The Will Leitch Experience

FRIDAY THE 13TH

1. The original Friday the 13th has to be the worst non-porn movie ever to spawn sequels and launch a billion-dollar franchise. The film looks like it was made for 20 dollars in someone’s poorly lit shed where they grow weed. The plot is as basic as possible: A bunch of naked teenagers (including Kevin Bacon!) are garrotted by an unseen assailant. Ludicrously, the “twist” ending is that they’re being killed by a middle-aged woman who is sad about the death of her son. The “writer,” amusingly, claimed, “I took motherhood and turned it on its head and I think that was great fun. Mrs. Voorhees was the mother I’d always wanted - a mother who would have killed for her kids.” Yes. A film about motherhood. That was the takeaway: Like Terms of Endearment, that film. Jason doesn’t actually show up until the second film, and he doesn’t grab his hockey mask until the third. By the end of the original series of films, they’d lost so much control of the character and “mythology” that he was floating around in a spaceship in the year 2455.

2. This is all to say: Though the original set of films has “fans” – and I’m one of them, in spite of it all – this is not a fanbase that’s particularly concerned with dramatic consistency. It’s not “Lost,” or, for that matter, Saw. This makes doing a “reboot” fairly easy; you’re not going to have many people going all, “No, way, Jason would never do that.” All you have to do is give us some teenagers, some machetes, some bare breasts and that famed minimalist soundtrack, blend ‘em together and serve, chilled. If you think this is a movie you might possibly enjoy, then I assure you that you will. Also, it’s worth noting: The title card of Friday The 13th doesn’t show up until about 45 minutes into the film, which, all told, has to be a record.

3. The film doesn’t waste much time with backstory, mercifully. Jason watches his mom die and is so messed up by the experience that he has to kill every teenager he sees. Frankly, that’s a little too much backstory for my tastes. Jason is merely a indestructible force bent on spilling as much blood as possible. That’s enough. A subplot – as much as a film like this can have a “subplot” – about Jason believing one of his victims looks vaguely similar to his mother, and therefore taking her as a hostage, is beside the whole damned point. Jason should only be about killing stuff: That’s as complicated as he needs to be. I prefer to think that when there aren’t any teenagers around, Jason just hacks at inanimate objects with a battle ax, waiting for them to start spewing blood and sighing quietly when they don’t. Walls, lamps, picture frames, pianos, whatever.

4. My favorite kills from the first set of films? In Jason Takes Manhattan, a professional boxer starts jabbing and uppercutting Jason, who responds by punching his head off in one shot. And in Friday the 13th, Part VII: The New Blood, he zips up a woman in a sleeping bag and merely smashes her against a tree. (There’s something sublime about Jason thinking to himself, “You know, I don’t have any knives with me, and that tree is just sitting there … oh, why not?”) None of the murders in this film are that inventive, but director Marcus Nispel (who’s making a habit out of this horror reboot business: He did the slick, sharp Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, as well as some Amy Grant videos) keeps things moving and even succeeds a couple of times at the Killer Jumping Out Of The Dark trick. (Yes, I jumped a couple of times. It’s an old trick, but it still works.) He also avoids the temptation to turn Jason into some sort of metaphor. The Nightmare On Elm Street films were about our deepest fears, and our own connection to them, our own attraction to them. The Friday the 13th films are about decapacitation.

5. Obviously: This is not a good movie, or even a particularly clever one. (The movie, considering it involves a man in a hockey mask stabbing teenagers in progressively stranger fashions, is oddly devoid of humor.) But it’s expertly made, glossier than would seem necessary and comes up with enough different ways for people to be murdered that it doesn’t have to repeat itself. It’s efficiently fun, and, you know, that’ll do. I’ll never need to see it again, but given a choice between seeing this again and the freaking Reader, I’d run Friday the 13th on a loop.

GRADE: C+