WARNING: SPOILER HEAVY! It has now been 19 days since the new Friday The 13th (hereby referred to as F1309) movie was released. I consider the Friday The 13th series, overall, to be the greatest slasher series to ever exist. I saw it on it's second day of release, but it has taken me some time to collect my thoughts together - Yes, I've thought long and hard about this one. F1309 is the twelfth movie to focus on the Voorhees family's slight tendency towards the brutal slaughter of anyone who comes with ten miles of them. There's a lot of debate as to whether this movie is a remake, a reboot or a sequel masquerading as a remake for marketability. Here is your answer - this movie does in fact remake the original 1980 slasher classic. Kinda. Here's why - Jason was not the killer in the original movie. Mommy dearest carved up Camp Crystal Lake as best she could in the original movie (F13), thinking Jason dead. That movie was roughly 95 minutes long. There was a lot of build up in that movie, suspense was a key ingredient mixed in with the gore. We actually gave a damn about most of the characters in the movie. Here, the entire original movie is reduced to under a minute. Yup, Mrs. Voorhees get's all slash happy off screen, and we're just meant to assume people have died... and all we are treated to is Fake Mrs. Voorhees (Betsy Palmer and Betsy Palmer alone is Mrs. Voorhees - anyone else is a fake) yelling a lot about her son drowning and then getting her head cut off. Which seems a bit unfair in this new version, we haven't actually see the poor woman do anything wrong. Original: Jason drowns, women gets upset and over several decades kills councillors, finally being put down by having her head chopped off with a machete. Remake: Jason drowns, woman get's upset, shouts, get's her head chopped off with a machete. I know we're meant to assume she's killed people, but it just doesn't work cause we haven't seen it. Just makes the councilor look like an Uber-Bitch. Anyway, this all goes down in 1980. So that's the remake portion over. And my main complaint should be clear: Couldn't they give a little more screen time to Pamela... half an hour maybe. The world is ready for a two-hour-plus Friday Film! She is such an important part of the Friday the 13th saga - without her there's no Jason, no Roy, NOTHING! I think it's become obvious by this point in time (actually it was obvious eight years ago) that the producers are scared not to have Jason on screen. Jason and his hockey mask mean BIG MONEY! Anyway, then the zooms forward to the here and now, and a bunch of twenty-somethings are camping in Crystal Lake. Turns out one of them got a tip on some "awesome powerful weed" around there. Do people not just go camping anymore? They all sit about a campfire, the weirdo-loner dude talking about how a load of people got killed at this very campsite, and talking about the Jason legend. Now, the kids in the F13 Franchise have never been that bright - but who the FUCK would go camping in the place where you KNOW there's a serial killer, what possible reason would you have to go there, what could tempt you to.. Oh yeah. Weed. Nice one, writers. Anyhoo a couple of them have sex, while the weirdo dude goes off to find the weed and another couple go to Jason's shack. The dude finds the weed, but Jason shows up (sporting a really crappy looking version of the F13:2 sack mask) and kills him by cutting his ear off (huh?) Meanwhile, the two that are boning hear some scary noises, so one goes to investigate (OF COURSE) he finds his friends corpse, and runs back just in time to see his girlfriend,/fuck buddy trapped in her sleeping bag, tied over the fire. He gets caught in a bear trap, and his girlfriend does that thing young people do in these movies (dies). We then visit the other couple, who are poking around Jason's home (dumb kids) and suddenly a machete starts poking up from the floorboards. To cut a long story short, the dude dies. The girl runs back to the campsite. Jason chases her, and notices the guy in the bear trap. He machetes the guy in the head. THEN TURNS ON THE GIRL AND OMG! Is that the movie over? Didn't feel very long... Oh no, it's just the title sequence. But wait, the title comes up, "Friday The 13th" we hear that cool "Ki Ki Ki Ma Ma Ma" sound, then the movie starts. Only one problem... we're more than half an hour in. This movie is only an hour and a half long, and they've wasted it on these pointless characters... And the movie does suffer for this. Oh yes. The movie does what Rob Zombie's awful Halloween remake did, and tries to squish two movies into one. In the case of Halloween, it was a young Michael movie and a fairly faithful (but crap) remake squished into one, leaving both parts to the story feel rushed and incomplete. Here they squeeze two different Jason stories into one movie, and it leaves no time for character development for either set of witless youths who wander into Jason's stomping grounds. The next hour of movie is so poor that I can't even bring my self to write it all down here. The characters show up and immediately start dying (Take that, SUSPENSE! How dare you try and sneak into a Platinum Dunes horror remake) The biggest problem is the fact that this film does not feel like a Friday The 13th movie. Anyone see the actually pretty good Texas Chainsaw Remake. It feels like that. It looks like that. It was shot in Texas, and it shares most of it's crew (Director, Director Of Photography, etc) with that movie, so it's little wonder that this feels like a Texas Chainsaw Movie that Jason has wandered into. Derek Mears as Jason is actually pretty good, but he doesn't save this movie by a long shot. It's not all bad, there are some good points. Let's finish by weighing up the good points vs the bad. Several complaints: 1. Why do all serial killers these days look the same. All grungy and tattered. Leatherface, Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees - they all look the same. I know they shouldn't look pristine, but they each need their own physical identity, which is being lost in all the grime. Hell, Jason was pretty clean in parts 2-4 all things considered. 2. Okay, no Friday film has good characterization. But they haven;t even tried here... not that there's any time cause they spent HALF AN HOUR OF A 90 MINUTE MOVIE ON THE FUCKING INTRO!!!! 3. Why so many boobs? And sex scenes? It's not necessary. Yeah, it's a part of the franchise - but more effort seems to have gone into sex than the kills. 4. The way Jason finds his mask is so freakin' stupid. And his sack mask looks like crap. 5: The kills are just about the least inventive in the series. Machete, Sleeping bag on fire, Machete, Machete, Arrow, Machete, Screwdriver, Axe, Deer (wtf), Machete/Combine, Machete. 6. Underground tunnels. Yeah, real scary. 7. Why does this look/feel/sound/smell/taste like a FUCKING TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE MOVIE! 8. The "two-part" structure of the movie. Which I'm positive was only done so they could have THIRTEEN kills. Cause... you know it's Friday The THIRTEENTH. Gotta have Thirteen kills... urgh. Good points: 1. Jason doesn't use his machete as often as in FvJ, where the damn thing was superglue to his hand. 2. The Chinese dude is the funniest character in a F13 ever. Lastly, why call it a remake, it's clearly not (excepting the first MINUTE). Why, marketability. That's it. But JASON IS A CASH COW. Freddy Vs Jason made like, a squillion dollars (in slasher movie money) - it's didn't need a reboot... people were waiting for a sequel and they didn't damn well give us one. A remake should add something to the original story, this didn't. Look at Rob Zombies Halloween, it added something. Granted what it added was to turn Michael Myers into a whiny little bitch, and fuck up the entire story but hey, still changed something.