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Movie Review: Friday the Thirteenth
I promised a proper review of Friday The Thirteenth, so here goes. This is a re-imagining rather than a remake, with bits and pieces from several of the old F13 movies all thrown into one. I'll say at the outset that I'm not a big fan of the slasher genre and that I've seen only the original Friday the Thirteenth, not parts two to gazillion.
In the cheaply-made, effects-lite original, a group of young people come to the abandoned Camp Crystal Lake with the intention of re-opening the camp. They all die, murdered by the mother of a boy who drowned in the lake because the camp counselors were making out instead of watching him. At the end of the movie, the last (female) survivor of the group kills the killer and appears to hallucinate the dead boy coming out of the lake. There is no Jason (except that blink-and-you'll-miss-it shot at the end, and no hockey mask. The female killer actually makes it quite a subversive example of the genre.
By contrast, the new version is made by Michael Bay's company, Platinum Dunes. Bay has a producer credit but it's unclear how much input he had on the actual film. Platinum Dunes is known for these remakes and some have been very popular with genre fans, so we should expect a high quality, if unimaginative, film with plenty of nudity and gore.
Did we get it?
Well, let me start with the plot. I think what they've done is condense the first three F13 movies into one, as the structure of the film seems to suggest it. The first movie is dealt with in the credits sequence and it's very well done and genuinely scary. In a series of flashes we see the original camp, a girl running for her life and her final confrontation with Pamela Vorhees. A spooky voice-over introduces Jason and gives him a motivation for what follows: Kill for Mommy. Had the rest of the film been of this quality I'd be full of praise, but it's also true that this style couldn't be sustained for a full-length movie.
Next we meet a group of kids hiking in the countryside. Two of the boys are searching for a mythical cannabis farm, and one of the girls is the genre-staple Good Girl(TM), sweet and innocent and taking a break from caring for her poor dying mother. As darkness falls the kids split up to explore/have sex/get high and one-by-one they all die. Oddly, the first death seems to happen because the boy has found his weed-farm: it looks almost as if the killer is protecting the weed...which would actually have made sense. Two of the kids - Good Girl and her boyfriend, stumble across the abandoned Camp Crystal Lake where they discover evidence of Jason's...er, activities before he finds them. End of part two.
Six weeks later, Clay aka Good Boy (Jared Padalecki) zooms into town on his motorcycle searching for his sister (Good Girl of the previous bit) who has (obviously) gone missing. He runs into a bunch of kids on their way to raise some hell for the weekend at Rich Dickhead's father's retreat. They are an unlikeable bunch, much like the second lot, though they have their own Good Girl(TM) in the mix. What follows is pretty much predictable: Jason picks them off one at a time for no apparent reason. Clay teams up with Good Girl (2) and they find Camp Crystal Lake, finally twig there's a machete-weilding maniac in the woods and make a futile attempt to warn the others instead of getting the hell out of Dodge. Bad move and most die.
But no one goes to these movies for the plot, right?
I thought the script was pretty weak because honestly, there was not a single character I could care about. A couple of the dickheads in the second and third groups totally deserved...well, if not a horrible death then at least something bad. Jason became an odd kind of hero, snuffing these irritating gnats off the screen. Even the Good Girls and Clay weren't all that sympathetic, though Jared acted his ass off, turning in a far more convincing performance than Jensen's in MBV (and that's a line I never expected to write!)
But someone on that film set deserves a great deal of credit. I don't know enough about film making to know whether it's the director or the director of photography or maybe someone else, but parts of this film were incredibly well done. The scenes in the camp, for example, really conveyed the sense of decay and madness that is Jason's mind - giving the film a sophistication I wouldn't expect from the genre. The tunnel scenes were just as good in a different way (and achieved in 2D what MBV totally failed to manage in the more appropriate medium of 3D: a real sense of claustrophobia). Although the stand-out parts really do stand out the filming of it, the look and atmosphere are pretty consistent throughout. Someone behind the camera is very, very good indeed.
And the twist of Good Girl (1) not being dead? Is that in the original films? Because that I was not expecting. It was handled very well, too, the reveal just lingering enough for the horror of what happened to her to sink in and to raise questions with even worse answers.
The main problem is that after a while, the film is just boring. All that death...it stops being shocking or scary because there's so damn much of it. And some of the deaths are oddly tame, with only brief glimpses of what happens before the camera cuts away where a slightly longer shot might have been more effective. Paradoxically, some of the more wince-worthy moments just passed me by because earlier scenes had immunised me to the horror. It would have been better with a smaller cast and a much slower build-up to the horror and gore.
Maybe I'm missing the point. I'll admit that: this isn't my preferred genre of film. But isn't a horror movie supposed to be, you know, scary? This felt too much like a patchwork without much holding it all together.
In the cheaply-made, effects-lite original, a group of young people come to the abandoned Camp Crystal Lake with the intention of re-opening the camp. They all die, murdered by the mother of a boy who drowned in the lake because the camp counselors were making out instead of watching him. At the end of the movie, the last (female) survivor of the group kills the killer and appears to hallucinate the dead boy coming out of the lake. There is no Jason (except that blink-and-you'll-miss-it shot at the end, and no hockey mask. The female killer actually makes it quite a subversive example of the genre.
By contrast, the new version is made by Michael Bay's company, Platinum Dunes. Bay has a producer credit but it's unclear how much input he had on the actual film. Platinum Dunes is known for these remakes and some have been very popular with genre fans, so we should expect a high quality, if unimaginative, film with plenty of nudity and gore.
Did we get it?
Well, let me start with the plot. I think what they've done is condense the first three F13 movies into one, as the structure of the film seems to suggest it. The first movie is dealt with in the credits sequence and it's very well done and genuinely scary. In a series of flashes we see the original camp, a girl running for her life and her final confrontation with Pamela Vorhees. A spooky voice-over introduces Jason and gives him a motivation for what follows: Kill for Mommy. Had the rest of the film been of this quality I'd be full of praise, but it's also true that this style couldn't be sustained for a full-length movie.
Next we meet a group of kids hiking in the countryside. Two of the boys are searching for a mythical cannabis farm, and one of the girls is the genre-staple Good Girl(TM), sweet and innocent and taking a break from caring for her poor dying mother. As darkness falls the kids split up to explore/have sex/get high and one-by-one they all die. Oddly, the first death seems to happen because the boy has found his weed-farm: it looks almost as if the killer is protecting the weed...which would actually have made sense. Two of the kids - Good Girl and her boyfriend, stumble across the abandoned Camp Crystal Lake where they discover evidence of Jason's...er, activities before he finds them. End of part two.
Six weeks later, Clay aka Good Boy (Jared Padalecki) zooms into town on his motorcycle searching for his sister (Good Girl of the previous bit) who has (obviously) gone missing. He runs into a bunch of kids on their way to raise some hell for the weekend at Rich Dickhead's father's retreat. They are an unlikeable bunch, much like the second lot, though they have their own Good Girl(TM) in the mix. What follows is pretty much predictable: Jason picks them off one at a time for no apparent reason. Clay teams up with Good Girl (2) and they find Camp Crystal Lake, finally twig there's a machete-weilding maniac in the woods and make a futile attempt to warn the others instead of getting the hell out of Dodge. Bad move and most die.
But no one goes to these movies for the plot, right?
I thought the script was pretty weak because honestly, there was not a single character I could care about. A couple of the dickheads in the second and third groups totally deserved...well, if not a horrible death then at least something bad. Jason became an odd kind of hero, snuffing these irritating gnats off the screen. Even the Good Girls and Clay weren't all that sympathetic, though Jared acted his ass off, turning in a far more convincing performance than Jensen's in MBV (and that's a line I never expected to write!)
But someone on that film set deserves a great deal of credit. I don't know enough about film making to know whether it's the director or the director of photography or maybe someone else, but parts of this film were incredibly well done. The scenes in the camp, for example, really conveyed the sense of decay and madness that is Jason's mind - giving the film a sophistication I wouldn't expect from the genre. The tunnel scenes were just as good in a different way (and achieved in 2D what MBV totally failed to manage in the more appropriate medium of 3D: a real sense of claustrophobia). Although the stand-out parts really do stand out the filming of it, the look and atmosphere are pretty consistent throughout. Someone behind the camera is very, very good indeed.
And the twist of Good Girl (1) not being dead? Is that in the original films? Because that I was not expecting. It was handled very well, too, the reveal just lingering enough for the horror of what happened to her to sink in and to raise questions with even worse answers.
The main problem is that after a while, the film is just boring. All that death...it stops being shocking or scary because there's so damn much of it. And some of the deaths are oddly tame, with only brief glimpses of what happens before the camera cuts away where a slightly longer shot might have been more effective. Paradoxically, some of the more wince-worthy moments just passed me by because earlier scenes had immunised me to the horror. It would have been better with a smaller cast and a much slower build-up to the horror and gore.
Maybe I'm missing the point. I'll admit that: this isn't my preferred genre of film. But isn't a horror movie supposed to be, you know, scary? This felt too much like a patchwork without much holding it all together.
no subject
This is the exact same reaction that I had to the book Pet Semetary, though obviously substituting book for movie. I was all "so what?" at the end of it. Zombie pets don't scare me so much!
no subject
I dunno. F13 is just weird. It should be scary. And it is in parts. But scary isn't what you remember. You walk out of there plain bored. Probably not the effect they were going for.
On the other hand it was rather fun listening to the three people behind me (a girl, her boyfriend and another guy) discussing SPN before the film actually started. They obviously knew the show but weren't into fandom...I was just dying to tell the girl about some of the more racy fanfic!