Forgettable 'Friday the 13th'

The remake of Friday the 13th is notable only for its title; we have seen this stuff literally hundreds of times before, sometimes done better (whatever that means to you in this context) and sometimes done worse. This new picture is a remake only in the sense that it borrows the famous name, the setting and a portion of the premise. Nothing wrong with that approach, it’s just that when somebody appropriates all those elements, they also appropriate a measure of expectation, even obligation, to do something memorable, or so I thought. These filmmakers failed to do any such thing. Maybe they never intended to. Movies are a business, after all, and there’s lots of bank to be made just thrashing a franchise.

Horror movies are almost all remakes now, and they fall almost exclusively into two big categories: Remakes of Old US Movies, and Remakes of Asian Flicks. Both tend to fail at the same rate in being great or even passable entertainment, and that rate is approximately 100 percent. Last year’s The Eye and Shutter were all remakes of Asian originals and all were pretty much forgettable. On the US side–and again, sticking just to 2008–we got Prom Night (which I thought was pretty good, but not many other folks agreed), and fresh (sic) installments of the Saw and George Romero’s …of the Dead franchises. Overall, these too were weak, and so were the dozen or so others I could have mentioned.

The Hollywood trend on horror (and pretty much all else) is to add on to a franchise or borrow a proven title on the belief that a previously proven premise is a safer investment than something brand new. The studio executives may be right: Horror movies are usually pretty cheap to make, so they can get into the black pretty fast. But few of these remake pictures are making crazy money (with the huge exception of the five–so-far–Saw films: $661 million gross on $37 million budget) and none of them are memorable entertainment.

Horror pictures have become an assembly-line operation. They rarely feature an original story and differ from each other only in the order in which they deploy the standard scary-movie tricks such as Loud Noise During Quiet Passage, Surprise Face In Mirror, Evil Child With Horrifying Prediction, and Creepy Image On Common Item.

There are young, will-work-for-cheap writers and directors out there who could have given Friday the 13th a surprising and engaging new direction. That would have been so much more exciting than the the slick, soulless 90 minutes this remake turned out be–a re-shoot incorporating the latest (and already exhausted) CG tricks. Absolutely any filmmaker’s product could not have been less stirring than this, and–here is the heart of the argument–the title alone would have brought in the same crowd in the same numbers, regardless of the content.

So going with some new idea means there’s not really a risk involved. Horror fans (I include myself in that group) will show up, regardless. Hey, studio heads, why not try something different next time? Who knows, you might actually end up with something different, something better, something that draws in folks who don’t otherwise care about the genre. Stranger things have happened–just not in the latest crop of horror movies.