Showing posts with label Friday the 13th. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Friday the 13th. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 31, 2023

Ten Days of Terror! Friday the 13th (2009)

Film: Friday the13th (2009)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

I’ve never been a huge fan of the slasher sub-genre. I do like a good horror movie, but slashers are lwest common denominator stuff in general in my opinion. There are good ones that transcend the genre, of course, but most of them are nothing more than what Siskel & Ebert called “dead teenager” movies. You have a group of dumb teens who wander too close to something purely evil. The film starts out showing plenty of T & A and ends up with blood, machetes, and viscera. “Plotless” is a compliment for many of them, which is definitely true of the remake of Friday the 13th from 2009.

Because of this, the real difference in a lot of slashers is the identity of the person who is, to coin a phrase (or name a really good slasher parody), behind the mask. Most of them are just variations on a theme. The main difference between Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Victor Crowley, and a few others is the mask that they are wearing. This brings up a significant question—why remake a slasher rather than either make a sequel to an established series or start a new one? The answer is simple: name recognition. Even if you go into a remake of something like Friday the 13th relatively sure that it’s going to suck, you at least know it’s going to be Jason Voorhees behind the hockey mask and swinging the machete.

Sunday, March 2, 2014

Off Script: Friday the 13th

Format: Independent Film Channel on rockin’ flatscreen.

When you prepare to talk about one of the granddaddies of the horror/slasher genre, you need to be careful. Friday the 13th is a film that has a reputation, a following, and a massive amount of influence over the films that follow it. If I’m not properly deferential, I immediately become ignorant of history and genre or someone who disagrees for the sake of disagreeing. Love it too much and I’m just sucking up. As tends to be the case my feelings fall somewhere in between.

This is a film that is short on plot, something it has in common with most slasher movies. The basic premise of the genre is to toss a bunch of young kids into a remote location and start picking them off one by one through a variety of stabbings, slashings, bludgeonings, drownings, and any other form of mayhem the filmmakers can think up. Typically, the killer is unstoppable and the teens are whittled down to a final potential victim, who usually lives. That’s certainly what happens here.