Friday the 13th (2009)

“Friday the 13^th” was meant to be a reboot of the series and not a remake of the original film. This allowed them to take elements from the first four films and apply them in a single movie. The writers and director wanted to reexamine, update, and adjust various aspects of Jason’s mythos which left me thinking that their efforts were both cool and pretty lame at the same time. The film opens up with the events that occur at the very ending of the original “Friday the 13^th” with the showdown between a counselor and Jason’s mom; she’s still beheaded and Jason is still a witness to the gruesome act. The movie moves forward in time to when Jason is grown and begins killing people while wearing a cloth mask like the one he had in “Friday the 13^th part 2”. Jason finds a hockey masks and puts in on and some teenagers find the head of Jason’s mom, just like the events in “Friday the 13^th part 3”. Finally, a guy shows up looking for his missing sister (Friday the 13^th part 4”) and a lot more people get killed before they realize what’s going on. These were cool nods to the first few films in the series when the movies were still building a mythos and keeping to a serious horror movie vibe.

The only thing I really didn’t like about this film was seeing where Jason lived; a creepy, wet, room/tunnels of torture. The fact that he had an area to lock somebody up is not like his character at all and it really bothered me. The only time we saw a house where Jason might have lived in the original movies was a tiny hut that was set up as a shrine to his mother. That was cool and this was not. It feels like it’s too similar to all of the other hideaways that deranged movie killers have. It’s just a part of the story that I wish they had skipped.