Marcus Nispel gets a lot of shit for his 2003 Texas Chain Saw remake, some of it coming from your’s truly. That film really failed to capture what made Tobe Hooper’s film such a successful exercise in terror. Nispel tried to use washed out colors and abrasive textures to do most of the heavy lifting in that film, never quite getting that what made the original film click was its raw, unrepentant tone of almost documentary realism. In other words, the 2003 TCM was too much sizzle and not enough steak.
Yet, having said that, I’m here to tell you that Nispel’s 2009 Friday the 13th remake is a certifiable success in just about every way. Is it as fun as Friday the 13th The Final Chapter? Nope. Is it as weird as Friday the 13th Part II? No siree. It is, however, a pretty effective reinvigoration of an otherwise dopey franchise using the exact same tricks that made the Texas Chain Saw remake such a disappointment.
It all boils down to the strength (or lack thereof) of the source material.
I consider myself a horror film fan first and a Jason fan second. That’s why I can acknowledge that there are really only four Friday the 13th movies worth watching more than once, and only two of those are what I’d call actually good. The rest are shit. They may have things about them that we love – nutty performances, classic gags, etc. – but only the most obsessive slasher aficionado would claim that Friday the 13th Part Five is worth seeing sober, and I think that Jason Takes Manhattan is being featured in one of Jigsaw’s torture devices in the next Saw film.
The big draw for any of these movies (except the first) is Jason Voorhees himself. There are a couple of ways to peel this apart, and forgive me if I go entirely subjective in my analysis here.
David Mamet said once that audiences like to watch people do things they’re good at. I myself call this the Allure of Expertise. It’s why we love James Bond and Bruce Lee movies, and why it’s so satisfying to watch a truly good heist movie or courtroom drama. Jason Voorhees is the best at what he does, and what he does is kill people. In fact, in the annuals of horror films, nobody has racked up a bigger body count than Jason Voorhees. To get anywhere close, you’ve got to look towards action films like Robocop, Commando, Death Wish III, or most recently, Punisher: War Zone and Stallone’s Rambo.
One of the things we DO NOT watch Jason Voorhees for is self-identification. The notion put forth by so many that audiences kill vicariously when Jason kills is just stupid. Audience identification is given far too much credence – you can enjoy watching a character do something savage and not project yourself into their shoes. You can measure a person’s emotional response, poll them upon leaving the theater and ask them pointed questions that might isolate or elucidate how they responded to a character or scene, but that’s about the extent of it. Everything else is extrapolation, and often biased extrapolation at that.
This is also why I have to laugh when filmmakers state that audiences sympathize with Jason because he saw his mother killed. I have never met a single person who feels a tug on their heart strings for Jason Voorhees. We may understand on a basic, rudimentary level that Jason does what he does because Pamela Voorhees’ memory has a hold on him, but sympathy? Empathy?
A few months back, I reread Frank Miller and Jim Lee’s run-to-date of All-Star Batman and Robin. It’s a pretty fun book, and it really gives us a pretty psychotic take on the Dark Knight. It hit me while I was reading Miller’s inner-monologue for the character that he’s really a stone’s throw from being Jason Voorhees – the trauma of experiencing violence has turned him into a machine built for violence. Miller’s Batman loves the feel of bones crunching under his fist and the sight of teeth flying out of a broken jaw. His life was forever altered by violence and he has built a life that’s singularly focused on controlling and mastering violence himself. Similarly, Jason experiences the murder of his mother and becomes a murderer himself, turning the source of trauma into a relief for his pain.
All of this is just mental masturbation, of course. Ultimately, the motive isn’t important for a character like Jason any more than it’s important for Bond or Rambo. We don’t really give a shit why they do it – we just want to see them do it. Sometimes, in the case of Michael Myers for example, going into too much detail about the whys can sabotage the simple pleasures we get out of watching these two-dimensional archetypes just be pure.
I say all of this to preface my argument in support of the Platinum Dunes Friday the 13th remake because I think it nails what draws me to the character: rage. The film thankfully spends precious little time devoted to Jason’s backstory. The first scenes of the film do a dandy job of recapping how Pamela Voorhees was beheaded in the original Friday the 13th film and we see little mongoloid Jason carry his mother’s head off into the rainy night. That’s it. That’s what you get. The rest of the film is spent making Jason Voorhees an utterly brutal and efficient killer of human beings. I mean, the Jason in this film is like Jason of the original series distilled and reformulated with 100% pure “ARGH!!!” The fury in this version of Voorhees is really something to watch in action. He doesn’t just come out swinging – he seethes and then explodes. It’s pretty spectacular, really.
All of this would be moot, however, if the film itself were limp, but thankfully it’s got some teeth as well. The first fifteen minutes in particular took me completely by surprise. I won’t spoil it because I hope you’ll take my endorsement as a nudge towards catching the film for yourself, but suffice to say it really gets things off on the right foot. There are lots of nods to earlier entries in the series, including some variations on classic kills and familiar locations. It follows the basic set-up of the Friday films, but it’s more aggressive and, dare I say it, edgier than any of the earlier pictures.
The script is kinda goofy, and there are the usual cast of characters that have no business associating with one another except that the script demands every stereotype be checked off. Still, the film has a great tempo for the last half and a nasty streak that tickled my fancy. One character’s death came as a shock, although in hindsight I don’t know why it did, and Nispel gives every character a murder that befits their degree of obnoxiousness, which in my mind is pretty much essential in these pictures. *
If Nispel’s film has a big dramatic flaw, it’s that it’s obviously directed from the cutting room floor – the same haphazard storyboarding and shot compositions I lamented in Zombie’s Halloween remake plague this film as well, the chief difference being that here they don’t have the disadvantage of having John Carpenter’s work lingering in the background as a point of reference.
Yes, Jason does keep a character alive (although this fits with the Jason we see in Part II if you think about it) and, yes, it adds some unnecessary details to Jason’s living situation, giving him an underground hide-out and a somewhat elaborate system of tunnels and traps around Crystal Lake, but none of that SUBTRACTED from the character. None of it made him more mundane or more human. In fact, I thought the additions were just extensions of set-designs and background details first established in Friday the 13th Part II, so nothing new so much as expanded upon. I mean, in Part II, Jason used a phone to make a menacing phone call and even managed to kill the survivor of Part I in a completely different town, for the love of Mike!
For die-hards, there’s a lot to nitpick, but I would distrust the tastes of someone who is so slavish to this particular franchise to begin with. Jason Voorhees is one of my favorite on-screen characters, and this felt like the idealized Jason in my mind – larger than life, a near-mythical creature born of wrath and fueled by bloodshed.
In other words, a great movie monster.
* Of course, acknowledging this opens me up to criticism that I am, in fact, identifying with the killer in these films. So be it. I like seeing really nasty bad guys get particularly painful comeuppance in action movies, too – it’s called a pay off. The longer the audience must endure an insufferable character, the more satisfying (lengthy/gory/hilarious) their demise should be.
