1 out of 5

Directed by: Marcus Nispel

The ‘reboot’ or remake or whatever of Ft13th isn’t the worst movie ever.  It’s got some effective callbacks to the originals, and director Nispel and cinematographer Daniel Pearl effectively muck up the atmosphere, besides the general Platinum Dunes sheen.  But even though the series sprang from a pure desire to jump feet first into an exploitable genre, and even though most of the sequels that followed certainly were not cinematic gems… The 2009 version just misses the mark.  In part, it’s because the franchise puts an update at a disadvantage: Freddy and Mike Myers can be told in one-and-done movies, but the icon we associate with Ft13th – Jason – would take a couple movies to tell his tale with semi-effective build-up, else you’re forced to add on two intro segments that start out our flick (the second one featuring some campfire exposition to spell it out…).  The other misstep here is a major one: you can’t really like any of these characters.  Normally there’s at least one oddball at whom we can chuckle, or an overly decent hero character, but Ft13th 2009 just trades one facile group of teens for another, the stupidly “aware” humor and pot jokes and fake boobs not really doing much to sell this to anyone – except, perhaps, similarly facile teens.  We do get the stoic faced Jared Padalecki (of Supernatural) as a good guy, looking for his sister (features in that second intro) in some woods near a familiar campsite, but the film is otherwise so over-stocked with annoying characters – and Jared is sort of side-winded into events – that it doesn’t really balance out.  The movie is directed cleanly by Nispel and has a pretty unique of old and new music cues from Steve Jablonsky, and Derek Mears bring back my favorite version of Jason from Part 2, but the then-new wave of horror wasn’t in favor of actually giving us screen time to soak that in – it’s all a rush to splatter some blood.  Though Ft13th 2009 isn’t as outright trashy as similar genre films that came out during the era, it’s slight positives aren’t enough to prevent you from snoozing through it.