For once, I’d like to see a franchise get rebooted by people that only care for the “non-canonical” films in said series. Marcus Nispel’s recent retread of the Friday the 13th films could have been that film. Screenwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift were the braintrust behind Freddy vs. Jason (2003), a film that not even fans of either of the titular boogeyemen want to remember exists. Sadly, they do not take cues from Friday the 13th VII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) or Jason X (2001) but rather Friday the 13ths 1 & 2 (1980, 1981), which is a real pity because somewhere inside Jason Voorhees’ latest escapade is a hilarious comedy yearning to break free from the stifling clutches of its over-serious guardians.
Make no mistake, Nispel and Co. are protecting the legacy of a soulless monster because they something in the mongoloid sociopath that only fans wearing rose-colored beer goggles can. Their new Friday the 13th is just like the last Friday the 13th and the one before it: a bunch of teens go to the woods, get drunk, high and horny and get hacked up one-by-one—except, of course, for “the final girl,” the last piece of walking cleavage and the slasher genre’s favorite fetish. This kind of film doesn’t need instructions for assembly, just a group of CW teeny bait and a crew of devoted gorehounds to provide the magic formula for clichéd nonsense that they’ve by now memorized.
Shannon and Swift know that they have no mandate to resuscitate the undead slasher idol and they even have their characters crow about that triumph of loutish nostalgia over arty brains. Just before the Asian guy (Aaron Yoo) bites it, he raises a toast to being “walking clichés,” ironically bitching about people that excuse their actions on childhood trauma right before Jason (Derek Mears) strikes one of many pseudo-iconic poses and drives a screwdriver through his latest victim’s throat.
Like its hero, the franchise knowingly thrives on thoughtless actions and exploits the fact that it’s just a copy of a copy of a copy. This is the stuff of moral panics, the bad pastiche that has given up on bringing anything new to the table and instead decided to give fans of the original series, now all grown up and skulking about in bigger basements, exactly what they wanted 28 years ago: mindless repetition.
No matter how sadistic the woefully mislabeled “torture porn” artists (as far as inane catch-all terms go, I prefer “Gore Gore Guys”) may seem, they have nothing on Nispel’s gang. Their new Friday the 13th confuses its lack of ambition with cleverness. It takes the age-old gag of “He’s-right-behind-you/where-you-can’t-him” to deliriously campy new heights of overuse, leading the black guy (Arlen Escarpeta) to peer into a freezer for his missing horndog buddy only for said horndog’s corpse to fall into the lap of his would-be rescuer. A recycled gag thus gets confused with knowing tribute but comes out only as sarcastic mugging, the kind that would make even Wes Craven blush.
However, assuming that one’s audience is grown up enough to know that they’re watching derivative junk food isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In the right hands, Friday the 13th could have been a semi-serious homage along the lines of Christopher Smith and James Moran’s Severance, an effective and in-no-way patronizing valentine to the slasher subgenre. As it is, it cannot because it doesn’t even dare take a stab at making a token racial joke about how the black guy normally dies first. That’s probably because, being the PC bit of nostalgic ultra-violence that it is, the new Friday features two minority characters. Making a joke that accounts for that new twist to the formula would require a modicum of good humor or just tolerable self-reflexivity.
But who really cares about a new Friday the 13th? Diehards have all but given up on the character, new fans don’t care and producers just want to make a quick buck. The logical solution would be to re-unleash one or more of the older movies on as many unwitting multiplex attendants as possible. Barring that, they should just pass out forms for audience members to fill out with their pitches for the next slasher franchise they want to revive. DIY pastiche: Now there’s an idea!
Make no mistake, Nispel and Co. are protecting the legacy of a soulless monster because they something in the mongoloid sociopath that only fans wearing rose-colored beer goggles can. Their new Friday the 13th is just like the last Friday the 13th and the one before it: a bunch of teens go to the woods, get drunk, high and horny and get hacked up one-by-one—except, of course, for “the final girl,” the last piece of walking cleavage and the slasher genre’s favorite fetish. This kind of film doesn’t need instructions for assembly, just a group of CW teeny bait and a crew of devoted gorehounds to provide the magic formula for clichéd nonsense that they’ve by now memorized.
Shannon and Swift know that they have no mandate to resuscitate the undead slasher idol and they even have their characters crow about that triumph of loutish nostalgia over arty brains. Just before the Asian guy (Aaron Yoo) bites it, he raises a toast to being “walking clichés,” ironically bitching about people that excuse their actions on childhood trauma right before Jason (Derek Mears) strikes one of many pseudo-iconic poses and drives a screwdriver through his latest victim’s throat.
Like its hero, the franchise knowingly thrives on thoughtless actions and exploits the fact that it’s just a copy of a copy of a copy. This is the stuff of moral panics, the bad pastiche that has given up on bringing anything new to the table and instead decided to give fans of the original series, now all grown up and skulking about in bigger basements, exactly what they wanted 28 years ago: mindless repetition.
No matter how sadistic the woefully mislabeled “torture porn” artists (as far as inane catch-all terms go, I prefer “Gore Gore Guys”) may seem, they have nothing on Nispel’s gang. Their new Friday the 13th confuses its lack of ambition with cleverness. It takes the age-old gag of “He’s-right-behind-you/where-you-can’t-him” to deliriously campy new heights of overuse, leading the black guy (Arlen Escarpeta) to peer into a freezer for his missing horndog buddy only for said horndog’s corpse to fall into the lap of his would-be rescuer. A recycled gag thus gets confused with knowing tribute but comes out only as sarcastic mugging, the kind that would make even Wes Craven blush.
However, assuming that one’s audience is grown up enough to know that they’re watching derivative junk food isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In the right hands, Friday the 13th could have been a semi-serious homage along the lines of Christopher Smith and James Moran’s Severance, an effective and in-no-way patronizing valentine to the slasher subgenre. As it is, it cannot because it doesn’t even dare take a stab at making a token racial joke about how the black guy normally dies first. That’s probably because, being the PC bit of nostalgic ultra-violence that it is, the new Friday features two minority characters. Making a joke that accounts for that new twist to the formula would require a modicum of good humor or just tolerable self-reflexivity.
But who really cares about a new Friday the 13th? Diehards have all but given up on the character, new fans don’t care and producers just want to make a quick buck. The logical solution would be to re-unleash one or more of the older movies on as many unwitting multiplex attendants as possible. Barring that, they should just pass out forms for audience members to fill out with their pitches for the next slasher franchise they want to revive. DIY pastiche: Now there’s an idea!
