A New Beginning

Year: 2009

Director: Marcus Nispel

Cast: Jared Padalecki, Danielle Panabaker, Derek Mears

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Good lord, I done it.

Saturday's screening of the Friday the 13th remake in honor of Jason Voorhees' 69th birthday (a big'un, but he's still spry as a nubile teen, the old bastard) formed the very last entry in my long-running marathon of the extant Friday franchise. For the time being, we're at the very end. A moment of silence, please.

...

Moment over. Time for me to resume not shutting up. The fourth title to get the remake treatment from prolific horror copiers producers Platinum Dunes, Friday the 13th was put in the capable hands of Marcus Nispel, the director behind the surprisingly decent update of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The results were... surprisingly decent. 

Horror remakes get a lot of flack, and a lot of them deserve it. But among the pantheon of revisited horror classics (among which are numbered the Rob Zombie's evisceration of Halloween and the atrocious Jackie Earle Haley rendition of A Nightmare on Elm Street), Friday the 13th stands out as a film that is shockingly easy to like. Perhaps this stems from the fact that, unlike the aforementioned films, the original 1980 Friday the 13th is not a masterwork of cinema.

It's a terrific and historic slasher film for many reasons, but cinematography, acting, writing, and directing are not included among them. This is a film with room for improvement, and while I would balk to say I enjoy the remake better than the original film, it's not exactly a stain on a hallowed artistic masterpiece.

And come on, could any film possibly be worse than Jason X already was?

Friday the 13th has a fascinatingly wonky structure, loosely remaking the events of the first four films rather than just the original plot, for obvious reasons. Friday fans don't want to see Pamela traipsing about in the woods again. They want Jason Motherlovin' Voorhees, and that's what they got. After a brief and strikingly terrible recap of the final scene from the original film, where Mrs. Voorhees (Nana Visitor) gets beheaded by a camp counselor (Stephanie Rhodes, who looks far too much like an Abercrombie bag model to do justice to Adrienne King), we pick up in the modern day with a group of campers, two of whom are on the lookout for an illicit crop of weed rumored to be growing along the banks of mythic Crystal Lake.

[FIRST ACT SPOILERS] During a truncated 25-minute murder spree, the bag-headed Jason Voorhees (Derek Mears) tears through the campers with alarming alacrity, capturing one of their number - Whitney Miller (Amanda Righetti) - and dragging her back to his underground lair as his prisoner. Thus the false first act ends, in a halfway effective attempt at misleading the audience a la Janet Leigh in Psycho. At which point we jump six weeks into the future, where a new crop of revelers arrives at a lakeside property for a bit of R&R. By that I mean Rolling joints and Rcheating on their girlfriends.

Our Meat for the evening consists of Trent (Travis Van Winkle), the preppy dickwad whose father owns the house and whose supreme douchiness can only be contained by his two entire collared shirts; Jenna (Danielle Panabaker), Trent's girlfriend who kind of hates him; Nolan (Ryan Hansen), a surfer bro who looks like an Owen Wilson puppet; Chelsea (Willa Ford), his sexy blonde girlfriend - this is a Michael Bay production, after all; Lawrence (Arlen Escarpeta), a young black man who's trying to get his music label off the ground and makes racial jokes about 199% of the time; Chewie (Aaron Yoo), a kind of gross slob with the inhibitions of a brainless mollusk; and Bree (Julianna Guill), the blonde vixen at large who exists only to act slutty in the general direction of the camera.

The group has several run-ins with Clay (Jared Padalecki), who is puttering around the township on his motorcycle searching for Whitney, who is his estranged sister. Trent is the worst, so he ignores his plight and shouts at him, but Jenna has a heart so she accompanies him for a search of the nearby abandoned camp. Somewhere along the way, Jason finds himself a hockey mask and picks up where he left off, plowing through the partiers like they're made of tissue paper.

He's very territorial. Like a dog. Or me, when I have gelato.

As you can probably tell from the capture and enchainment of Whitney, Platinum Dunes hadn't entirely grown out of the dreary, torture porn-esque phase of Chainsaw and its prequel. Several of the deaths are a bit more prolonged than they might have been, and Jason's new MO involves a variety of traps laid around the forest, waiting to ensnare some brittle bones. These scenes can be a bit dreary and become especially unwatchable when we have to spend any amount of time with the vulgar redneck denizens of Crystal Lake, who seem transported directly from Nispel's nightmare vision of backwater Texas.

However, the film largely sloughs off these scenes after the first act and, excepting a necessary return to the underground tunnels in the finale, manages to sustain its focus on what the franchise does best: bloody death and ridiculously unnecessary sex. And you know what? It's fun, damn it.

The acting, as per usual, finds its closest peer in the talky parts of porn (clearly the women were cast for assets other than Juilliard training, and the men are hardly better - unfortunately including Padalecki, who gruffly barks his lines like he's choking on licorice). But the characters all have remarkable chemistry, fueled by a set of 80's inspired barbs and banter provided by screenwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, improving monumentally on their work for Freddy vs. Jason. 

Though with equally questionable haircuts.

Some scenes even manage the campy, ineffable fun of the original franchise, almost rivaling the early days in terms of sheer gaudiness. One moment in particular (a raunchy sex scene between Trent and Friendly Neighborhood Vixen, Bree) is sustained, laugh-out-loud hilarity for two indelible minutes. Many of the kills are likewise a major return to form, full of splashy gore and improper use of household garden tools.

Two more strengths mark the film: The cinematography (by Daniel C. Pearl of the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre) is extremely capable, capturing the darkness of the forest at night while still giving the frame plenty of depth and full visibility, allowing shafts of light to delicately arc across with unexpected beauty. And last but not least, Derek Mears is a terrific killer. He doesn't have the personality of a Kane Hodder, but his Jason is full of vigor and rage; a terrifically solid presence that absolutely justifies the fear and shock that the characters feel.

It also helps that he's just uncomfortably large.

That said, the film obviously isn't perfect. The production design in Jason's lair is fabulously overwrought (Water pipes! Clinking chains! Creepy dolls? An overturned school bus!), turning what was already a pretty bad idea into a dime store spook show, and the film can't sustain Jason as a character based on the mythology present, which absurdly lacks the ability to stand on its own. Honestly, there is hardly any point in calling this film a remake, considering that a good half of the sequels that came before it were more self-sustained (and shamelessly plagiaristic). It's merely a particularly well-made dumb sequel that brings nothing new to the table save an utterly strange structure that bursts across the screen in fits and starts.

The tension stalls in the underground caves, which eradicate any sense of urgency with scenes that seem to take place in an entirely separate dimension where time doesn't work in quite the same way as our own. Like Narnia, but with more inexplicable plumbing grates.

But we take the bad with the good. Or, in the case of slasher films, we take the worse with the bad. And at the end of the day, against all odds Friday the 13th is a good time at the movies. Hardcore retro fans will have you believing it besmirches the good name of Mr. Voorhees, but some people try their hardest not to have fun. Turn your brain off, have a blast, watch some axe impalements. I don't see nothing wrong with that.

Killer: Jason Voorhees (Derek Mears)

Final Girl: Whitney Miller (Amanda Righetti) feat. Clay Miller (Jared Padalecki)

Best Kill: While hiding under a dock, Chelsea is stabbed through the top of the head with a machete. When Jason pulls it back up, this drags her above the surface of the water, revealing her breasts. It's basically a perfect encapsulation of the entire series in one shot.

Sign of the Times: Let's just say that Whitney would not be chained up in an underground cavern if Jigsaw hadn't come to town five years earlier.

Scariest Moment: Clay and Jenna hide under a pile of canoes while Jason furiously searches for them.

Weirdest Moment: Lawrence decides to masturbate in the living room. To a winter catalogue.

Champion Dialogue: "Your tits are so juicy, dude."

Body Count: 14

1. Mrs. Voorhees is decapitated.
2. Wade is slashed with a machete.
3. Amanda is roasted over a campfire in her sleeping bag.
4. Mike is stabbed through the floor with a machete.
5. Richie has his skull split with a machete.
6. Donnie has his throat slit.
7. Nolan is shot in the head with an arrow.
8. Chelsea is stabbed in the skull with a machete.
9. Chewie is stabbed in the throat with a screwdriver.
10. Lawrence has an axe thrown into his back.
11. Bree is impaled on antlers.
12. Officer Bracke is stabbed in the face with a fireplace poker. 
13. Trent is stabbed through the back and impaled on the back of a truck.
14. Jenna is stabbed through the back with a machete. 

TL;DR: Friday the 13th is a grim, but surprisingly decent remake of a slasher classic with room to grow.

Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 1675
Reviews In This Series
Friday the 13th (Cunningham, 1980)
Friday the 13th Part 2 (Miner, 1981)
Friday the 13th Part 3: 3D (Miner, 1982)
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (Zito, 1984)
Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (Steinmann, 1985)
Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (McLoughlin, 1986)
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (Buechler, 1988)
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (Hedden, 1989)
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (Marcus, 1993)
Jason X (Isaac, 2001)
Freddy vs. Jason (Yu, 2003)
Friday the 13th (Nispel, 2009)

Come Back To Texas

Year: 2003

Director: Marcus Nispel

Cast: Jessica Biel, Jonathan Tucker, Andrew Bryniarski

Run Time: 1 hour 38 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

In the past decade, the horror community has been inundated with remake after remake after remake. These types of films have always been around, even in the 50's and 60's and back, but since the mid-2000's there has been an overwhelming glut of the tepid things. Just on this blog, I've covered a small army of them including Carrie,  Evil Dead, Fright Night, The Last House on the Left, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Prom Night, and The Wizard of Gore, and there's easily ten times that amount on the market today.

With most cinematic movements, it's hard to tamp down a true ignition point. There tends to be several films around the same time that coalesce into the beginning of a new wave of filmmaking, like how the proto-slashers The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Black Christmas came out within weeks of one another in 1974. Luckily for us, the remake boom has one clear culprit.

In 2003, Michael Bay's new production company Platinum Dunes released their first of many many many low budget remakes - The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. As if you couldn't have guessed that already. 

I really shouldn't bury the lede in reviews where I stick the poster on the top.

The film was such a sterling success that other studios immediately hopped on the bandwagon and began pumping out updates on their long dormant horror franchises, prominent and obscure alike (and if anybody has any insider information on how the hell Mother's Day got remade, please contact me immediately). What most of them seemed to miss was the fact that Texas Chainsaw was actually pretty good.

But we're not here to talk about the tsunami of crappy remakes. We're here to discuss their pretty good progenitor and the influence it has - for better or for worse - over the narrative and aesthetic stylings of the ensuing decade.

The first of these is immediately apparent. Though the characters in this film have no obvious analogue with the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre, they are exponentially more attractive. In fact, if we view beauty as the equation x=log2(3^10) with x being the proportional attractiveness of the current cast over the classic cast, the results would be math.

Sexy, sexy math.

Our Meat for the evening, and by any definition, the film doesn't view them as more than that, are Morgan (Jonathan Tucker, also from The Ruins), a sexy nerd-stoner who combines the most annoying traits of both stereotypes and whose every line of dialogue sounds like vomit dribbling from the gaping maw of a mad drunk; Andy (Mike Vogel, the sexy outlaw from Under the Dome), the sexy rebel - a real stretch, performance-wise; Pepper (Erica Leerhsen of Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2), a sexy hitchhiker whose thirst for Andy rivals Leatherface's thirst for blood; Kemper (Eric Balfour of the first episode of Buffy), the sexy hick with a chip on his shoulder; and Erin (Jessica Biel of The A-Team), the sexy girlfriend of said sexy hick - soon to be his sexy fiancée if he has anything to say about it.

The kiddos are driving through the countryside to a Skynyrd concert in Dallas. As if that wasn't tip-off enough, Texas Chainsaw is set in 1973, the same year as the original film. On their way they pick up another Hitchhiker (Lauren German), who blows her head off after shouting about her friends all dying. They pull off at the nearest gas station and are sent to a mill to await the Sheriff. As they wait and wait, they soon realize the nearby house will become their final resting place as Leatherface (Andrew Bryniarski), the Sheriff (R. Lee Ermey), and their family send them one by one to the basement workshop to be chainsaw massacred.

To be fair to them, how could this lovely home seem like there might be killers hiding inside?

The great thing about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is that it can be taken on its own. Its plot intersects with the plot of the original at so few points, it actually becomes a distinctly separate movie. This is greatly to its favor, because comparing any single horror film to Texas Chain Saw is like flinging spaghetti at a dartboard and hoping for a bull's eye.

And there are even some cases where the film - I wouldn't say "improves on," but it... extrapolates certain sequences from the Chain Saw structure to great effect. It is debatable whether this film's increase in gore improves the horror (I personally don't find it to do so - it's suitably disgusting and wet, but I find the whole film to be a little too slick to get under the skin), but something must be said for a girl watching a hulking killer attack while wearing her boyfriend's face. And a sequence with a meat hook and a piano is delightful in a sickening kind of way.

The film isn't afraid to up the ante and in today's world of anonymous studio horror, that is a quality to be much admired. Texas Chainsaw allows us to explore the entire deranged town, visit the nearby slaughterhouse, and see just how far gore prosthetic technology has come since the last entry in the franchise in 1994 (or 1997, once Matthew McConaughey got his way).

This gleeful excess is mirrored in the deliriously drippy and wet production design, which seems to have been inspired by that time I walked to class on a rainy day and forgot an umbrella. That or the filmmakers' fervent desire to keep Jessica Biel as soaking wet as possible. It's hilarious. No matter where she goes it rains on her, whether it be literal rain or the inexplicable flooding of Leatherface's workshop. At one point she manages to find a refuge but Leatherface triggers the fire sprinklers because the teen boys in the audience would likely implode if she spent one second without her sopping bosoms flapping about.

And yet this guy keeps his shirt on. Wasteful.

Joke all I might, I do enjoy my share of needlessly exploitative horror. It's always delightful to watch the filmmakers' obvious desperation to sexify even the most harrowing of scenarios. There's enough hot dudes around to not feel particularly misogynistic. But let me expound my theories on sexuality and exploitation in its own essay, I don't want to bog down this post like so much rainwater.

Here comes the part in the positive reviews where I dump all the negative things I have to say. Because, succeed as it might in distancing itself from Texas Chain Saw, this film is a remake and is thus beholden to comparisons. I've already mentioned the movie's distancing slickness, but the cold grey "gritty" aesthetic just doesn't do it for me in terms of this franchise's narrative universe. I associate Texas Chainsaw with oppressive heat and claustrophobia and that is just not the feeling this film gives off.

It's altogether shallow, and the film follows suit. Gone are the first films intensely angry political sentiments. It's understandable. 2003 was a wildly different societal climate than 1974, though the original time period has been needlessly retained (in fact, Erin's irritating moralizing stances, the fashion, and speech patterns actively disagree with the time period). 

There's more gore but less personality, and it's not necessarily a lesser movie because of it. It has different aims than the decades-gone original. But it's certainly a more superficial one.

But in spite of these shortcomings, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is certainly worth its salt. Its ability to be genuinely tense and creative paved the way for the battalions of remakes to come. Unfortunately but predictably, other studios followed the route of "slick and grey is cool" rather than "good horror movies make money" but what are you gonna do?

Watch Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The rest, as they say, is history. Let it confine itself to the books while you enjoy one of the most interesting reboots modern cinema has to offer.

TL;DR: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is obviously not as good as the original, but is wonderfully intense and fast-paced.

Rating: 7/10

Body Count: 8

1. The Hitchhiker shoots herself through the head.
2. Kemper is hit in the head with a sledgehammer.
3. Pepper is sliced with a chainsaw.
4. Andy has his leg sliced off, is hung on a meathook, and stabbed in the chest.
5. Morgan is hung on a chandelier and chainsawed in the crotch.
6. Sheriff Hoyt is run over with a police car. 
7. Officer #1 is killed with a chainsaw offscreen.
8. Officer #2 is killed with a chainsaw offscreen. 

Word Count: 1449

Reviews In This Series

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper, 1974)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (Hooper, 1986)
Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (Burr, 1990)
Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (Henkel, 1994)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Nispel, 2003)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (Liebesman, 2006)
Texas Chainsaw 3D (Luessenhop, 2013)
Leatherface (Bustillo & Maury, 2017)