Friday the 13th Part 2
Release Date:
TBA
2011
It isn’t easy being a horror film.
There are people who love you but they are a devoted, temperamental few who can never fully agree on your merits. Others hate you because they simply don’t understand you. The people who brought you into the world all too often put little effort into making you great and your friends constantly rip off all your best ideas. To top it off, your own offspring are usually inferior to you in every way, which tends to ruin the reputation you worked so hard to earn. No, it isn’t easy being a horror film. But if you’re looking to make one, with a modest budget and a usually even more modest idea, it isn’t hard to entertain enough people over the course of a few weekends to make a tidy profit.
Let’s take, for example the 1980 horror classic Friday the 13th. It has probably been a long time since you've seen it but you do remember it, don’t you? Yes, it’s all coming back to you – the thrills, the chills and those oh so gory kills. Do you remember the part where Jason dons the hockey mask for the first time? No, you don’t; that was in Part III. Do you remember the triple beheading? Sorry, that’s Part VI. And the hedge clippers! Who could forget the hedge clippers – from Part V! Of course, if you’re a horror buff you’re probably scratching your head, wondering where I am going with this. Who doesn’t know these things, as well as the fact that Mrs. Voorhees was the original killer - Jason doesn’t even appear in the first film!
But the majority of the people who flocked to theaters in the 1980s to see Jason do his dirty work were not always horror fans, but often just giddy teenagers. And they were eager not so much for a good scare but to see how many different ways cinema’s most unlikely bad boy could come up with to slaughter other members of their generation. And that was really my point - creatively, if you take an idea and turn it into a formula it eventually gets homogenized to the point where everything you do is reduced to a lowest common denominator. It all runs together, and in the case of the Friday the 13th franchise, it’s hard for all but the most devoted fans to recall which movie was which. The original Friday the 13th was a surprisingly effective and clever thriller, making good use of the age old "lost in the woods" motif along with an ending you couldn’t possibly have seen coming. And with the unveiling of Jason in Part II, one of film’s most menacing villains became at once immortal.
But after the first few installments, the franchise mutated into farce. Jason was now a Celebrity Killer - larger than life, larger than death, and certainly larger than the story. Serious attempts at genuine suspense and tension were abandoned for the all out sensory spectacle of the kill. I suppose part of the transition from horror to camp was necessary; there’s only so much mileage you can get out of dropping off yet another carload of kids in the woods and sending the same knife wielding maniac after them. Plus as a moviegoer, if you considered it long enough, you began to realize you’d paid a good chunk of change just to laugh at the serial dismemberment of other human beings – in color - on a screen the size of your backyard. If such an experience hadn’t been at least partially tongue-in-cheek, basic human decency might demand you come away disgusted with yourself. But alas, the kitsch factor of the typical 1980s slasher film escalated in direct proportion to the body count and by the turn of the century, audiences had become weary of the genre. The one killer even Jason can't escape is the Grim Reaper and eventually it looked like Death had finally caught up with his most notorious protege.
But in Hollywood nothing stays dead forever, and it was only a matter of time before someone decided to dig up Jason Voorhees (no pun intended). But how do you seriously revive a horror franchise known more for buckets of blood and corny black humor than actual horror? And how do you do it without alienating existing fans or turning away new ones? To solve this, 2009’s Friday the 13th took a page from J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek playbook and positioned itself as something of a combination reboot/sequel. Incorporating bits and pieces (again, no pun) from the original Parts I-IV, Friday 2009 attempted to retain the most critical chunks (okay, I'll stop) of the original concept while putting a new face on it for contemporary audiences. Produced by Michael Bay’s horror factory Platinum Dunes, Friday intentionally jettisoned the tomfoolery of the original sequels, opting for a grittier, darker tone. Gone was the shambling, blithely comical hayseed from the original series. The 21st Century Jason Voorhees was a vicious, diabolical mastermind with cat-like reflexes and ninja cunning.
Also in keeping with the modern horror zeitgeist, the remake gravitated toward the remorselessly graphic sort of violence seen in films such as The Devil's Rejects, Hostel and Platinum’s own The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. While I wouldn’t quite classify it as the same sort of flat out "torture porn" as those films, Friday the 13th: The Remake – while better than many expected - was still a joyless and derivative chore to endure. Though certain elements were interesting enough to make it watchable, nothing about it was there in sufficient quantity to make it memorable. What made the first installments of the original series entertaining were the fact that they were – at the time, anyhow – genuinely frightening. The cruel irony of the remake is that in attempting to distance itself from the silliness of the sequels, it fell victim to one of their biggest flaws. In a horror movie, the story is everything, and the scariest part about being stalked is not seeing your killer. In a slasher movie, the killer is the star of the show, and the entertainment is derived mainly from seeing the villain ham it up front and center. But without a strong story, a horror movie isn’t going to scare anyone and without a sense of humor, a slasher flick is just a snuff film with a budget – grim and repulsive.
But what do I know? Despite being what it was, Friday The 13th: Part 2009 made its bottom line back almost six times over – so if you think you smell something, it is probably Michael Bay cooking up the sequel. It is probably safe to say that screenwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift are returning for the follow up and since this will be the 13th film in the long running series, there is early talk of commemorating it by shooting in 3D. I doubt there’s anyone in the horror business – fan or filmmaker – who would bet against Jason Voorhees returning. After all, if there’s anything he has taught us over the years it is that if you think it’s hard to keep a good man down, just try it with a machete wielding homicidal maniac who wears his mommy issues on his sleeve, and a hockey mask over his face. (Bruce Hall/BOP)
