Friday the 13th -- Review

He's back. The man behind the mask. And he's out of control. Jason Vorhees, that big retard, has, word to Bill Simmons, hooked himself up to the juvenation machine, and I think I like it. In fact, I know I do.

As someone who has seen every Jason movie and liked fewer than half of them; as someone who adamantly believes Part II is the best in the series and that the sack over Jason's head is much more menacing than a goalie mask; as someone who hasn't felt the nervous sense of terror and dread that the best slasher movies provide in a long time, Friday the 13th is both a return to form and a welcome breath of fresh air. The biggest compliment I can pay the film is that I truly was terrified -- or as terrified as a 30-year-old man jaded by Hollywood slasher tropes can be. (If you really want to see me terrified, see me off at Pearson Airport in a couple of weeks.)

Sure, slasher films are pretty much a one-trick pony, which is why all the Halloween, Jaws*, and Nightmare movies' sequels are pretty awful. There's not much further you can improve upon the formula of a faceless menace slaughtering young people. (Word to the Bush administration.) Your options, I suppose, are to put your soon-to-be-dead cast of kids in a new location like Manhattan or outer space (same thing?), or to go the route of so-called torture porn and sacrifice genuine tension for blatant shock. But who wants that? It's good to know that in 2009 Platinum Dunes has released what horror fans loved so dearly in 1980: a straight-up slasher movie. Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese. Pickles. Onions. On a sesame seed bun.

Thankfully, Friday the 13th opts for scares and suspense over gratuitous gore and slow, gruesome deaths. Relatively speaking, of course, because this is, after all, a Friday the 13th picture. There's plenty of blood and carnage, but it never overwhelms or takes away from the reboot's modus operandi: fast, furious kills and unrelenting tension. True to the character's original slasher villain iconography, Jason runs trough two groups of college kids like a force of nature -- always present, always unstoppable.

So while Friday the 13th doesn't reinvent the slasher genre -- a genre, like heavy metal and hot dogs, that neither benefits from nor needs reinvention -- it certainly reinvigorates it.

4/4 *_*


* Please indulge me on this point; except for some fins and a lack of limbs, I don't see much of a difference between Jason Vorhees and Bruce.