Friday 13th...

I wasn't sure I was going to see the remake of Friday 13th. In the wake of the Halloween debacle (I'll get into this), I wasn't sure I could trust another remake, but when the chance to see a preview for free came up on Tuesday, I knew I couldn't say no.

Don't get me wrong, I wanted this movie to be good. I saw the trailers and I was excited. It looked scary, it looked fun. It looked like everything I hoped it would be. And then I remembered, Halloween. I drug Dinah to see that at a drive-in theater a little after it came out. (A horror movie at a drive-in? Too good an opportunity to pass up.) I was a fan of the Halloween movies (except number 3, which was, well....an odd choice). I would even watch the later sequels that kept coming out hoping that they would someday regain the brilliance of the first two. So, when I saw Rob Zombie was signing up to do this movie, I was thrilled.

Of course the movie sucked. My high expectations didn't help, but the movie missed the point of Michael Meyers. He went from being pure evil--a killing machine of the highest order--to a whiny, abused, pyscho. This was bad.

It was bad for two reasons. The first was that it took away one of the main themes of the movies. Dr. Loomis was always there in the Haloween legend to inform anyone that Meyers was just evil. There was no explaining it. There was no wondering about it. He was just evil and sometimes that's how it works out. And that was what made Micheal so creepy. From the earliest scenes where you see Michael in a clown mask stalking his older sister, there's just no reason for him to be that way. It looked like he came from a (possibly upper) middle-class household. He seemed to have been given a nice clown outfit and his parents seemed to care about him, but he was evil. There was no real explanation. So we had to invent it ourselves. Which is far creepier than being told outright what made him a killer. To know it was the same social problems and issues facing many households made it an all-too-easy cliche and took away a lot of the Meyers mystique.

The second reason it was bad for the movies was because we all were secretly rooting for Micheal Meyers. That sounds bad, but hey, it's kind of true. We probably didn't want him to get Lori Strode, but we did want him to pick off some of her annoying friends. And we wanted him to do it in brutal and interesting ways. It's part of the cliche of horror movies that they're filled with teenagers who act in the most annoying and cliched ways. They only want to get laid or stoned or drunk and you knew people like this in high school and college and they sucked. And you secretly wanted them to just shut up and go away. Maybe they gave you swirlies or stole your girlfriend, or maybe they just annoyed you from afar, but either way it was cathartic to see them meeting with gory deaths. To turn Meyers into an annoying little punk made him more like the annoying people we had been hoping he'd knock off.

So, it was with this baggage and the low expectations they bring, that I went to see the new Friday the 13th remake. And I gotta tell you, everything Haloween did wrong, Friday the 13th did right. The remake spends about 2 minutes on Jason's backstory and get right to the hacking. It doesn't make Jason understandable or try to explain him, it just let's Jason be Jason.

One thing I wasn't expecting from was Rory's old boyfriend. He was good. And he looks good older and with the slight beard that seems to be everywhere these days.

I won't give away too much, but the movie is a good mix of the cliches we love and expect from horror movies and some good fun action. They didn't re-invent the horror flick, but it's a fun ride. So enjoy it if you get the chance.