This Jason-played for the first (and apparently last) time by stuntman Derek Mears-is a deranged survivalist. The remake’s most novel idea is its quasi-revisionist take on Jason Voorhees himself. It’s a modified version of a plot point from Friday the 13th Part 2, which is not quite enough to justify how incredibly contrived and stupid it is. (For the record, the gnarliest death goes to America Olivo’s Amanda, whom Jason zips into a sleeping bag and roasts over a campfire.)īut at the last minute, Jason ends up sparing and kidnapping one would-be victim: Whitney Miller (Amanda Righetti), who looks uncannily like his own dead mother. After a standard-issue quota of boobs and blood-alongside a weird Blue Velvet reference that feels like a sign of the screenwriters’ boredom with this material-Jason arrives and slashes up the teenagers’ campsite. One of the actors in this gang is Ben Feldman, just a few years before he’d go on to greater fame in Mad Men and Superstore, joining fellow Friday the 13th alums Kevin Bacon and Crispin Glover in the Too Good for This Shit Club. Meanwhile, the adolescent Jason-who watches all of this from the bushes-decides to keep his mother’s severed head, which he imagines telling him to avenge her death on every teenager who gets within a mile of Camp Crystal Lake.Ĭut to the present day: A bunch of idiot teenagers are looking for a mythical field of weed to steal, smoke, and sell. It is a legitimate contender for the most bluntly expositional monologue in cinematic history, and it only ends when the teenager uses a machete to slice off Pamela’s head. Compared to those half-remembered movies, rebooting a big franchise like Friday the 13th must have seemed irresistible. The year saw a murderer’s row of wildly unnecessary horror remakes: The Last House on the Left, My Bloody Valentine, Sorority Row, The Stepfather, and Night of the Demons. And in that way, 2009’s Friday the 13th remake could hardly have been better-suited to its era. For nearly 30 years-and despite two separate movies that explicitly promised to be the final chapter of Friday the 13th-the franchise had refused to die.īut for all the weird ways filmmakers had toyed with Jason Voorhees over the years, there was one last obvious place Jason hadn’t gone yet: back to the beginning for a full-blown franchise reboot. He had even walked away from a Nightmare on Elm Street crossover with Freddy Krueger’s severed head in his hands.
Read parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, and 11.
This is the 12th article in a series revisiting one Friday the 13th movie every Friday the 13th.
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