There's a lot lacking in this extremely hollow remake of the Friday the 13th franchise, it's violent and at times relentless - just like a Friday the 13th movie should be, what it lacks is intelligence and depth.
Although for the most part critically reviled, there was a low-budget effectiveness of the original Friday the 13th - a hugely influential horror movie that ruthlessly targeted and exploited it's core audience. Although not particularly well made it was an effective shocker, which at the time took influence from the spate of late seventies horror fests from Fulci and Argento and threw some sexually active, pot-smoking teenagers into the fray. It was a huge success that had a direct impact towards the 1980's horror boom as well as creating the rules that later horror movies like Scream were keen to point out.
The equally low-budget sequels that followed adhered to a basic formula where groups of teenagers would be stalked and slashed by Jason Voorhees, a sadistic psycho in a hockey-mask that seemingly had no end of elaborate deaths for his prey. In the ten sequels that followed, Jason became the star of the show as the eponymous anti-hero turned into a horror icon.
After a grainy opening scene showing the death of Mrs Voorhees at the ominous Camp Crystal Lake and a relatively decent pre-credits sequence that shows the first group of campers becoming efficiently and systematically dispatched by Jason, we flash-forward to a second group of youths that are descending on the lake for a weekend of fun where they encounter an impossibly rugged biker searching for his missing sister. It's not long before they are all fighting for survival.
Director Marcus Nispel previously helmed the remake of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which although not a patch on the 1974 original, had enough moments to function as an effective horror movie. Aside from an eye-opening topless jetski scene in the middle of this one, Nispel uses his most effective ideas within the first fifteen minutes before the film lapses into tedium. Although this incarnation of Jason is a lean, muscular efficient killer, the group of youths he terrorizes are so unlikeable that it's hard not to side with the machete-wielding killer as he ruthlessly dispatches this group of under-written youths that wouldn't look out of place on a Calvin Klein commercial.
The action runs along for a poorly-paced 97 minutes, which although will keep you awake is unlikely to really engage you on any serious level. The film suffers from an abysmal script, poor direction and considering that the original source material played on manipulating your most primal fears, you'll be hard-pressed to find any decent scares in this poorly conceived reboot for the O.C. generation.
Jonny Dawson
