Nearly thirty years ago on the grounds of Camp Crystal Lake a woman by the name of Pamela Voorhees viciously killed all but one of the camp’s counselors. Ms. Voorhees was getting retribution and revenge on those she blamed for the accidental drowning death of her “special” son Jason. But before Ms. Voorhees could complete her task, she was decapitated on the shore of Crystal Lake by the last remaining counselor. But her death was observed from beyond and from beneath the waters of Crystal Lake as her son saw his mother struck down. Jason, now reborn, is about to begin his own path of destruction and revenge on all who would dare venture into his domain.

The remake to one of the most influential horror movies of all time has hit the screen, but is it a leap forward for the legendary franchise or is it a step backwards? Well I guess it depends on how you look at the movie itself. So I decided to look at this film in two very different ways, which I think from here on out is how I am going to look at any remake or reimagining from here out.

For my first take on Friday the 13th 2009 I am going to go from the aspect of being a newbie to the world of Jason and his legend and look at it through the eyes of a first time viewer and what I think the studio executives and film makers were going for, so here goes.

A new monster has enter the world of horror and this time he doesn’t use crazy traps or run around eating people Jason Voorhees is a walking machine of death and carnage who can’t be stopped. So Jason comes back from the grave after seeing his mother get killed and decides to get his revenge on any one he sees or can catch. After his mama gets her head lopped off the film shot forward to present day where little Jason has grown into a giant of a man with a huge chip on his shoulder. As you can imagine a group of pesky teenagers head into Jason’s woods and begin buzzing around until Jason begins to swat the pesky human gnats with tremendous ease.

The groups of teens are your classic horror movie cliché group. You have the pure girl, the arrogant jock, the token black guy, the comedy relief guy, the ultra hot bitch girl and the all important heroic character and the local style characters like law enforcement and crazy locals. Normally a movie like this would have a stoner character too, but nearly everyone in this flick is a weed head to some degree or another. As normal it is Jason’s civic duty to eliminate the woods of these pains in the ass one at a time until we get to the climatic showdown at the end and eliminate them he does.

The hills are fast and brutal, there are axe and machete slashes, good old fashion beat downs and even a few surprises from time to time. And Jason himself looks completely bad ass. Actor Derek Mears is excellent in the role and his intimidation factor is off the charts. Jason never speaks, but his actions speak loud enough to cover that and who ever came up with the idea of putting him in an old fashion goalie masks deserves an award, it’s simple and very effective.

The movie wasn’t flawless as some of the time it seemed to drag from time to time and there were a few questionable themes in the film I kinda didn’t get, like how in the hell was Jason able to keep the electricity on in an abandoned camp?, but I guess I can overlook that. On the whole not a bad flick and I have no doubt Jason will be back for a sequel. If you have the spare time and just want some old fashion 80’s style horror in modern times, then this one is worth the money. Give it a look.

7 of 10.

Now, for the other side of the coin the view from a fan who worships the ground Jason walks on.

By the sainted, severed head of Pamela Voorhees, what a let down, I have been waiting for a new tale of Jason stomping through Crystal Lake hacking apart teenagers for years. It’s not as bad as Jason in New York or Jason in Space, but F-13 2009, will be a huge let down for fans who were expecting great things from this movie.

Where to start, man, I’ll guess I’ll give what I liked about this one first. They did a good job of mixing basically the first three original films together, Derek Mears looked great as Jason, the guy is as big as a house and he made Jason quite a beast, I would put him about third or fourth on the list of actors who have been Jason, I still have Kane Hodder first, but Mr. Mears places in the top five with ease. There is also three sets of breast in this film and the last set are natural and quite amazing. The problems with this version of Jason are as follows;

#1 Jason’s time on screen is actually kind of limited, the middle of the film easily has a fifteen minute mark where there is no sign of Jason at all.

#2 Jason’s life style and behavior. He lives in a cave that somehow has working light bulbs at a camp that has been abandoned for nearly thirty years. He sets traps like jigsaw but on a more simplistic level, he takes hostages, he is an expert marksman with a bow and arrow and he has had time to make more tunnels under the camp grounds of Crystal Lake than the entire Viet Cong army dug in the hills of their country during the Vietnam War.

#3 The kills are all mostly CGI and happen in darkened rooms where you get to see very little of the actual carnage.

#4 The cast of victims are all annoying, I could have really given a rats ass about any of them, and the half assed Miila Jovovitch clone looked like her hair weighed more than her entire body, damn girl get a haircut or eat a double meat and triple cheese sub and get some meat on them bones!

#5 Weed. The weed growth around Crystal lake and the weed use of those around Crystal Lake was insane. I don’t think Jason was killing for his mother, but more likely for the DEA.

I guess I just needed so much from this film and I didn’t get it, which was a shame. The basic though behind this flick is easy enough to follow and could have been pulled off without a thought. There was one point in this movie that if they were going to do what I thought they were going to do I swear I was going to walk out of the theater, I won’t spoil it, but see if you start to cringe when you see the two truck come into view. I swear I shuddered.

Without a doubt Jason is my favorite movie maniac of all time, to me he is and always will be the man, this film just didn’t seem like it let Jason get fully released and storm across the screen in his slow stepping, ass kicking, unapologetic manner. I thoroughly enjoyed the recent remakes of The Hills Have Eyes and Halloween, but I also know many of you out there thought those were disrespectful to the original films or simply bad films. I don’t think F-13 09 tries to be disrespectful, but it just didn’t seem to capture the true essence of the original either. Maybe it’s me, maybe I’m just a damn crotchety old man anymore, but this was not what I personally needed out of a Jason movie. I think it will bring in many new fans in the series and will spark some great retro viewing for the older films, which in no way can hurt the franchise in any form.

Another final complaint would it have been that damn hard to work in some cameos by Betsy Palmer, Ted White, C.J. Graham, Kane Hodder or anyone else that has ever taken part in a Friday the 13th move? Hell I would have loved me some Corey Feldman at one point or another.

4 of 10.

So there you go it gets a 4 of 10 and a 7 of 10 from me, do the math average it out and you get a 5.5, so round it up and I’ll go with a 6 of 10.

The new Friday the 13th from director Marcus Nispel (responsible for the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which I enjoyed) is an interesting creature in that it is the only remake I’ve seen to date which does not update the story, but rather the villain. Despite what the folks at Platinum Dunes have been telling fans for the past year or so, this film is a fairly standard entry into the venerable slasher franchise. It consists of good looking twentysomethings in the deep woods , doing lots of drugs, having lots of sex and getting picked off one by one in a variety of gruesome ways by the Man Behind the Mask himself, Jason Voorhees.

The plot is straight forward: The opening minutes ,set in 1980, give us a brief recap of the demise of vengeful Mrs.Voorhees after her rampage at Camp Crystal lake. If you’ve seen the original film, you know that Jason’s mom has a really bad day here. This time, though, we are made aware that young Jason is watching the vents from the nearby woods, giving a little more gravitas to his murderous Oedipal complex.

Flash forward to present day and a group of campers enters the now abandoned site of Camp Crystal Lake in search of a rumored marijuana crop. Night falls, they set camp and Jason shows up, sporting the sack over his head we remember from Friday the 13th part 2. The campers are picked off one by one and we again shift gears to six weeks later.

Now another group of revelers are heading into the area to enjoy a weekend of debauchery and they run across Clay (Supernatural star Jared Paledecki) who is searching for his sister Whitney. Turns out sis was one of the campers who vanished six weeks earlier. Clay does a meet-cute with one of the revelers and she in turn eventually helps him post fliers and search for Whitney, while her obnoxious rich boyfriend and the others continue to party in the latters spacious house. Jason of course pops up again, more murders ensue and the fight for survival is on.

Okay, that’s about the extent of the plot details I’m going to give. That actually about the extent of the plot, period. Notice that save for Paledecki, I didn’t go out of my way to name any of the actors in the cast? That’s wasn’t an oversight. They’re not bad, but except for the character of Clay, every single person in this film is a stereotype. Each one fills a predetermined role. There’s the sincere girl, the sarcastic, racially self-referencing black man, the obnoxious preppie, the funny as hell stoner Asian kid, the sexy hottie and her California surf bum boyfriend and the other sexy hottie willing to steal sincere girl’s obnoxious rich preppie boyfriend. You get the idea.

Paledecki was surprisingly fun to watch though, bringing a relative sincerity and amiability to Clay that I found really engaging. I actually found myself hoping the guy would find his sister and get out of there safely.

But all of that is irrelevant. Nispel and the Dunes people didn’t reinvent the wheel on this one in terms of the plot, but they sure as hell did recreate the individual who was the reason any of us went to see the damned movie in the first place. I am happy to report that this version of Jason Voorhees sets a new standard for sheer onscreen awesomeness.

Derek Mears brings a new energy and viciousness to the character, earning the right to wear that mask for the probable sequels. No longer is Jason a stumbling mutant just getting his legs as a killer or an unstoppable zombie. Though he is still very large and very deformed, now Jason employs strategy and utilizes the sort of knowledge you would expect someone to have accumulated after living in the deep woods for over thirty years. This Jason can reason. He sets traps for his victims, often using one person as bait to lure out the others. He doesn’t outlast his prey, he outwits them. Hell, he’s even mastered the proper use of floodlights.

This was a really pleasant surprise for me. I’ve always found Jason Voorhees to be entertaining, but in my opinion he was always a second tier baddie. Michael Myers or Fred Krueger- now those characters scared the crap out of me in their early incarnations. Prior to this film, watching Jason do his thing was goofy fun, nothing more.

This movie changes all of that. I’d put this incarnation of Crystal Lake’s most sinister denizen up against any of the great screen villains. Watching him go about his business got my blood pumping and put a chill down my spine.

The kills are not necessarily imaginative- the usual tools and sports related implements are seen in full force here- but that doesn’t mean they are any less impressive. There’s one sequence involving water skiing and a boat dock that has to qualify as some sort of new classic. Some damned fine gore is on display throughout the film.

Also in the plus column is the scene where Jason finally obtains his famous hockey mask. I won’t go into detail, but I enjoyed that the moment itself was actually rather random and something born out of necessity rather than just the big guy stealing a prop from a victim.

Cinematographer Daniel Pearl (who handled the TCM remake, as well as the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre) provides solid images, with night shots soaked in eerie dark hues and daytime shots saturated with subdued tones of amber.

In fact, so impressive was Pearl’s work that I found myself wishing a little more attention had been paid to the actual editing, which is my primary grievance with the film. Certain important scenes are chopped up with that flashy quick-cut style Nispel embraced in TCM and it doesn’t work nearly as well here. One example is the opening shot of Pamela’s beheading. If you blink you will miss it. There is also an early sequence where Jason appears from under some floorboards and damned if the scene was nearly over before I caught one decent glimpse of Jason grasping at his victim. Fortunately, most of the important kill scenes are not edited this way and leave no room for misinterpretation.

Whether or not you enjoy the new Friday the 13th depends a lot on what you were hoping for from the movie. If you went into it anticipating something bold and new, some new direction for the franchise, then you’re bound to be disappointed by the devotion with which the film follows the pattern set by the Paramount entries into this series.

On the other hand, if you simply wanted to take a nostalgic trip back into one of Jason’s bloody rampages , you’ll find this fits like a comfortable old coat. You’ll also have the thrill of seeing the new and improved Jason show a bunch of campers what backwoods horror is all about.

I fall into the second category. I’m also of the opinion that the 1980 original doesn’t hold up all that well and needed an update. The new Friday the 13th gives us a better take on the villain while staying true to the exploitation elements which drew fans back to the franchise over the course of so many years. Based on that criteria, I’d call this a resounding success and well worth the wait.

Eight out of Ten sleeping bag cookouts.