Friday the 13th: Movie Review

Friday the 13th: Movie Review

Rating: 4/10
Cast: Jared Padalecki, Danielle Panabaker, Aaron Yoo, Amanda Righetti
Director: Marcus Nispel
Horror's gone full circle.
From the mockery and sly reverential humour of the Scream series to the out and out torture porn of the Saw franchise, it was always inevitable that horror would go back to just simply doing what it does best - killing off nubile, young teens who are dumb enough to go into the woods when there's a killer about.
Let's backtrack first and give you an idea of the plot of the reboot of the Friday The 13th series.
It's 20 years after hockey masked nutjob Jason Voorhees's mum went beserk at the Crystal Lake camp in America, and despite rumours of Jason still being about, a gang of 5 backpackers are out and about.
On a quest for weed, the gang end up in Crystal Lake and at the mercy of a rampaging Jason - who's currently wearing a cloth sack mask over his deformed face.
Shortly after that, Clay (played by Jared Padalecki of TV2's Supernatural ), the brother of one of the girls who went missing turns up looking for her - as she'd missed her mum's funeral.
As he distributes flyers he bumps into another seven people heading to the Crystal Lake area (seriously is this place not on a holiday non destination list?) for a fun weekend away at a family hide-out.
Shortly after they all show up on Jason's turf, he decides the only way to welcome them - is to kill them.
And that's really it for the plot - Friday the 13th is essentially an old school horror film.
The 20 minutes pre-credit slaughter of the 5 who go into the Crystal Lake Camp area is a pretty deceptive way to start the film; but unfortunately all the horror cliches are present (the randy teens having sex are killed, the camp fire story of how Jason was born is shared)
To be fair, for a reboot of the series, it's not a bad effort - and some of the death scenes are quite violent (albeit in a non-exploitative way a la Hostel and Saw ).
While the writers and director have taken elements of the previous films and incorporated it into this one (Jason finds his hockey mask early on in the first film- as opposed to the second film of the original series), it still feels like it could have done with some more polish.
The real problem is, however, that once again, we're supposed to care about a load of characters who are too dumb to be likeable or identifiable - and who don't seem to behave in the way anyone would do when faced with wholesale slaughter.

Ultimately though if you like your horror true to the basics, where young people make unfathomably stupid decisions, with a lot of female nudity and killing thrown in, you're really going to love Friday The 13th.