I'm far too cowardly to have tested this out myself, but theoretically speaking, I think horror movie slashers might just be misunderstood superheroes.
Think of it this way. They pretty much only kill the young, so at the very worst they're just doing what we're all thinking. At that, their teen victims are almost always getting drunk, fornicating or otherwise having fun. Remember that referendum we held a couple years ago where we illegalized fun? Yeah, well you probably overslept, you degenerate. Have fun in prison -- if you want to go to double prison.
Most critically of all, slashers get along with their neighbors. Granted, people get a lot more neighborly under threat of being hacked up and entombed in a wall, but there's nothing more heroic and patriotic than helping out your neighbors, as evidenced by Captain America's original name, "Takes the Old Lady Next Door's Trash to the Curb Every Sunday-Man." Hell, even Jason in the new Friday the 13th has neighbors. Think they guy across the street secretly wants to wear your skin for a cape? Go on over and offer to lend him some power tools. I think you may be surprised at the result.
Twenty years ago at Camp Crystal Lake, the mother of a young boy named Jason went crazy, murdering the campers she believed were responsible for the death of her son. Unknown to her, Jason was still alive -- and watched her die.
The camp's since been abandoned. But Jason remains (played in adulthood by Derek Mears), and when five youths stumble into his territory searching for a trove of wild weed, they go missing.
Six weeks later, local cops have given up the search. Jared Padalecki, the brother of one of the missing girls, takes up where they left off. But Jason's been stirred, and he is looking to vent his wrath on a house of hard-partying college kids across the lake.
In a ploy that can be described as either "clever" or "deliberately misleading," depending on whether you're into the whole truth thing, Friday the 13th was advertised as being directed by the man who did The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. While technically correct (the best kind of correct), what they really mean is it was directed by Marcus Nispel, that visionary genius who made the inspired move of being paid garbage sacks full of cash to direct the TCM remake.
Nispel brings that same can-do spirit to the Friday the 13th reboot, a movie just dying to be made. It's the Hollywood motto: "No One Wants to Watch Something Older Than They Are. Jesus, Can You Believe We Used to Wear Our Hair Like That?"
Writers Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, authors of the should-have-been-way-way-better Freddy vs. Jason, happily join the unoriginality parade by putting together a script that steadfastly refuses to deviate from the Jason + Campers = Murder formula of the last billion films in the franchise.
While the tissue-thin plot offers absolutely nothing new, it does overcome the series' greatest weakness by providing forms of entertainment that aren't wholly reliant on Jason carving teens into head cheese. In those long, wasteful sequences where the non-Jason cast is sitting around not getting slaughtered, they're actually funny! Charming! It's kind of a bummer knowing that, within minutes, they're going to make some great joke, then turn around to find themselves rewarded with a harpoon through the eye socket.
For Jason may be older, but the years have only heightened his thirst for blood. As sophisticated peoples of the 21st Century, we demand that our fake violence be so gritty and real that we can almost feel the arterial spray on our faces. Nispel's death scenes are savage and plentiful -- points on that.
In those terms -- routine violence and a crummy plot wrapping up in a foolish ending -- you could say Friday the 13th is the same old shit. Well, yeah. But with its newfound sense of humor and believably human Jason, it's at least fleetingly entertaining.
Grade: B-