Friday Week: Say hi to mommy in hell

FRIDAY THE 13th

2009

Directed by Marcus Nispel

Written by Mark Wheaton, Damian Shannon, and Mark Swift

Spoilers: high

We had to get here sometime, and in a sense it's appropriate that while we finished all eighteen of the "real" Friday the 13th and Nightmare On Elm Street movies in time for Halloween, we're only getting to the very last gasps of each franchise, their reboots, here in November, where doing so is no longer either relevant or particularly fun.  Freddy vs. Jason might have literally winked at you on its way out, suggesting that Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger would rise again, just like they always had—but they never actually did.  Now, it was only, purely as intellectual properties that these icons would ever be resurrected, and even though both their resurrections made money, neither produced a rebirthed franchise of its own (it is also the case that neither is especially beloved, but that's hardly ever stopped a Friday before).  What seems to have happened was a series of squabbles breaking out between the franchise's numerous stakeholders—New Line Cinema's successors-in-interest, Warner Bros.; Paramount, again; Sean Cunningham, still; a new player, Michael Bay; and the oldest player of them all, the original Friday the 13th's screenwriter, Victor Miller—which persisted for so long that the reboot's modest legacy went stale, so a re-reboot was formulated, an origin story for Jason, which never happened either.  A silly part of me wishes that Friday the 13th would get its thirteenth entry, and, given the world we live in, I'm sure that one day that'll happen; though as the decades roll by, the underlying concept (of young people congregating to socialize in person) seems like it might be losing its relatability.

So I was never actually looking too forward to the endings of these paired review series, but I was looking forward to 2009's Friday the 13th more: for one thing, Friday the 13th should be, I think, easier to get right and, of the two, it does have the better reputation.  Moreover, it was directed by Marcus Nispel and shot by Daniel S. Pearl, whose 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was, as I remember, quite good; and it was produced by Bay's Platinum Dunes company, for which I have, or had, a residue of affection, on the basis of that Chainsaw remake as well as their 2005 Amityville Horror remake.  And, although I wasn't even aware of this till afterwards (because who attends to a Friday movie's writing credits?), its screenplay was written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, lately of Freddy vs. Jason.  In theory, that should've been a good sign, too, though it probably would've been a better sign if they'd done the Nightmare remake instead, since that was obviously the side their script for Freddy vs. Jason was buttered on.

Of course—this almost certainly goes without saying—we are not dealing here with a remake of Friday the 13th, the Jason Voorhees-less 1980 superhit, for I doubt anybody was ever bold enough to forward that as a potential option.  So we get that out of the way during those opening credits I wasn't reading, gifting us with probably the most interesting gesture of Pearl's cinematography (a desaturation that's extremely close to black-and-white, with the muted, subliminal color just present enough to make it feel weird and wrong) and, simultaneously, the worst gestures of Ken Blackwell's editing (the jarring collisions with the title cards and the unwillingness to let the narrative shots play out for longer than a second or two that renders all of it completely enervating).  What we're seeing is effectively the end of the original Friday, where, after what's implied to have been an epic struggle, a camp counselor (helpfully identified with a T-shirt that says "counselor") hacks the head off of her pursuer, Pamela Voorhees, who's gone on a rampage to avenge her drowned son (oh man, Nana Visitor! but also with the voice of Kathleen Garrett for some reason).  But what's this?  A certain young boy, heretofore unseen, picks up that machete, to carry on her task.

And we're going to stop here, for a second: this sucks.  Maybe it'll seem like I'm contradicting myself, considering how frequently I've asserted that the very inconsistency between the Friday films, and the way that inconsistency reflects the series' core, semi-deliberate conceit of folktales coming to life, has always been one of its strengths.  But they weren't inconsistent within themselves; it's not a serious weakness in Part 2 that it can't possibly be squared with the original film, but it is a weakness (and an immense annoyance) in this Friday, that within the first minutes of their reboot they've already embraced the same kludged desperation that the makers of Part 2 only had forced upon them.  There's something mysterious and unknowable about where Jason could have come from in Part 2.  This is just a lazy indifference to even begin rethinking the legendry to make it work.

Fine then, whatever, but while this prologue clearly doesn't count as "a whole movie," it's going to feel pretty clumsy in any movie where the very next play is, basically, yet another prologue, that does practically count as its own "whole movie."  So: twenty-nine years after the horror that befell Crystal Lake, Camp Blood has been abandoned and the town returned to its isolated, rural stasis, hence when a clutch of young adults comes a-backpackin', they're basically stomping through mid-Atlantic rain forest that happens to have the ruins of a prior civilization in it to gawk at.  They number five, but I'm feeling put upon, so here's a parenthetical that names the actors who don't much matter (Jonathan Sadowski, Ben Feldman, Nick Mennell, and America Olivo), and a character name and an actor for the only one who does, Whitney Miller (Amanda Righetti).  They're not as bad as I probably imply, though this isn't the most winsome collection of slasher characters you'll ever see.

If Freddy vs. Jason indicated that Shannon and Swift were capable of good things that put them out of step with their era (though maybe it was only director Ronny Yu who was), it also indicated that they were still capable of being dragged down into some of the worst bad habits of 00s horror.  Not solely in their screenplay, Friday '09's certainly got that in spades.  But, indeed, the exigence for our first five's sojourn out to Crystal Lake is to find a thicket of wild marijuana, and I defy you to give me a more 00s premise; out of the six bared breasts we'll eventually get over the course of these 97 minutes, four of them are so fake it feels like some kind of affirmative statement of actual preference; we may even consider the fact that this movie is 97 minutes long in the first place (there's an extended cut I didn't watch that's reputedly mainly an additional scene and additional toplessness, rather than additional violence); and we'll soon have our two male lead roles filled out with enormous hunk model dudes ensconced in 00s fitness regimes, calling into question whether even a giant stuntman isn't more a peer rival than an inescapable doom.  Above all, it demonstrates how thoroughly 00s slashers had internalized the criticism of 80s slashers, regarding how the latter only ever had annoyingly-written and inhumanly-performed assholes for casts, for it turns out that if you've heard this enough times you must start to believe that this was 1)true and 2)why 80s horror was successful in the first place.  Thus Shannon and Swift opted to write everybody not explicitly labeled "hero" this way on purpose, while, as a director, Nispel followed suit; and it's obviously much worse than when it was on accident, because now it shows up as cringily overwritten R-rated sitcommery in every line and as irritating overacting in every read.

Soon enough, Jason (Derek Mears, a giant stuntman) shows up and kills them, and I'm sorry that I evidently cannot get through this summary without interrupting myself every sentence—let's say the review mirrors the stop-and-start experience of the movie—but this isn't well-judged structure, is it?  It goes a ways towards explaining why these characters, who have existed onscreen for only about fifteen minutes, had to be annoying, because whatever one-note characterization they were going to get had to be put at 2.5 speed if it was going to register at all; even the revival of the traditional Friday campfire storytelling left me sour, in how it's now approached as an obligation to be raced through, rather than its own opportunity for portentousness or atmosphere.  Nor do I like the broader trend it's coming out of: "Friday structure" was such a quaint thing by 2009 that perhaps nobody realized such a thing ever existed, but if I had to pin the downfall of the franchise on just one thing, its abandonment would be as good as any; the last Friday to hew to Friday pacing, and even pretend to give a shit about its cast of characters as anything but excuses to turn living bodies into corpses, was 1988's The New Blood, probably not coincidentally the last good (non-crossover) Friday movie.  It's the exact same impulse that gives us wall-to-wall assholes, since "annoying characters" is just the short form of "annoying characters you can't wait to see die."  But the pretense that we're supposed to care when they die is probably more important for a slasher flick than is generally thought.

And then we have our Jason.  I do appreciate that the blunt meta-critique of the last two Fridays, regarding Jason as an explicit punisher of premarital sex, has been dropped (as Freddy vs. Jason before it, the one 00s current Friday '09 does not indulge too much in is reality-rupturing post-modernism, though when it does—like the character who offers Jason a hockey stick, as a peace offering—it's genuinely fucking brutal); I also enjoy Mears's performance well enough, and I guess Nispel was watching 28 Days Later or whatever to have gotten the idea for "fast Jason."  He's also, comparatively, a "smart Jason," with his traps and tunnels and what-have-you.  He's also consciously cruel in a way that kind of disoriented me, and while it's not necessarily bad, Nispel's riff on The New Blood's sleeping bag kill just isn't correct: Jason takes one of the campers (it's Olivo's character) and suspends her over the campfire to slowly roast to death.  It's creative, and upsetting, and "good horror," and just terrible "Friday the 13th," recasting Jason as a torturer, when he's always been a destroyer.  I suppose it spells bad things for Friday '09 that Nispel apparently tacked into the former by accident, because it's not even some deliberate reinterpretation; for the most part, Jason is simply annihilating dudes and dudettes, as per standard procedure.  I also cannot express how much I hate how Jason gets his hockey mask—beginning as "baghead Jason," for IP reasons we cannot allow that to be his final form, so of course he finds his fated mask about halfway through, just sitting in a junk pile in some guy's attic—and it's almost intellectually interesting, in that it prompts interrogations about how a complete accident of costume design in Part III ever became THE indispensable slasher iconography (presumably its sheer graphic simplicity, just an ovoid with black hollows in it), though maybe it's not so hot that it raises these questions via artless fiat and complete horseshit.

Anyway anyway, they all die on camera except Whitney, for reasons you'll immediately realize (she's stated aloud to look like a photo of Pamela), and that could've been a potentially interesting exploitation of the one aspect of Jason that you might describe as "any character psychology whatsoever."  But since you've probably already guessed how much this matters, even though this is the spine of the film, somehow this entire subplot gets about as much screentime as Ginny's mommy gambit did back in 1981, where it wasn't.

Mostly, then, this is to prompt Whitney's brother, Clay (Jared Padalecki), to come looking for his missing sister.  (I will not whine, much, about the extremely lax realism that Friday '09's story depends on, basically "fully five kids disappeared in 21st century New Jersey, and the entire investigation was handled by a local sheriff's office that appears to be one single guy.")  But first we get the rest of our cast.  And very quickly, I was begging, begging the movie to bring those first five back, because the primary cast of this movie is one of the worst slasher ensembles I've ever seen, one of the worst you could even imagine without tipping over into the "oh, this is actually shock comedy, or satire," of, say, Black Xmas.

These number seven, led by rich boy Trent (Travis Van Winkle, a better name for his character than his character actually has), who's invited his party posse out for a weekend at his father's luxurious Crystal Lake cabin, despite apparently despising every single one of them, and also having no interest in bacchanalian debauchery or even doing anything besides constantly scolding and physically threatening them for, like, not using coasters, thereby making Trent one of the most incomprehensibly-built characters I have ever seen in any movie, existing solely to be a repository of negative traits that, as noted, are intended to make you root for his death.  We also have Jenna (Danielle Panabaker), Trent's nice, often-yelled-at girlfriend and this movie's fake Final Girl candidate (how very, very clever), such as we'll never be given any reason to understand why she's even here; couple Chelsea and Nolan (Willa Ford and Ryan Hansen), who are only slightly awful, so they die first; Bree (Julianna Guill), Bay's olive branch to the big naturals lovers, and by far the most sexist part is that hers are still deployed in such a way to make her character wholly unlikeable; stoner Chewie (Aaron Yoo); and Lawrence (Arlen Escarpeta), who will eventually be revealed to be a stoner also, and in fact probably the most likeable member of the cast overall, so naturally he's anchored with introductory lines that I assume were crafted to address the long-standing representational issues in slasher films, though Shannon and Swift only got as far as making the majority of his dialogue for the first third of his existence some version "I am a black man, being black in this movie," which is only barely not a verbatim quote.

Clay's canvassing of the locals goes poorly, and leads him to Trent's door, but he gets a clue, alongside Jenna, when they investigate ol' Camp Blood, and they witness Jason doing his rarely-seen body disposal thing with Chelsea and Nolan.  They hightail it back to Trent's house, Trent continues being unpleasant, but Jason has followed them; the siege begins; lots of them die; Whitney eventually gets freed and a final confrontation with Jason occurs.  It's pretty desultory, and though it has some novel ideas—for example, Jason using victims as bait (only to small success, because his adversaries are mostly sociopaths)—it's just never able to make much progress against the headwinds previously, laboriously described.

I don't think I'd have found it especially well-constructed as a violent thriller anyway.  The best craft contributions to the movie are, in earnest, Jeremy Conway's production design, John Frick's art direction, and Randy Huke's set decoration—a lot of half- or wholly-rotten rural interiors that capture that sensation of "a lifetime of accumulating trash" that, in my experience as a rural South Carolinian, many such interiors really have; and in Trent's dad's house and toolshed, we have the similar sensation of rich people who do exactly the same thing, except all their stuff is shiny and new—but here's the thing: how good could a Friday the 13th movie possibly be if my most unvarnished praise is for the production design?  By 2020s standards, Pearl is doing perfectly fine with the challenge of night photography—which means it's overlit (somehow barely moreso when it turns out our smart, survivalist Jason also has floodlights of his own), but hey, everything is legible, with the caveat that whatever Pearl gives with the one hand, Blackwell's editing can, when things get sufficiently hectic, still take away with the other.  Meanwhile, by 2009 (or at least 198X) standards, it's awful and gaudy: I don't believe I have ever seen a movie this cavalier about allowing its off-camera, non-diegetic light sources in the night scenes to create lens flares, just these giant, screen-filling horizontal glares from what is, literally-speaking, supposed to be nothing, or (at most) moonlight.  It's such a constant companion that I can't even call it "actually sloppy," because Pearl's a pro and it's obviously on purpose, but it feels sloppy.

I suppose I could just treat the film purely as a delivery mechanism for gore effects but there's not much joy there either: while everything on this front is certainly competent, after the prologue and/or first act, it's not really spectacular (the highest praise I want to give is that the integration of CGI is seamless); the end of Jason (or at least somebody!) is teased early on by way of a mechanized wood chipper, and we get there in the end only for the thing that the movie has basically promised you will happen, not to fucking happen, because, notionally, we want sequels, and, notionally, we're too mired in "realism" to send Jason's head through a series of slicing blades.  This is the same "realism" that finds our survivors, rather than calling the (neighboring town's, I guess) cops, or grimly marching back to civilization, instead deciding to schlep Jason's 250 lb.+ body down to the Goddamn lakeside as if they... needed to hide their crime (?!), thus giving him a water burial, in what might be the most asinine final frame jump scare set-up in cinema history.  I don't even know why I'm reluctant to declare the last Friday to be the worst—perhaps Jason Takes Manhattan is more boring and ineptly-made, Jason Goes To Hell so misbegotten and stupid I need it to be the worst—but it's surely real close.

Score: 3/10

Reviews in this series:

Friday the 13th (Cunningham, 1980)

Friday the 13th Part 2 (Miner, 1981)

Friday the 13th Part III (Miner, 1982)

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (Zito, 1984)

Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (Steinmann, 1985)

Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (McLoughlin, 1986)

Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (Buechler, 1988)

Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (Hedden, 1989)

Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday (Marcus and Cunningham, 1993)

Jason X (Isaac, 2002)

Freddy vs. Jason (Yu, 2003)

Friday the 13th (Nispel, 2009)