"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.
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