Here we go!
Again I could write 60 pages for you on these movies, but I will keep it short.
The "Friday the 13th" series represents the 80's slasher genre like nothing else. Alongside "Halloween", "A nightmare on Elmstreet", "Child's play" and perhaps "Leprechaun", Monsieur Vorhees and his beloved Momster rocked the horror business hard in these times.
I put Jason before Myers, Krueger, Chucky and all the others, but everybody has his darling amongst the mentioned characters, and everybody has a gazillion reasons why one of them is better than the other. Let's not talk about that here.
The reason I'm reviewing this series here is that I finally had the time to watch the remake, and I gotta say, I liked it. I kid you not.
I was, like probably all the fans, prejudiced and full of fear when I put on the DVD, but soon got positively surprised. The movie IS good, it fits into the original series and all in all, it's not that different from oldschool fridays.
There are still shitloads of stupid, flat charactered twens consuming drugs, having unprotected sexual intercourse, visiting a creepy camp Chrystal Lake and getting the goode, olde Jason treatment. So far so good.
But there are some NEW points to this movie. As we all know, the Nispel/Bay team did a remake of "The Texas chainsaw massacre" some time ago, and they even prequelled it. Same as here, you don't have to like it, it's different in style and tempo from the original, but I found it rather entertaining. AND, big good AND, it brought something very precious into the horror-remake genre: The background stories of them badass killers.
Don't get me wrong, I love the original and the total randomness and the breathtaking confusion that it plants into the hearts of even the bravest, and in it's time, that was new, appropriate and had it's effect. But now the kids scream for sex and violence, and they get it, and thanks to the mentioned team they also get some obscure background infos that revive the legend around the killers. We had that in Nispels TCM, we had that in Zombie's Halloween and we get that in Nispels Friday the 13th.
The movie goes the way of the plupart of the post 2000 horror remakes: More blood, more background and more sex. LOTS MORE SEX. I was surprised what you can do with american mainstream cinema nowadays. Beautiful!
Nispel surely found his style with TCM, as he plays with that through this whole movie. The sets are different but still the same, it's more serious than the original (I don't know how to put it better, the original TCM WAS serious, but Nispel knows how to let them suffer good...).
Like RemakeLeatherface Jason is now just the deformed hillbilly creep he is, has hunting skills and booby traps all over the woods. Until the classic ending he didn't remind me much of the indestructible meanmachine from the 80's.
Over all, it's a fine, entertaining slasher, quite a bit harder and meaner than the originals but it still carries the flag. Watch it, and don't be too biased.
Ah, and Jared Padalecki, you're still little sammy, and you will always be. Your acting was ok, but only because the standard in camp-slashers is low low low. Don't take it personnaly.
