Friday The 13th (1980) [Blu-ray]
Horror

Rip into a chilling new Uncut Edition of Friday The 13th. With the addition of unrated footage, and insightful special features, plunge deeper into the film that spawned eleven sequels and the genre's unstoppable bad guy, Jason Voorhees. A new owner and several young counselors gather to reopen Camp Crystal Lake, where a young boy drowned and several vicious murders occurred years earlier. They've ignored the locals' warnings that the place has a death curse...and one by one they find out how unlucky Friday the 13th can be as they are stalked by a violent killer.

User Comment: Tom Foolery from United States, 14 February 2009 • *** This review may contain spoilers *** Did you know a horror franchise drowned a day before this week? The Producer and Directer weren't paying any attention... They were counting their money while that cult icon drowned. It's name was Friday the 13th. I watching the night it happened. Losing my temper... there. I was a fan. Friday the 13th should have been awesome. Every minute! It was... It wasn't a very good remake. We can give up now... fans.

You see Friday the 13th was my favorite movie... and today it was raped.

I mistakingly had high expectations of this movie. Of course I was bothered by the fact that Marcus Nispel, who did such a smash up job on Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, was directing. In fact besides the fact that Jason wore a hockey mask, had an affinity for machetes and his mother was in it for five seconds. It was almost impossible to differentiate between the two movies. Lots of slack jawed yokels and shaky camera action in the dark, just like Chainsaw. Poor story telling with numerous loose ends, just like Chainsaw. Terrible adaptation, just like Chainsaw.

Okay, maybe I'm being a little too hard on the movie. The first few minutes of the movie were incredible. Of coarse there' no rhyme or reason to Jason's return from the grave, but they never had on in the original either. The elements that they took from the first four movies were there, and yes I said 'Four' movies. There were elements from the Final Chapter despite what the propaganda says. The acting wasn't terrible. Yoo's character was probably the funniest character to ever be in a Friday the 13th to date. The under the dock kill was so classic that it felt like it belonged and it was good to see Jason in his old sack mask again.

Many key elements were there, but only for a second or two. Mrs. Voorhees head wasn't really elaborated on and wouldn't be caught as significant to anyone who hadn't seen the original movies. Despite all the hype about how Jason gets his hockey mask in this movie, it was a big let down and just seemed a little too convenient. The locals in the town were basically rejects from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In fact the scenery may have appeared New Englandish... but the locals just screamed, "I'm from Texas!"

Jason Voorhees. How could they screw up a character like Jason Voorhees? Give these folks a hand though. They did it. I started to realize that Jason wasn't quite himself around the sleeping bag death scene. First and foremost Jason is a killer, not a sadistic torturer. Sure he's done some pretty brutal things to his victims, but roasting a person alive, just isn't his style. It's too much set up for Jason honestly. Additionally, if Jason has you on the ground with a machete coming down at you, you are DEAD. He doesn't lock you in his basement and keep you alive for months because you're a pretty girl who looks like his mother. Jason kills. And he especially kills if you impersonate his mother.

The end... in more ways than one. When I watched the ending of this movie I literally had the feeling that I was ripped off. The pay off with the wood chipper wasn't even utilized here. And then for some reason the survivor(s), another thing that was lame, decided to dump his body in the lake. This means they had to actively decide it was a good idea to get rid of the evidence that they were not the manics that killed a bunch of people, but it also means that they had to take Jason out of the chipper, take the chain off his neck, remove his mask, and carry him all the way out to the dock. And if Jason was playing possum the entire time, why didn't he just kill them when he still had access to a wood chipper and a barn full of tools?

In fact this movie raised nothing but questions. Who killed Mrs. Voorhees? What ever happened to her? Why did Jason miraculously come back from the dead? Why was his body still intact after all those years in the lake? Why does Jason wear a mask? How did he keep the rats from eating his mother's head? Why did the local cops not bother investigating anything? How did Jason learn to hook up electricity to his camp? Why didn't the power company notice nobody's paying the electric bill for an abandoned summer camp? Why would Jason keep some girl chained up in his basement? Why do all the locals of Crystal Lake appear to have come from Texas? Why did they bother doing makeup for Jason when they show his face for maybe two frames of the whole movie? Why does Jason pop out of the lake at the end with his mask on? What were they thinking? Why did I see this miserable attempt to remake a great movie? Why am I wasting more time on a bad review? Why are you still reading?

Summary: In sum: one group of annoying people are quickly dispatched; another group of even more annoying people are less quickly dispatched.

Summary: All in all a terrible movie.

[CSW] -2- Lousy storytelling and every thing in it seemed to annoy me. I don't know what I expected but this wasn't it. If you can, rent it because the edited for TV version would be even worse and only watch it if you have run out of anything better thing to do, and even that is a maybe.

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