I try to be a ‘glass half-full’ person. So when watching yet another pointless addition to the Friday the 13^th franchise, I took joy from the fact that with each victim Jason Voorhees claims, the end credits were one step closer. It was the only way I could endure through this god-awful slasher-rehasher from director Marcus Nispel (2003’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre).  Well, that and the copious amounts of nudity. But that’s free on the internet.

Just to clarify, I’ve got nothing against the film being a franchise reboot. Everyone’s doing it, and if any series needed to start afresh, it’s Friday the 13^th. After 10 instalments – two containing the word ‘final’ in the title, one set in space and one franchise crossover with Elm Street’s Freddy Kruger – it’s safe to say Hollywood had bled the hockey-masked hacker to death (if the bastard could actually die, that is). If it had to be anything, which it obviously did,  a remake was the right direction.

Yet to call Friday the 13^th a remake would be to lie. Only a brief, epilepsy-inducing preamble covers the events of the first film, where a young Jason watches on as his psychopathic mother is decapitated in an act of defence by a counsellor of Camp Crystal Lake. You see, Mrs. Voorhee’s went on a killing spree after the counsellor was too busy fornicating (happens a lot in this franchise) to notice her son drowning in the lake, to which he emerged deformed. Fast forward to present day and Jason (Derek Mears) still lives at Crystal Lake, killing anyone who dares to cross his path. In terms of back story and motive, that’s about all there is to it.

But before we even get the title card, or any sense of plot, we’re subject to what is easily the lengthiest ‘opening kill scene’ on record.  In it, five college friends venture to Crystal Lake to find a hidden marijuana plantation and have sex in tents, cause you know, that’s what teenagers do nowadays. Of course, Jason isn’t the least bit impressed by their trespassing ways, and in what is essentially a short slasher film in itself, kills them off one by one.  Yet given this sequence has little to do with the primary story arch, it’s twenty five utterly pointless minutes of film.  That being said, it’s also the best twenty five minutes of the film because we only have to put up with these obnoxious pincushions for a quarter of the time than that of the fresh batch of teens that follow.

I mentioned earlier that there was a plot, but don’t get your hopes up. What little there is concerns nice-guy Clay (Jared Padalecki), who is searching the Crystal Lake area for his missing sister (from the opening sequence).  He crosses paths with Trent (Travis Van Winkle), an unsympathetic jock spending the weekend with his girlfriend Jenna (Danielle Panabaker) and five other blatantly stereotyped friends at his parent’s lakeside cabin. Aside from the narcissistic jock, there’s the token black guy (Arlen Escarpeta), the blonde bimbos (Julianna Guill and Walla Ford), and the Asian nerd (Aaron Yoo). It’s hardly a surprising line-up considering the film is produce by none other than Michael Bay, the man criticised for the illiterate, smack-talking robotic twins Skids and Mudflap in Transformers 2.

Anyway, back to the *ahem* plot; Jason thankfully kills most of these intolerable characters, conveniently after the females have had a chance to flash their boobs, and  the credits start to roll. No originality, no twists, no nothing. Friday the 13^th is just one mindless killing after another, none of which are particularly frightening or inventive.  It’s a case of “he’s behind you!” repeated ad nauseum, where sudden bursts of sound stand in for real scares.

Maybe if the film didn’t take itself so seriously (à la Drag Me To Hell), it might have actually benefited from its stereotypical characters, copious genre clichés and almost laughable death sequences. But since it doesn’t so much as wink at the audience, Friday the 13^th is yet another hack-job of a film in a franchise that Just. Won’t. Die.

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