "Friday" starts by spoiling the originals climatic twist ending almost immediately before jumping to the present day. We meet our doomed teens hiking by the nefarious Crystal Lake. After the ham-handed campfire exposition, the gang quickly breaks off to: A)Have gratuitous sex and B) wander onto a rundown cabin and snoop around inside. A few obvious cat scares and one "Night Ranger" sing-a -long later, things end badly. Then the opening title card finally appears. Twenty three minutes on the clock and the movie has officially begun.
This chunk of the movie, which plays more as underwritten filler than story, also introduces another main character: Jason's pot garden. At some point, the serial slasher formed quite the taste for marijuana, harvesting a stash that would give Tommy Chong the munchies on sight alone.
Several weeks later(or as I call it, "Even more present day") we meet a new batch of kids, including the obligatory Asian stoner/comic relief and the racially sensitive black guy, along with the token sluts and jock A-holes. We also get a weak link to the opening act in the form of Clay (played by Jared Padalecki from TV's "Supernatural".) He shows up in town looking for his sister Whitney, the non-slut from the extended opening, who is now being held hostage in Jason's underground lair(Huh?).
Re-teaming from their previous collaboration on the god-awful remake to "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", Bay, along with director Marcus Nispel and cinematographer Daniel Pearl have constructed a by-the-numbers and completely un-engaging motion picture. Characters are given zero backstory and no inkling of sympathy. Nispel's direction is dull and fails at the relatively simple task of staging decent deaths and nude scenes, the staples of the genre. Daniel Pearl, who never met a stage light he couldn't dim out of existence, photographs every scene as if he were creating mood lighting for a blind person.
The slasher movie genre may have never been genius, but it certainly deserves better than this.