Even after the lackluster [ed. and vile] footage shown at Comic Con last weekend, some of us (me) was still convinced that there would be something salvageable from the new “Friday the 13th” reboot. This was a foolish notion.
This movie, directed by Marcus Nispel and “written” by Damien Shannon and Mark Swift, is an inelegant mash-up of the first four “Friday the 13th” movies, with almost zero in the way of innovation, improvement, or adaptation. There are buckets of blood joylessly splashed on screen, and one very nice bit of nudity, but beyond that there’s almost nothing compelling about the movie.
The structure of this remake is helter-skelter, with inadequate time given to either set-up or pay-off; the production design is too artfully atmospheric; and more often than not Nispel falls back on the same hoary “country rube” clichés (affluent teenagers being punished for pre-marital sex and daring to have fun) that populated his remake of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” pausing only occasionally for a line of inane dialogue or a distractingly placed lens flair. (Sadly, there are none of the bloodthirsty Viking clichés that populated his borderline unwatchable “Pathfinder.”)
Probably the only redeeming factor is the interpretation of Jason as a kind of survivor man gone berserk, and there’s an interesting idea teased but never engaged where Jason has booby traps set up around the forest, “Apocalypto”-style. But alas, we just get a lot of exasperated running, shrill screaming and falling down, with extremely gruesome and gratuitous torture-porn-ish murders simply meant to shock.
Geeks and longtime fans will probably enjoy it, but the slasher nerd herd are a notoriously easy lay. If you want a stylistically bold approach to the tired slasher genre, you’re much better off renting Ronny Yu’s gonzo “Freddy Vs. Jason” (or Quentin Tarantino’s quasi-slasher, “Death Proof”). This? You might be bored to death. – Drew Taylor