From Amazon:
A group of young adults discover a boarded up Camp Crystal Lake, where they soon encounter Jason Voorhees (Mears) and his deadly intentions.
Oh-kay, here we go: This is a reboot. There are no sequels to this reboot. Make of that what you may. Here’s what I made of it:
The movie has a high production quality — but HD cameras aren’t exactly hard to find. The movie is well put together, but it’s a well put together bit of fan-fiction. It’s at best an homage to the rest of the series. This is something I can type with a straight face in a series where somehow Crystal Lake connects to Long Island Sound and Jason catches a ride on a ship, and also a series that went to space. But the problem with this one is pretty simple: the best of the movie comes from the parts that are direct homages to the others.
Also, I am not one to complain about nudity, especially not in a movie like this because it’s literally baked into the formula. But this movie seemed intent to rely on getting people to watch it for the nudity and that’s a fool’s errand when the internet exists now.
I may also have complained about this with the new Nightmare, but another problem that impacts a lot of movies now impacts this movie hard core: all of the people are cookie cutter. In the original set of movies the counselors/victims resembled real people. Now everyone looks like they just stepped out of a mold based on what some casting director thinks everyone should look like. It used to be that actors were normal looking people who acted. Now everyone seems like a sculpted Lord of the Rings elf. Get off my lawn.
It just adds to the problem of everything being so… samey? Like this movie does not stand out as a Friday the 13th aside from the title and the mask. There are a ton of slashers from this decade that don’t do enough to differentiate themselves: this movie could have just as easily been a Hatchet movie if you changed the costume of the killer. (That isn’t a slight against Hatchet, but rather how… samey this movie is.) It’s a product of 2009.
Thank Christ for Blumhouse and my Full Moon channel on Amazon Prime.
So far of all the originals-sequels-reboots this is my least favorite, if you couldn’t guess.
Report Card:
Running Time: An hour and thirty-seven minutes.
Acting: The reboot did not do a lot of improvement here.
Effects: There were some “neat” kills, but it’s 2009 so nothing was surprising.
Violence: Doesn’t that go without saying in a slasher?
Gun Use: If there was any it didn’t stand out as offensively wrong.
Gore: As required, it’s a slasher.
Creepy? Not really.
Monster Type? A murderer human-type.
Funny? Nothing that truly stood out.
Nudity: An over-the-top amount of gratuitous topless female nudity.
Pacing: Can I use the term “jerky”?
