Horror remakes: Friday the 13th

I had at first wanted to watch Marcus Nispel's 2009 remake of Friday the 13th as the final film in this month of horror remakes. That place of pride had nothing to do with its expected quality. It had to do with this stupid joke that I love:

"Wouldn't it be crazy if there was a year where Friday the 13th fell on Halloween?"

You know it's a stupid joke pretty quickly -- but maybe not as soon as you hear it. For half a second you're like "Yeah, I wonder if that's ever happened?" And then you say "Oh wait."

So in that respect it's a good joke, because it gets you for a second but no one has to explain to you why it's a joke. (And I suppose it's more of an example of what I call "dumb guy" than an actual joke. "Dumb guy" is when you say something earnestly pretending that you are dumb and that you really believe it. "Double dumb guy" is when someone else responds back to you in the same vein, and it can often cause confusion because sometimes the first person doesn't get that the second person is also doing "dumb guy.")

I ultimately decided this was not good enough reason to save what could well be the worst movie I see this month for the hallowed viewing ground of Halloween night. Besides, my wife might want to watch something with me that night, and it sure as hell wouldn't be this.

So I decided as a compromise, I would watch it Thursday night and at least post it on a Friday. (I could have watched it next Thursday and posted it on Halloween, but I didn't. I'm running out of viewing options until I can think of a few more, so I couldn't afford to sit on it.) 

I didn't hate this movie, but I started out thinking I would.

Two thousand nine is only 16 years ago. I don't usually think of it as different enough from our current era for it to have a distinctly different look and feel on film. And while of course I would notice differences between then and now in any film from 2009 I were to see for the first time today, you tend to notice these things more when the film is of the lowest common denominator, like Friday the 13th.

It started with the opening credits. We see images of flashback to 1980, when the events of the original Friday the 13th took place. (Making this, like I Know What You Did Last Summer, more of a reboot/reheat than a remake. Though I didn't know that would be the case until I saw it.) The credits are in this very basic sort of typewriter font, and they break up the grainy, desaturated flashback footage at intervals of about every two seconds. Which is highly annoying. These days we rarely see the names of most of the cast and crew on screen at the beginning of any movie, as opening credits have become increasingly passe, and I'm sure no one would opt for this specific incarnation of that, where you have to cut away from the images at least two dozen times to show a typewritten name of a cast or crew on a black screen by itself.

The other big difference between then and now is that 2009 was the last gasps of giving us nudity in horror movies. I can't say exactly when that stopped, but porn was likely not as prevalent on the internet 16 years ago, meaning that horny kids still benefitted from getting a glimpse of it at the movies. It may be that this actually didn't start to really change until Harvey Weinstein was revealed as the creep that he is, at which point I think the whole industry started taking more seriously the depiction of beautiful young women in movies. But Friday the 13th is still in the heart of the previous era, and I was really surprised by the sheer quantity of T&A here.

To be clear, this is not a good movie. But there are things I liked about it.

One of these was that I thought the characters we follow felt slightly more believable than you usually get in a movie like this. In fact, we follow two sets, one of which gets killed off before the title of the movie comes on the screen, which is way after the opening credits and comes late enough that we think we've already passed that point. The fact that these characters feel reasonably fleshed out, even though we're ultimately only going to follow them for about ten minutes, is an indication of someone doing something right in the screenwriting. The characters we follow for longer, before they also start getting picked off one by one, have similar depth that I appreciated. We're talking "depth" in a totally relative way where, but it was more than they needed, and I thought the performances were pretty good.

The kills? Not so much. There's almost zero cleverness to Jason knocking them off. I think in a movie made today, these would be drawn out, and would only result in the release of the gore we're seeking after each character had been stalked a bit, had almost escaped at least once. There'd also be fakeouts, times you thought a character was about to be slaughtered but then it was just narrative misdirection. Well, nothing like that here. Within seconds of popping up next to a character -- Jason Voorhees being especially famous for popping up out of nowhere in defiance of space and time -- he's already shoved a machete through their head, leaving us little time to appreciate what might be about to happen. 

It's been long enough since I saw the original -- like, at least 30 years -- that I don't remember if Jason is consistent with his weapons in the original. But that I found a bit disappointing here too. I guess the machete is the one he uses most often, but there's also a screwdriver death here, and one with an axe. At least give the guy an MO that he repeats.

Maybe the deficiency that surprised me the most, especially after the intro flashback that heavily featured Jason's mother, was how little they tried to develop the Jason back story after introducing it. The characters are aware of some of the lore surrounding Jason, but in terms of actual impact on the character or his motivations, it's quite shallow and gets basically dropped. I guess this is also before the era when movies were trying to understand serial killers and give them more dimension.

Two other quick thoughts:

1) For a movie that appears to be pretty cheaply made in all other aspects, I was really surprised to see that they paid to use Night Ranger's song "Sister Christian" in one scene. That scene also stood out because they obviously didn't have the money to buy any other songs. Usually you try to make this a consistent approach.

2) There's a bit of Blue Velvet homage here, out of nowhere. One character at a campfire briefly sings the praises of Pabst Blue Ribbon, much as Frank Booth does in Lynch's film. He doesn't belabor it, but the similarity of the dialogue is enough that it couldn't be a coincidence. 

Okay, I think I'm going to watch at least two more of these movies over the remaining week before Halloween, and at the moment I've got three candidates -- though one is new so it's still at the full $19.99 rental price, and the other two are both remakes of the same movie, which I may or may not watch as a double feature. I think I'm going to need some more options here in case these don't all work out like I'm planning. 

I guess you can't trademark a day

If you can believe it, I didn't realize the title of the body-swapping horror comedy from last year, Freaky, was actually a nod to Freaky Friday until I started watching the movie Thursday night. And I can't blame the fact that I only saw Freaky Friday (the original) for the first time earlier this year. Everyone knows that high concept even if they haven't seen the movie. 

What clued me in was actually a reference to a different movie.

When Freaky opens, we see a couple cold open kills after the words "Wednesday the 11th" flash up on the screen in letters dripping blood.

That prompted two thoughts:

1) "So wait ... Thursday the 12th, and then Friday the 13th! FREAKY FRIDAY!"

and then

2) "Wait, are they allowed to reference Friday the 13th in this movie?"

Only at this point did I slap my forehead -- metaphorically if not actually -- and realize that the unending series of slasher movies starring Jason Voorhees does not have sole dominion over references to the unluckiest day on the calendar.

Freaky does lean into the comparisons a bit, though. The Jason Blum-produced film has another Jason it obviously wants us to think of with this appearance of the Blissfield Butcher, the character played by Vince Vaughn:

That may not be a hockey mask, but it's close enough.

Leave it to Blum -- in collaboration with Happy Death Day writer-director Christopher Landon -- to figure out how to allude to something without directly thieving from it. Nothing else about Freaky actually relates to the misadventures of Mr. Voorhees, so plausible deniability abounds. The shrewd move here is to make us think of Jason if that's a good thing for us, or allow us to discard the associations if that works better. Blum has gotten to this point in his career by figuring out how to give all sorts of different people what they want.

They could have taken steps to steer clear of the association with the existing franchise, but why would you? The movie owes a more obvious debt to Freaky Friday, and if the Friday part is already a fixed part of the "adaptation," then why wouldn't you take the next obvious step and make it Friday the 13th?

Besides, according to the internet, the associations of Friday the 13th being an unlucky day go all the way back to the year 1307, with the arrest of the Knights Templar on that day, and may have come into public consciousness exactly 600 years later with the 1907 release of Thomas Lawson's novel of the same name. It was another 73 years after that that the first Jason movie was finally released. 

Also, I don't care what might be begged, borrowed or stolen from that franchise, because Freaky is way better than any Friday the 13th movie I've ever seen. I simply loved this movie -- everything about it, really, but especially the performances of Vaughn and Kathryn Newton in the key roles. It's also way better than Landon's Happy Death Day movies, and this is with me liking the second one quite a bit more than the first.

I mightn't have written this today -- this marks posts on nine straight days, and both you and I could probably use a day off. But how could I miss the chance to publish this on a Friday?

You know I couldn't. Might as well tell Jason Voorhees to wear a fencing mask. 

It's Friday the 13th ...

... so where's my crappy horror movie?

The Devil Inside couldn't have waited one more week to come out?

Tainted!

I went from February until July without writing about Flickchart on my blog -- and now I'm doing it for the third time in the space of two weeks. Sometimes things just go that way.

And because I know the Flickchart creators sometimes look in on my blog, I want to start by telling them that I don't blame the site itself in the least for the following story -- I blame my computer, pure and simple.

Okay, so I'm very anal about making sure all my Flickchart duels have the correct winner. If you choose poorly or hastily between the two choices in front of you, the site has a handy-dandy Undo button, which I have availed myself of on numerous occasions. I don't want to let a single poor decision creep through and muck up my whole list.

Yesterday, my computer acted up in a way that took the ability to go back and correct right out of my hands.

I'd just gotten home from work and hauled my computer onto my lap for a couple minutes of random dueling. I love these little Flickchart breaks, which are usually finite in duration according to little parameters I put in place. I'll say "I'll duel until I get one lower film to beat a higher film," or, "I'll duel until I get one duel featuring one of my top 20 movies." Because I've done over 83,000 duels, either of these can take a little while -- anywhere from one to five minutes. And then I'll go do something else.

But because of some state the computer was in, where the inner circuits were telling it that the mouse click mechanism was depressed, or because of some way my palm was brushing over the mouse pad in between my two thumbs, I suddenly made a flurry of unknown duel choices. The posters rapidly changed, and I noticed that results were being recorded -- this film held its position, that film jumped forward 700 spots. I was aghast by the 700-spot jump, but it wasn't the end of the world -- it was the original Friday the 13th jumping from a spot that was probably too low (in the 2700s, out of 2950) to a spot that was slightly too high (in the early 2100s). Because Flickchart sometimes freaks out a little bit in situations like this, where a flurry of unexpected stimuli registers actions on the site, the Undo button was not available as an option. But having Friday the 13th ranked in this position didn't seem fatal to the integrity of the list.

I thought I was past this temporary trauma, but then it happened again, this time faster and with more dire results.

The little flurry ended with Inside Man jumping 800 spots, from around 1000 to #220. Looking at my live list of rankings just now, that means it beat Total Recall. Sure, there are plenty of people who might rank Inside Man above Total Recall, but I am not one of them. However, again I decided I could live with it. Inside Man would eventually make its way back to the appropriate spot through the random dueling process. I could live with it being ranked higher for six months or a year before finding its rightful place again. But just to make sure there was not a third session of random ranking, I closed my web browser and reopened it.

There were no recurrences of the problem, but it was only a few minutes later that I discovered one of the consequences of this uncontrolled period of blind ranking.

I got a duel between The Story of Us and Mission: Impossible III, and I gave the win to The Story of Us. You can imagine my surprise when Flickchart proceeded to jump The Story of Us from #1300-something in the standings ... all the way up to #25.

This is when I slapped my forehead and knew that my Flickchart rankings had been irrevocably tainted.

What apparently happened was that Mission: Impossible III had won a blind duel that had jumped it all the way up to #25. So when The Story of Us beat it, it assumed the #25 spot, pushing the Cruise flick down to #26. Consulting my rankings again, it appears that M:I III had won a blind duel against ... wait for it ... Fargo. The horror.

I sat for a moment and wondered what I would do. I actually like The Story of Us quite a bit -- it's a candidate to be reconsidered in my Double Jeopardy feature that runs on Tuesdays, since most people (those who have seen it, anyway) do not share my high opinion of it. But #25? I couldn't handle it. I could see it belonging around 800, but no higher than that.

And it wasn't just one interloper, but two. The fault really lay with the elevated ranking for Mission Impossible, but the problem had already started to multiply. Now, in order to force those two movies downward to their correct spots, I would need other films to beat them -- which shouldn't be a problem. But then I'd have to deal with the separate problem of those films being ranked too highly. Before long, my top 100 films would become unrecongizable.

I realized there was only one thing I could do: I had to remove the offending films and start ranking them again from scratch.

For an ordinary Flickcharter, this might not be such a big deal. But for an anal retentive bastard like me, I felt the pain. You see, Flickchart keeps a stats page of how your films have performed over time -- how many times you've ranked each film, and what percentage of duels it's won. An anal retentive bastard like me believes that those stats have some kind of intrinsic value -- they mean something in the imaginary "record books" that no one but me (and others like me) probably cares about. So my pain wasn't so much a result of the fact that I'd have to begin the process anew of getting these movies to their appropriate spots in the rankings, but that I'd be wiping out this history -- this history that means something intangible yet powerful to me.

But I had to do it.

I first went to the page for The Story of Us. I'd ranked it 56 times and it had won 59% of its duels. I clicked Remove From My Flickchart. I clicked Add to My Flickchart. When you add a new movie, it subjects it to three random duels to get an initial ranking. It won two of those duels. Its new stats? Three times dueled, 66.67% won.

It was harder when I moved on to the next two. Both Mission: Impossible III and Inside Man were part of the initial 300-400 movies they give you automatically when you first join Flickchart, movies that are considered the most popular. (They do this so that new Flickcharters aren't immediately confronted with My Dinner With Andre and The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain.) So these two movies had been dueled a lot more -- as it happened, 99 times each. Oy. Pretty soon, they too were back down to three duels apiece. And the integrity of my list had been restored.

Oh, I decided to just leave Friday the 13th where it was.

All in all, not a big deal. So why am I writing about it today? In fact, why am I writing so many words about it that the sensible ones among you have already stopped reading?

Well, it's just another insight into the passion I feel both for movies and for lists. And now you get why I have such passion for Flickchart, 'cause it's got both. If you haven't started yet, what are you waiting for? www.flickchart.com

Gimmicky release dates

If you're a fan of schlock cinema -- or at least maintain an awareness of it -- you probably know that the Friday the 13th reboot coming out today is actually the 11th movie to use the Friday the 13th brand, or perhaps the 12th, if you count 2003's Freddy vs. Jason. Which I guess you probably should. So when they release the inevitable sequel to this reboot -- and I say it's "inevitable" with confidence, because they've already started working on it -- it'll be number 13 in the series. Whoa, watch out then.

But it may surprise you to know this: Only four of the previous 11 movies were actually released on a Friday the 13th. And since Friday is the day 95% of movies get released, you'd think there would have been a lot more.

I used the adjectival form of the word "gimmick" in my post title, so you may think I'm against this kind of thing. But really, I'm for it. Call me simple, but I think if you are going to make a Friday the 13th movie, it's incumbent upon you to release it on a Friday the 13th. You usually get about two of these a year. Can't you pick one of them and go with that?

Yet those who have shepherded this franchise through 12 release dates have chosen a Friday the 13th for only five of them, including today. (And since this 13th falls during a non-leap year February, whose length of exactly four weeks means the dates fall on the same days next month, they had the option to release it March 13th of this year as well).

Let's take a look back. And forgive me if the following paragraph reminds you of a scene from Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming, where the characters quiz each other on the titles of all nine movies that existed to that point. (And by the way, if you thought Saw movies came out with impossible regularity, just look at the first eight movies in this series, released within the space of just over nine years).

Okay, deep breath ...

Friday the 13th was released on May 9, 1980. Probably expecting it to be just some one-off horror movie, the studio didn't think too much about the release strategy. They hadn't yet gotten their act together for Friday the 13th Part 2, which came out less than a year later on April 30, 1981. But the ducks were finally in a row for Friday the 13th Part III (and forgive the inconsistency -- the source I'm looking at has regular numbers for Part 2, and roman numerals for Part III), using the opportunity of the series' first 3D movie to also get the first Friday the 13th release date: August 13, 1982. They kept that going for the next film in the series, which they foolishly titled as though it would be the last: Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, which came out on April 13, 1984. But then they inexplicably abandoned the strategy again for Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, which hit theaters March 22, 1985 -- perhaps because they would have had to wait six more months to get a Friday the 13th. (And in case you're scoring at home, it took them less than a year to both reverse themselves on the decision to wrap up the series with that fourth installment, and to actually release the movie that "revived" the series.) Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives hit theaters on August 1, 1986. Granted, they were dealing with a pretty manic production schedule to churn these out so regularly, but if they'd been six weeks faster, they could have gotten a Friday the 13th that June. The planets aligned again for the release of Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, though granted, they allowed themselves almost two years this time: May 13, 1988. They couldn't work it out for the following year, releasing the movie that acknowledged the series had totally devolved into self-parody, Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, on July 28, 1989. The workaholic series finally took a hiatus of sorts before Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, again failing to accurately project the longevity of the series, but getting a Friday the 13th release date by benefit of waiting more than four years: August 13, 1993. That logic didn't hold when it took another nine years for the next movie, Jason X, to be released on April 26, 2002. It being the first Friday the 13th without the word "Friday" in the title might have had something to do with it. By the 11th movie, Freddie Krueger had hijacked part of the spotlight from Jason, and Freddy vs. Jason was released on August 15, 2003 -- though again there was an available Friday the 13th two months earlier.

Whew! Can you imagine how much trouble this kind of research would have been before the internet?

So I've got my Friday the 13ths down cold. What disappointed me as I prepared to write this was how few of the other prominent gimmicky release dates I could remember. Probably almost every Friday the 13th has seen the release of one horror movie -- sometimes more than one, though it would seem like box office suicide for two horrors to take each other on in the same weekend. (Last year's Friday the 13th, which hit in June, saw the release of M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening, which features a monster far more ferocious than Jason: a light breeze.)

But Friday the 13th isn't the only gimmicky release date you can have. Over the years, various movies have prominently featured either dates or numbers in their titles or themes, and been released accordingly with a calendar date. I just seem to be drawing a blank on them here. (If you would be so kind, you can help me out in my comments section.) I thought of Independence Day, but that was released a day early to better capitalize on the holiday box office. Here's a good one: The post-apocalyptic animated film from Shane Acker and Timur Bekmambetov, 9, whose trailers look pretty awesome, will be released on 09-09-09. Fortunately for them, that date happened to land on a Wednesday, the next most popular release day after Friday. If it had been a Sunday, they would have been shit out of luck.

I can think of one good missed opportunity that came just last year. Columbia Pictures had it lined up perfectly to release the blackjack movie 21 on Friday, March 21st. Except they inexplicably waited a week and released it on March 28th instead.

They must have really feared the stiff competition from Drillbit Taylor and Meet the Browns on March 21st.