Friday the 13th (2009) review.
It’s been 14 years since we last encountered Jason Voorhees patrolling Camp Crystal Lake. With new projects finally on the horizon…it’s a good time to take a look back at the 2009 remake. Friday the 13th does a number of good things but struggles to contend with a key issue. Jason Voorhees has never quite felt like he belonged outside of the 80s.
Classic movie reviews will contain spoilers.
Friday the 13th (2009)
Directed by Marcus Nispel
Screenplay by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift
Starring Jared Padalecki, Danielle Panabaker, Aaron Yoo, Amanda Righetti, Travis Van Winkle and Derek Mears
Friday the 13th (2009) Review
Let’s start off with a discussion about remakes. To my mind there are a few distinct types of film remakes and we shouldn’t lump them in together. You have movies remade from foreign films like The Ring. There are movies updated for a modern era like It. Sometimes it’s done to simply reboot a dormant property like Hellraiser (2022).
Without breaking this into a dozen little boxes to set specific movies in…let’s just concentrate on two larger ones. There are the remakes that come from a place of creativity…movies like Suspiria, The Thing and The Fly. Each of those is an example of a filmmaker taking an existing property from the past and making it their own. Whether you love all of these versions or not…no one can deny that they are a new vision even if they are based on an old story.
Unfortunately, the other kind of remake is the one we get most often. The remakes that give the word a bad name. For every John Carpenter’s The Thing there are a dozen remakes made solely because a studio owns the property and sees an attempt to cash in on it. That is not to say that all of these remakes are bad or void of value. But…a lot of them are. 2003’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was not the first of these attempted cash-ins. Its commercial success meant we were going to get a whole lot more of them, however. In fact, it’s why 2009’s Friday the 13th exists.
All of that said…in this specific case a cash in remake is perfectly acceptable. The franchise that it’s remaking was, itself, a blatant attempt to cash in on Halloween in the first place. This is the long way to say that Friday the 13th (2009) being a remake doesn’t really matter as much as it does with the others. There simply wasn’t enough of a soul to suck out of it to matter.
So, onto the movie. While Friday the 13th doesn’t enter the picture born out of someone’s burning creative desire to tell their own story variation…it does come with a surprisingly clever idea. Instead of simply retelling the story of Pamela Voorhees by remaking the original…it takes elements from the first four Friday movies. This may seem obvious since people want Jason in their movie…not his mom. But it is something that other remakes didn’t really try. A greatest hits package from the era of the series where Jason was still (maybe) human.
We do see Pamela in a flashback as the film opens. The finale of the original is recreated in a way that fixes the big logic flaw in the original series. Instead of seeking vengeance years later when Camp Crystal Lake is set to reopen…Pamela’s justice is immediate. As is her demise. We see a young Jason who has survived his apparent drowning happening upon the scene. It basically tells the story that Part 2 tries to retcon but never works because we’ve all seen Part 1.
From there we get the coolest feature of Friday the 13th (2009). We get an extended opening sequence which introduces our new Jason (Derek Mears) and eventual final girl, Whitney (Amanda Righetti). Jason doesn’t get his iconic hockey mask until later in the film…so Jason runs amok with what appears to be a makeshift sack on his head. That’s right…like Part 2 before it, Ol’ Sackhead is back in action! Jason dispatches a truckload of teens before we get to the actual story. It’s effective in introducing some of the (borrowed) lore and even a bit as a Psycho like Marion Crane twist. A mini movie where the characters are underwritten and disposable. Feels like home.
When we break into the actual story…things slow down some. Clay (Jared Padelecki) is searching for his sister Whitney after her disappearance in the opening (cough Part 4). He comes across another batch of teens who are heading to the lake to get slaughtered. Eventually Jason gets his mask (Part 3) and pretty much everyone dies. The new group of victims gets more time to establish characters and there are some pretty good ones among the set. Jenna (Danielle Panabaker) takes the role you’d assume will be the final girl but in another of the film’s good moments…she isn’t. The standout character is Trent (Travis Van Winkel). A wealthy, douchebag who you love to hate. He steals every scene and gets the best death in the film. He’s one of the best characters in the series, all told.
Mears makes for a great Jason. He’s menacing, capable and fleet of foot. More human than any Jason since Part 4…and heavily influenced by Part 2’s nomad woodsman version. Physically imposing and, frankly, doing something more interesting with the character than we see most of the time. While this film doesn’t cry out for a sequel (though its box office success certainly did) it is a shame that we didn’t get more time with his Jason.
By now you’re thinking…this sounds great…what’s wrong with it? Well. The biggest flaw with Friday the 13th (2009) is something that can’t really be helped. It’s set in 2009. A recurring problem with the series has been how poorly it translates into different eras. Jason may be a child of the 50s…but he belongs firmly to the 80s. Even if you are a fan of Jason Goes to Hell, Jason X, Freddy vs. Jason orthis remake…you have to admit they don’t feel like a Friday the 13th movie.
This doesn’t have to be a problem, mind you. The Fly doesn’t feel like its namesake. But if you aren’t going to (or aren’t able) to recreate the feeling of a series you’d better create something that feels necessary or good on its own merits. This is where Friday the 13th (2009) ultimately fails. No one has figured out how to do a Jason movie after the 80s ended. Even the bad entries in the initial 8 share the same aesthetic and feeling. 2009 feels like every remake of the era instead.
The Michael Bay factor is at play here. Most of the characters are dudes. I don’t mean they’re men…I mean they’re dudes. Half of the female characters are dudes. Dudes and bros. It’s like a particularly annoying fraternity took a weekend trip to the lake. Trent is the ultimate version of this…but he’s so good at it that he might actually be the other character’s problem. We don’t need two sets of dudes when we have the ultimate dude already.
It does, at least, help weed out who we should care about pretty quickly. Jenna stands out because she’s not written like everyone else. Clay and Whitney really aren’t that different from most of the characters and get by solely on the story forcing them to a different side of the coin. They aren’t the most interesting characters so when the movie whittles down to them for the climax…it largely falls flat. Jenna is the one character (other than Trent in a completely different way) that you really care about. It’s why her surprise death is such a great moment. Unfortunately, it then hurts the rest of the movie.
There are some decent kills, and it has more nudity than most slashers in the post-Scream era. Those are, I guess, highlights of a sort. What it really highlights, however, is what Friday the 13th (2009) really is. It’s a director and cast doing their best to add a soul to something that was lacking one. It succeeds more than most cash-in remakes (especially ones from this era) on the backs of Panabaker, Mears and Van Winkel. But it can’t justify its own existence as a slasher movie in 2009.
The truth is that the era didn’t know what to do with slasher movies. The Scream series and their own set of knock-offs had died out years earlier. Scream 4 would arrive in two years as a direct response to movies like Friday the 13th (2009) and a generation of glossy remakes over new ideas. We weren’t getting throwback slashers yet and the legacy sequels wouldn’t arrive for almost another decade. What we had to comment on this era…was these remakes. Inferior copies of cherished memories. Movies that, deep down, had nothing to add to the conversation.
And yet…given that this defined the original existence of the Friday franchise anyway…it feels oddly fitting. In this specific case.
Scare Value
A lot of Friday the 13th (2009) works. It’s one of the better remakes from the era. It lands somewhere in the middle of the series quality wise. The biggest issue it faces is the same one faced by the previous three films in the series. Aesthetically, Friday movies just work better in the 1980s. A great opening and some fine kills elevate this remake above the other non-80s entries. Derek Mears is a great Jason and it’s a shame he didn’t get more opportunities at the role.
See where Friday the 13th (2009) ranks within the entire series.
3/5
Friday the 13th (2009) Link
Rent/Buy on VOD from Vudu
Rent/Buy on VOD from Amazon
Buy on Blu-Ray from Amazon
Friday the 13th (2009) Trailer
If you enjoyed this review of Friday the 13th (2009) …check out some other horror remakes: Psycho (1998), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), My Bloody Valentine (2009)
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