Friday the 13th is Back and Jason Lives

This weekend saw the return of one of the world’s infamous movie villains – Jason Voorhees; the hockey mask wearing, machete wielding, psychopathic killer that is bent on revenge.
First thing I will say is that I really did enjoy this movie and for those of you that have been saying that it’s a bad Friday film, you clearly haven’t seen Jason Goes to Hell or Jason X.
This movie trumps both of those films. Yet, I will admit the movie really has nothing new to offer and we’ve seen it all before and it will not reinvent slasher films. It’s just a Friday the 13th movie and that’s not a bad thing, it has plenty of gore and other things that we expect.
The movie does effectively merge elements from the first four Friday films and weaves them into a new entertaining story, I mean it doesn’t have a great plot and the characters are cardboard cut outs of stero-types but it’s entertaining to say the least.
The plot is basically this; Clay (Jared Padalecki) is searching the area around Crystal Lake for his sister who went missing. He meets up with a group of kids that have come up to the “rich kids'” parent’s cabin for the weekend to party and of course in Friday the 13th fashion they all start to get killed off one by one – if it’s not broken, don’t try to fix it.
Alright let’s talk about what everyone is going to this film to see and that’s Jason. Well he’s back and his back and very agile and with a higher IQ this time around. (Side Note: Everyone has to stop complaining about Jason running, because Jason has ran in the franchise before. If you want to argue with me, just go watch parts 2, 3 and 4 and you’ll see Jason chasing his victims. So, for everyone who denies this I think it’s safe to say they’ve never seen those parts. The Jason that you see in Freddy vs. Jason was a slow walking one and he was never like that before that movie, the slow walking thing was always a Michael Myers thing.) Back to Jason in this movie, he’s great and he has made the abandoned Camp Crystal Lake his fortress, he has dug out under ground tunnels and has rigged wires all around the camp so when someone trips over one a bell will ring in his under ground tunnels alerting him of trespassers. I thought this was pretty smart of Jason and makes him a little scarier.
We also see a young Jason very earlier in the film and he witness his mothers death and I liked how he picks up her locket and then takes the machete that killed his mother and grips it in his hand, I felt this was like Pamela Voorhees passing the baton to her son, because we hear her tell him to kill.
Now, a question everyone has been asking me is if the classic theme of “Ki Ki Ki Ma Ma Ma” is in the movie and it is but not a lot. I heard it very distinctively in the very beginning and then again at the very end. I could have missed it during some scenes.
Also everyone is always interested in the kills in these types of movies and the kills are good, there’re a few that are PG-13 type kills but all and all I thought they were creative, it was basically old kills with new tricks and it worked out. My favorite kill involves a sleeping bag and a camp fire.
In the end being a huge Friday the 13th fan I was not let down. The people I think who are going to be let down are the ones that go into it looking for a horror masterpiece, its not a horror masterpiece, but it takes all the things that made Jason great and gives us what I expected a movie that sticks to the very basic formula of Friday movies.

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