Staff Blog
Scenester: Read a review of Friday the 13th
posted by Molly Eichel
Admit it — you want more from this week’s Movies section.
Friday the 13th (2009)
If ever a series rendered a reboot superfluous, it’s Friday the 13th — each installment already pushed the reset button, resurrecting its
hockey-masked anti-hero and killing him off again at the end. But like Casino Royale,
the fresh start allows the series to disown the ridiculous gimmicks —
telekinesis, outer space, Corey Feldman — that increasingly cluttered
each entry, and to reimagine its iconic character as an athletic and
sadistic upgrade of the familiar old model. Once a force of nature,
Jason Voorhees is here transformed into a deranged survivalist. It’s
obviously modeled directly on Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake,
but we need to know how Jason survived in the woods all those years
even less than we needed to fill in the gap between Michael Myers’
childhood killing spree and the night he came home. What hasn’t been
rethought is the fuck-and-die formula, though it’s applied with smug,
knowing irony. The standard teens-in-the-woods slaughter is briskly
dispatched in a 30-minute pre-title sequence, but instead of freeing
the film to veer off in unexpected directions it instead sequelizes
itself, introducing a new batch and offing them in the expected order —
the final girl is still chaste, and there are grueling deaths in store
for the topless water-skiier, the stoner goof-off and, yes, the black
guy. —Shaun Brady (Click here for showtimes and to purchase tickets for Friday the 13th)
Related: Freddy vs. Jason
Also in this week’s movie section: Sam Adams reviews The Class, and shorts on 
Azur & Asmar (Azur et Asmar), Confessions of a Shopaholic and The International.
