ShareThisThe new "Friday the 13th" ups the ante in flesh as well as blood. The first film gave us a strip Monopoly game that never got past Baltic Avenue, so to speak; the reboot features topless rock 'n' roll wakeboarding on Crystal Lake that comes to an end when stealthy noise-pollution opponent Jason Voorhees -- still crazy after all these years -- shoots an arrow into the air and where it lands is just below the boat pilot's hair. Ouch.
Like the 2003 remake of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," also produced by Michael Bay, directed by Marcus Nispel and photographed with paradoxical delicacy by Daniel Pearl, the 2009 "Friday the 13th" evinces a surfeit of skill and art.
The lighting of any single shot and the dressing of each and every set seem to demonstrate more care (and expense) than could be found in the first eight Paramount "Friday" films combined; Jason's image is treated with such care he could be Greta Garbo at MGM. All this craft has gone into the construction of what is -- like its strong, silent, murderous antihero -- little more than a relentless, bloody scare machine. And like some machines, it makes a racket: The violence is brutal, but Nispel more frequently makes the audience jump or scream with a SUDDEN LOUD NOISE.
Unlike its slasher-film antecedents (John Carpenter's "Halloween," Tobe Hooper's original "Texas Chain Saw Massacre"), Sean S. Cunningham's 1980 surprise hit "Friday the 13th" wasn't much of a movie. Even Cunningham and his collaborators didn't really know what they had.
The first film revealed a nutty fiftysomething lady as its mystery killer of teen campers; Jason didn't begin his lethal rampage until "Friday the 13th Part 2" in 1981, and he didn't acquire his signature hockey mask -- and become a pop-culture icon -- until the 3-D "Friday the 13th Part III" in 1982.
In a blunt, direct way, the "Friday the 13th" movies are about the fear of death -- especially violent, untimely death, the type that is most scary to the teen-agers who flock to the films. Despite a tragic backstory (neglected and probably shunned for his ugliness, Jason became a sort of territorial and maniacal forest hermit after apparently drowning as a child), Jason is basically an inescapable cross between the Grim Reaper and "Refrigerator" Perry; ready or not, he's coming for you. He's the car that runs a red light and kills a kid on the way to the prom -- or perhaps after the prom, after the kid's been drinking and fooling around.
During the early-1980s heyday of the slasher film, critics (particularly Roger Ebert and the late Gene Siskel) complained about the way these movies linked the pleasure of sex with the punishment of murder. (Jason had a yen for impaling post-coital teens, sometimes two at a time.) In the new "Friday the 13th," Have-Sex-and-Die has been joined at the party by its Phelpsian sidekick, Smoke-a-Bong-and-Die (Jason makes his forest home near a wild marijuana field). This seems to be a theme for Nispel: The teens in his "Texas Chainsaw" meet horrible fates after they make a side trip to buy some pot while on their way to a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert.
To get Jason (6-foot-5 Derek Mears) into his hockey mask, the new film borrows from the first three "Friday" movies of the 1980s, compressing their chronology into a lean 97 minutes. The opening sequence, however, is so lengthy and gruesome that it's a shock when the title finally appears onscreen, after a multitude of ultraviolent and ugly deaths (and references to "Blue Velvet," "Boogie Nights" and "Spaceballs," apparently included to suggest the film will have more on its mind than mayhem).
The story proper begins "Six Weeks Later," as a handsome young hero (Jared Padalecki) on a motorbike arrives in the vicinity of the shutdown Camp Crystal Lake to search for his missing sister. What he finds, at least at first, are a group of beer-pong-playing potential victims with (mostly) beautiful bodies, including persons we might dub the Good Girl (Danielle Panabaker), the Jerk (Travis Van Winkle) and the Funny Asian Nerd Named After a "Star Wars" Character (Aaron Yoo, as "Chewie"), among others.
The hostility in the air isn't entirely due to Jason; these kids have issues. The general oafishness of the young people enables us to be less than upset when Jason greets our new friends with ax, machete and skewer.
(John Beifuss is a reporter with The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tenn. Contact him at beifuss(at)commercialappeal.com. His movie blog is www.thebloodshoteye.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
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