Friday the 13th (2009)
So here we are at the latest Friday the 13th film, which is already 5 years old. After it came out, there was quick talk of a sequel after its great recordbreaking first weekend. However, it had one of the sharpest declines by the second weekend. In fact, the box office fell by a surprising 80.4%! That's the 7th biggest drop of a film to open at #1 at the box office... ever. So what was it? Was it negative reviews? Bad word of mouth? Did something huge open the next weekend? Let's take a look.
For some reason, after the success of 2003's Freddy Vs. Jason, there was no movement on another film in either one of the series. By 2009, Michael Bay's company Platinum Dunes had decided to reimagine the Friday series after having success rebooting the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series, The Amityville Horror, and The Hitcher. There was actually a good deal of excitement in this announcement. Unlike other things Michael Bay touches, the remakes weren't all that bad. I genuinely liked his company's remakes at that point. So I was kind of excited that he was taking a a series that had devolved into self parody and that no one really cared about anymore and put a crew together to make something of it.
The movie starts off with a running start... literally. It begins as the end of the original 1980 Friday the 13th did, this time with new actors and filmed in artsy black and white. Everyone knows what happened in the first film, so I'll just say that Mrs. Voorhees meets her demise at the hands of a young female camp councillor. Then we fast forward to present day where some dipshit 20somethings are looking for some wild growing weed to get rich. The GPS screws up and they end up camping in the woods for the night. Obviously with the franchise this is in, it doesn't turn out well. There's some sex, crude remarks, pissing in the woods, and hey! One of the guys finds the weed! But crap, Jason doesn't like his weed touched, so the guy gets bashed to death. And Jason isn't having this weed stealing. He'd been quiet all alone in the woods until some stupid college aged idiots come and start to steal his mellow down medicine. And he doesn't approve! So he kills the rest of them one by one in increasingly painful ways. One guy gets his leg caught in a bear trap, and then a few minutes later gets the ol' machete to the face! Oh it's good to have Jason back...
Fast forward a few months and a group of college students are taking a vacation at spoiled rich asshole Trent's upscale cabin in the woods. (No relation to this Trent. Oddly enough, the same actor played another asshole named Trent in Michael Bay's Transformers. I like to think it's the same character.) Meanwhile Jared Padalecki is looking for his missing sister (one of the kids looking for the weed). The cops don't like him doing so, making the people in the area feel unsafe, etc. or something like that. Besides Jared Padalecki, the only interesting character in this film in Chewie, the asian-american weed addict. He's just so likeable, which is an odd thing for this series. I guess Arlen Escarpeta, Chewie's best friend, is alright as well. He's funny too, but are any of these peripheral characters here for anything more than to be knocked off? Absolutely not. This is Friday the 13th we're talking about here! We want things this way! Below is a picture of the main cast of the film.
One thing about this particular installment in the series that I do like is that for the first time since the early 1980s, Jason runs! It brings a bit more menace to the film that the later installments in the series didn't have. There's one big difference between this film and the first three films in the series, however. Like Part IV and Part VII, these are not camp councilors as the main characters. They are simply partying teens out for a week in a cabin by Crystal Lake. Sadly, I like the camp councilor stories better. They just have a different vibe to them than the other entries do. Something else odd the writers did was to give Jason a secret underground lair beneath the old camp and surrounding area. I'm wondering how it got there, as it seems to connect all the cabins and various other places. Did Jason just spend 30 years digging it all? Did he hire the Amish to help? Does the camp just have very overactive moles? While it doesn't make much sense, it is odd and different. And another good point of the film is that aside from 1 or 2 characters, we don't actively want these people to die. I mean, they may be a little annoying at times, but they aren't all sleazeballs. And of course, there's my favorite aspect to the film. The fact that within the first 40 minutes, we basically have the end of the first film, then we have Jason in his second film burlap sack mask, and then a bit later we have Jason get his iconic hockey mask. I wish he'd have kept the burlap sack for longer, though. You all know it's my favorite.
Now for some negatives. I guess it's not really a negative, but a positive for some people, but there is tons of nudity here. Like some of the most I've seen in a horror film, and definitely the most in this particular series. There's lots of boobs, rear nudity, and even some full frontal... and a very graphic sex scene. And for the ladies... two shirtless guys. (Woohoo?) However, for those looking for inventive kills... Look elsewhere. Like the first few films in the series, this goes back to basics. No powertools, no punching someone's head off, no tossing someone on a huge corkscrew or killing people in virtual reality. Instead we get arrows in the head, bear traps, machete kills.... Basically people just getting killed with sharp objects. I think the most inventive kill was just setting someone on fire, actually. I don't find these deaths to be negatives, but I know some would get bored by them. To me, these are more realistic and are potentially frightening a little bit. When I see someone's head get punched off or someone have their heart punched through their chest, I laugh. When I see someone have a metal pole pushed through their throat or a leg get snapped in a bear trap, I cringe and think "Oooh, that's gotta be painful." And just for fun, here's the obnoxious character's epic death scene, including his girly scream.
Even though it's not the best regarded film in the series, I do like this film quite a bit. It has no huge negatives when considered in relation to the other films in the series. Even the acting isn't really bad. It's not the best, but at least they have some trained actors here. And the film does get down to business pretty quickly and doesn't let up that much. Remember how the first few films took their time to get to the killings thinking it made things suspenseful even though it really didn't? Yeah, they know it doesn't work here, so they just decrease the time between killings every so often. I've often wondered why the movie hasn't gotten the sequel that was announced right after the film came out in theaters. These films aren't expensive to make and there is an audience for these. From what I read, it seems the downward economy that started right about the time this movie came out put the sequel on indefinite hold. However, last year Warner Bros sold their ownership of Friday the 13th back to Paramount so that they could co-produce Chris Nolan's Interstellar. And apparently now Paramount is working very hard to make the sequel a reality. There is also a new TV series apparently in the works, though I'm not sure if it's been greenlit or if it's just a pilot that we'll have to wait and see if it gets picked up. The new film is apparently set to debut next year, 2015. I hope they don't go the found footage route which I've read they are considering.
Well, that's it (for now) for the Friday the 13th series, folks. I intend to start my series of write-ups on the Nightmare on Elm Street and Star Trek film series very soon. I hope you've all enjoyed this as much as I liked writing them.
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