Still dead after all these years

The funniest thing I’ve seen all week was an imdb.com post about the new remake of Friday the 13th, the 1980 Halloween-by-way-of-Meatballs ripoff that spawned 10 mind-numbing sequels. The post began “This comment may contain spoilers.”

Spoilers?!? As if there was any chance of a F13 movie containing anything even remotely surprising, or for that matter doing anything other than slavishly following the exact tedious formula of every other entry in the series.

Let me make this clear right off the bat: If you’re thinking of going to see this latest remake from the producers who gave us the 21st century versions of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hitcher, and The Amityville Horror in the expectation that they will have spruced up the concept a bit, forget it. (The second funniest thing I read was that it took three writers to concoct this.) It follows the Joe Bob Briggs rule that if you’re going to make a sequel, it should be the exact same movie.

I was obsessed with monster movies as a kid but grew out of the genre around the time it was taken over by slasher films in the 1980s. But I admit to having seen every F13 sequel. The first few established the formula—teens arrive at abandoned camp site, smoke dope, and have sex, after which all save one are slaughtered by Jason Voorhees, a hulking brute in a hockey mask disguising a hideous visage that is exposed just before the end of the movie.

After those I approached each new entry thinking, surely they’ll have to do something different this time. By about the fifth or sixth sequel, that gave way to a fascination with the willful unoriginality of the series: watching product made for a core of viewers who expected each new entry to be exactly the same. I felt like Andy Warhol contemplating that can of Campbell’s soup.

Well, you have to be an optimist in the profession of film reviewing. But watching the F13 movies was never as interesting as pondering their anti-artistic significance. (Frankly, watching them was never as interesting as watching water boil or wallpaper peel.)

It doesn’t have to be that way. Genre work—writing books or playing music or making movies to a set of basic, well understood expectations—can be liberating rather than restraining.

Consider three genre specialists who died in the past six weeks: novelist Donald E. Westlake, who under his own name wrote the funniest books I have ever read but under the pseudonym “Richard Stark” wrote dozens of engrossing thrillers about a hardened crook named Parker; filmmaker Ray Dennis Steckler, creator of such no-budget cult classics as Rat Pfink a Go Go and The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies; and Lux Interior of the Cramps, a band that never, in the half dozen or so times that I saw them, played a song that wasn’t structurally a simple 12-bar blues. They all gloried in their favored genres as platforms from which to exercise their imaginations, and it saddens me that I’ll never enjoy anything new from them.

Is it possible to do anything interesting with the F13 formula aside from parodying it? They could increase the gore and torture content, but I think audiences got turned off by that with the recent wave of “torture porn” movies. They could give greater depth to the characters, but how much do you want to emphasize with someone whose sole function is to be butchered? The film could become a display of robust craftsmanship, but what filmmaker with any talent would want to waste his or her time on something made for undemanding teenagers?

Because that’s all the F13 movies really are, fodder for undemanding kids old enough to get into an R-rated film. The makers of this remake call it a “reimagining,” but that’s a meaningless term for a series that never displayed any imagination in the first place.

The press notes contain the usual inane quotes from the producers and director about how much they loved the F13 movies when they were young and that their biggest concern with this remake was keeping it real for the fans. The actor who plays Jason is quoted at one point as saying, “The first time I strapped on the [hockey] mask in [makeup supervisor Scott Stoddard’s] shop in Los Angeles, I got chills…Everyone in the shop stopped what they were doing and looked over. I felt like I was lifting Excalibur.” Gee, I just assumed they bought the thing off the shelf at Dicks.

But you can’t take press notes seriously, and I’d like to think that the makers of Friday the 13th mach 2009 are laughing all the way to the bank. It’s a lot less depressing than thinking that professional filmmakers could expend honest effort making something this dully stupid.