Who is the Audience for This Movie?

Fans of slasher movies.

What I Liked About This Movie

Minus the dumb back-story they give Jason the first 15 minutes or so of the movie are pure horror perfection. You are quickly introduced to a small group of teenagers (victims) and within a very short period of time you are treated to some killer moments of slasher mayhem. I love when horror movies start with a bang.

What Didn’t Work For Me

When re-imagining a franchise you should never keep the faults of your predecessors and add new ones. I thought the point of re-making something was to make it better. Let’s start with the new issues. Right off the bat it is obvious the campy tone of the Friday the 13th series has been taken out and replaced with an overly serious sense of dread. The mix of humor and horror was one of the best aspects of the originals.

Keeping the story simple was a staple in the originals but in this new version the story gets bogged down by a plot involving Jason and a dungeon he has created for himself. Why would you even bother trying to make a movie like this more complex then it has to be? The characters should only have the goal of escaping alive in their minds. Of course not all the characters live (or else it wouldn’t be a slasher movie) and the death sequences are usually the draw of these kind of movies so it’s kind of a drag that some of the deaths were uncreative.

Why was Camp Crystal Lake not the main setting? Jason becomes the killer he is because of the actions of counselors at the summer camp. It seems more fitting that the plot should revolve around him getting revenge not him just killing a bunch of random teenagers. My last gripe with the new changes is that Jason acts a lot more like a fashion model in this re-make. There are a quite a few shots dedicated to framing him to make him “look cool”.

Sadly the one thing that always bothered me is still rampant in this movie. For a slow moving man Jason somehow always manages to be in the perfect places and sometimes it seems as though he has the ability to teleport. To put the movie fully out of its misery there is shock ending that pays tribute to the original but manages to make less sense.

Should You Watch This Movie?

The Friday the 13th franchise was not the epitome of perfection but there were a handful of entertaining movies in it that they could have mimicked to make this movie a lot better.

My Rating (Out of 13)

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