Friday the 13th

Here’s what you need to know about this 2009 remake: if Jason weren’t wearing his hockey mask, you’d forget it by morning. As is, you’ll forget it by the next afternoon.

The film cobbles together elements from the original trilogy, opening with a brisk recap of Part 1—Jason’s mother loses her head on June 13, 1980. Flash forward to 2009. Jason stalks two groups of kids: first, some twenty-somethings hunting for weed, then a second batch visiting a rich kid’s lakeside cabin. Bodies pile up. Credits roll.

Strip away the iconography and what’s left? Not much. This doesn’t feel like a Friday the 13th movie. It feels like someone’s idea of what a Friday the 13th movie should be in the age of Saw.

The cast looks like they wandered off a CW soundstage. They’re attractive. They’re interchangeable. They have no personality beyond “stoner,” “rich kid,” and “good guy.” Remember Shelly from Part 3? Crispin Glover’s jittery performance in Part 4? Or Ginny, the resourceful final girl from Part 2? This film offers none of that. Even our heroine barely registers.

Worse, Jason himself is all wrong. He’s become a sadistic torturer, setting traps designed to maximize pain and terror. This is The Collector territory—and that film, also from 2009, handles this material far better.

The original Jason was brutal but simple. A killing machine with a child’s mind. You never got the sense he needed to sleep or eat or do anything but wait. When he killed, he preferred up close—quick and brutal. This Jason? He’s built an elaborate underground bunker with tunnels and escape routes. He shoots arrows through eyeballs from a football field away. He throws axes with perfect accuracy in the dark, uphill, at moving targets.

Why? That’s the question the film can’t answer. At first he seems territorial—trespass and die. But then he attacks kids at a cabin that appears well-used and maintained. If it’s been there for years (or was recently built), it must be outside his territory, right? The logic crumbles under the slightest scrutiny.

Even the setting betrays the franchise. Shot in Texas, it never convinces as New Jersey despite the desperate scattering of Garden State license plates.

The producers clearly wanted to “modernize” the series—grittier, more realistic, with torture-porn elements to compete with Saw—while still delivering fan-service callbacks. They succeeded at neither.

This isn’t what made Friday the 13th work. The series never needed big budgets or name actors. It needed a good Jason (Kane Hodder proved the role isn’t interchangeable), a location that passes for Jersey, and believable kids in their own teen movie. Then let Jason tear through that movie in brutal, creative ways.

This wasn’t that movie.

Seventeen years later, we’re still waiting.