Friday the 13th

By: Marco Mannone

“A group of young adults discover a boarded-up Camp Crystal Lake, where they soon encounter Jason Voorhees and his deadly intentions.” So reads the plot description on IMDb for the newly rebooted Friday the 13th, although “deadly intentions” is a mild way of putting it. Methodical, relentless hunting of young humans with a variety of horrific weaponry is a more accurate summation. Brought to you by Platinum Dunes, the same evil geniuses that have re-imagined for contemporary audiences such horror classics as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Amityville Horror, and The Hitcher, F13/2009 (as I have deemed the movie in discussion) dusts off an old hockey mask for a new demographic unfamiliar with the Voorhees legacy. Diehard fans may cry bloody-murder, but they should probably stay at home and cuddle with the original VHS franchise to sleep with.

Let’s face it. Fear is a fluctuating emotion. We quickly outgrow the horrors of our world and become casually desensitized to them…that is, until new horrors overcome us -– and then it is back to cowering in the corner with a trembling butcher knife clasped in both hands. It is with this in mind that revisiting Crystal Lake seems like a perfectly acceptable –- dare I say natural — thing to do. Newspapers are the only things as quickly dated as our own fears, and to re-watch the original franchise, while nostalgic, is also rather humorous.

Don’t get me wrong. I have a deep affection for the original F13 franchise. As a child of the 1980s, fear has no truer, purer face than that of a dirty hockey mask floating in the darkness. I owe my irrational fear of the Canadian sport to my first childhood friend, Mike Butler of Buffalo. It was on many dark sleep-overs that we would pop in another Voorhees installment. I think he was pretty pleased with those viewings, while I was left to mask my mounting terror with a smile that attempted hubris. The late-night walks back to my house in those glorious summers of the mid-’80s weren’t just travel — they were survival.

Of course, I had no way of knowing, at the time, that I was completely immune to the immortal machete of Jason. Deformed from birth, supposedly drowned, and the witness to his evil mother’s beheading, Jason might at first seem like an agent of chaos, but when you really think about it, there is an almost Puritanical approach to his menace: he exclusively targets the horny, drunken, stoned, and amoral souls that enter his sacred domain. This is just a theory, but it could be exercised with the introduction of Amish people into Crystal Lake. Perhaps with these virtuous folk, Jason would simply weave baskets and bake bread…

Directed by Marcus Nispel, F13/2009 is at once a playful throwback to 1980s horror cinema, while at the same time a modern addition to masochistic movies that clamps its audience’s throats with bear-traps. Efficiently tucking away the first installment within the opening credits (lest we forget that Jason was originally an afterthought to his murderous mother), we are plunged into present-day Crystal Lake where we befriend a group of teenagers in search of a wild patch of marijuana. Jokes are laughed at, breasts are oiled, and it doesn’t take long for a hulking man (Derek Mears, a formidable presence) with a burlap-clad head to pick them off, one by one.

One of these unfortunate kids happens to be Whitney (Amanda Righetti), the sister of Clay (Jared Padalecki), a motorcycle-riding loner (is there any other kind?) who scours the area with her missing posters. He comes across a group of extremely annoying college clichés (by one of their own admissions) that consists of the blonde douche-bag Trent (Travis Van Winkle), his happily breasted girlfriend Bree (Julianna Guill), the token Black Guy Lawrence (a very funny Arlen Escarpeta), the always funny Asian Chewie (Aaron Yoo), and some more blonde people — Nolan and Chelsea (Ryan Hansen and Willa Ford). Oh, let’s not forget the sympathetic love-interest Jenna (Danielle Panabaker).

What happens when these attractive people converge on a posh cabin by the lake is a matter of extreme misfortune. Remember that deformed kid who (almost) drowned back in 1980? He’s now a very big, very strong, and very evil man that dedicates his reclusive life to filleting annoying college clichés with a wicked assortment of sharp objects.

The third installment is quickly achieved in time for this misfortune, when Jason comes across an old hockey mask belonging to one of his victims (lest we forget that it took two whole movies before Jason as we know him stared out of a goalie facade), and the rest of the installments are thankfully ignored all-together (Jason in Manhattan, Jason in hell, Jason in the future…), as he goes about killing these clichés in the most gruesome of ways.

Clay and Jenna eventually team up by default/attraction and find themselves in Jason’s underground lair where Clay’s sister may –- or may not -– still be alive. The rest is a Freudian dissection of mother-complexes ala Norman Bates and a cutthroat example that maybe I was wrong -– maybe old fears never truly die…they just pretend to drown in our subconscious until we’re ready to resurrect them and run screaming into the night all over again.

Welcome back, Jason. I’m less innocent than when we last saw each other, so if you don’t mind, a head-start would be appreciated.