Viewed – 20 January 2012  Television

I have no problem with remakes, if that is they bring something new to the franchise / classic movie or at least show they are trying.  Good examples of recent worthwhile horror remakes include The Thing, Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  Revisiting one of the longest running horror movie series in memory however, is a different matter entirely.  Normally any horror fan has seen one of the Friday The 13th movies somewhere along the line, and everyone will have a favourite (mine is Part 4), so you would thing with such a wealth of material to take from, the makers of this would be able to come up with something new, fresh and relevant.  Did they buggery!

This treads the same old ground as many stalk and slash horrors over the years … sex mad teens, an isolated location, and a masked psychopath, picking them off one by one.   A ten or so minute opening pretty much wraps up the storyline to the first two movies, glossing over the most interesting aspect of the franchise (the killer’s mother) in a few seconds, and then its on to the pretty but personality-free cast as one man returns to camp crystal lake in search of his sister, who went missing months previous.  Now this could have been an interesting angle, but is overshadowed by the usual jock douche bags, bare breasted bimbos and dope-heads … all of which this viewer had no problem whatsoever seeing murdered.  Sadly killer nut job Jason Voorhees has lost much of his presence over the years, and now just ‘appears’ and kills without any particular imagination.  The murders are instantly forgettable, and what tension there could have been is lost in the fact the movie is almost pitch black dark most of the time, meaning its difficult to see exactly whats going on.  The epileptic camera work only makes this issue worse.

So it’s a real shame that a bit more thought or imagination couldn’t have been applied here … as at one time, Friday The 13th was good stuff, even if for me it was always the poor man’s Halloween.  What we have here is a badly made, imagination-free insult of a horror movie that nobody really needs to see – especially the fans.

Verdict:  1 /5