Friday The 13th

Director: Marcus Nispel
Screenwriters: Damian Shannon, Mark Swift
Starring: Jared Padalecki, Danielle Panabaker, Amanda Righetti
Running Time: 97 mins
Certificate: 18

The Friday The 13th franchise undergoes a reboot as evil mummy's boy Jason Voorhees dons his hockey mask once again and butchers a procession of dumb cardboard cut-out teens in increasingly uninventive ways. Yet that's hardly the scariest proposition of this mindless but entertaining film - that arrives when the 'produced by Michael Bay' credit emerges on the screen at the beginning.

Once you know the man responsible for Pearl Harbour and Armageddon has influenced the celluloid, it’s inevitable that the whole endeavour will be an exercise to appeal to the lowest common denominator and rattle off the horror genre conventions in an overblown and predictable style. It’s as if the postmodern brilliance of Scream never happened, as a procession of youngsters have sex, bare their flesh and get impaled on various sharp objects by Jason, who is back roaming the disused campsite at Crystal Lake that featured in the original movie.

At one stage, Jason plunges a knife into the head of a nude and nubile female as she tries to hide in a lake. He then pulls up the still embedded weapon high enough above water level to give the audience a nice t*tshot of the butchered lass to feast their beady eyes upon. Classy. Presumably the deluxe special edition DVD boxset will come with a box of complimentary tissues for pubescent male viewers. They might also come in handy to mop up some of the blood stains that emerge from battering your head against the wall after trying to comprehend some seriously stupid behaviour from the protagonists we’re supposed to be rooting for, along with some embarrassingly gaping plot holes.

A barrage of inane dialogue throughout the film simply elicits mocking laughter, like the legendary “where the f**k are you, gun?” spluttered by a doomed dude after dropping his weapon into a lake. As one does when fighting for survival. It’s no surprise that the ill-fated character loses his bearings though, as the spatial awareness of the film is consistently shoddy. Centred around the Crystal Lake campsite, the location of the original Friday The 13th, the direction fails to generate a sufficiently cohesive environment in which the youngsters (who do not deserve naming) are stalked by Jason.

It’s just random bits of forest, lake, shrubbery, remote buildings and underground tunnels thrown together without any sense of their geographical positioning to build up an all-encroaching sense of claustrophobia. Instead of clever scares, Friday The 13th opts for viewer repulsion instead, through various gory deaths. Such is the one-dimensional nature of the slabs of meat masquerading as characters that it’s hard to care for their fates, and a painfully contrived romantic intrigue between two of them hardly helps the cause.

Yet the regular hilarity that stems from the nonsensical behaviour and plot twists bizarrely manage to work in the film’s favour after a while, providing much in the way of trashy and sleazy entertainment value. If it weren't for these laughs at the film, not with it, then the viewing experience would be fairly grim, although the bulk of the action consistently flows along at a breezy pace

Rather than a simple retread of the original Friday The 13th movie (always the poor cousin of the superior Halloween), this attempt to breathe life into the lungs of Jason Voorhees's ravaged lungs uses elements of the original films for inspiration yet cannot transcend the tawdry nature of its predecessors. The whole endeavour is a logic-defying attempt to pander to the dumb masses and set the box office tills ringing, although had it not been for Michael Bay’s involvement one might even suspect that the whole enterprise is a clever parody of cruder genre conventions in a similar vein to John McNaughton’s Wild Things.


> What do you think of the movie? Share your views