Friday the 13th
(1980) vs. Friday the 13th (2009)
Original
Friday the 13th is my favorite horror slasher
franchise ever. Yeah the films sequels went on to be silly and dumb, but I love
them all.
The original Friday the 13th made way for ‘80’s
slashers, it was really the first
slasher to be overly gory. The films that came before it such as Halloween and
Psycho, weren’t really that gory. Yeah, in Psycho we get the chocolate syrup
going down the drain but Halloween really had no gore. So, Friday the 13th
was starting something new that would cause other horror movies to follow.
The film centers around Camp Crystal Lake,
which we all know now is the famous stomping grounds of the killer Jason
Voorhees.
Steve Christy (Peter Brouwer) is the owner of the camp and is looking to reopen it, despite a series of strange and unexplained deaths that plagued the camp 20 years earlier.
He’s being helped by a new group of camp counselors that are “Babes in the Woods” as Christy puts it.
With the counselors settling in, someone lurks in the woods surrounding the camp. They are spying on the care free campers and plotting a revenge on those who have woken the camp from its years of slumber.
Steve Christy (Peter Brouwer) is the owner of the camp and is looking to reopen it, despite a series of strange and unexplained deaths that plagued the camp 20 years earlier.
He’s being helped by a new group of camp counselors that are “Babes in the Woods” as Christy puts it.
With the counselors settling in, someone lurks in the woods surrounding the camp. They are spying on the care free campers and plotting a revenge on those who have woken the camp from its years of slumber.
I love the creepy theme, the setting, and how the story is
setup as a who done it.
The film does have flaws, mainly its pace. Now-a-days people
might become very frustrated with how slow it can go, they may also be
frustrated that they’ve seen this type of film over and over again.
Yes, Friday the 13th might not be as effective as
it once was, because let’s face it this is the film those other films modeled
themselves after. Yet, if you can see past all that then you’re in for a real
treat.
Remake
I might be in the minority, because I actually enjoyed the
remake. The reason for that is because I don’t look at the 2009 film as a
remake I look at it as just another sequel. Let’s be honest with one another
the remake was better than a lot of the sequels.
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.
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.
As a remake to the original film, well it’s hard to compare.
You see Jason Voorhees has become this icon in the horror world and if you put
out a Friday the 13th remake people expect him to be the killer,
hockey mask and all.
But if Hollywood
wanted to truly remake Friday the 13th, Jason Voorhees wouldn’t be
the killer at all, it would be Pamela Voorhees, Jason’s mother. Pamela was the
original killer and in the 2009 film her story gets shoved into the opening of
the film. So, we can’t call the remake really a remake, it’s more like a
reboot. It takes what fans loved from the original Friday the 13th
films and tries to mesh them all together to come up with a story that would
spawn more films in that specific continuum.
Yet, I have to say that the remake was good for what it was.
I wouldn’t have minded to see a sequel to it. I thought that they did some
creative things with Jason and the story sticks to the basic Friday formula.
So, which is better?
The original comes away with the win. Yeah, it’s dated by
today’s standards but it’s still a creepier film. The remake just tried to
duplicate what the original and other Friday the 13th movies did,
but the original set the standard and formula for these films.
Original Wins
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