Remake Horror: Friday the 13thPosted by tjparsons on Wed, 15 Apr 2009 2:32am
What I am saying is that I don't go out and pay damn near 10 bucks
to see a movie when I got boxes of DVDs and Videos waiting to be
watched. It's gotta be something special. Something that screams out
to me, "Watch me!".
So the Friday the 13th remake comes to town.
Sounds like the setup of a dirty joke, doesn't it? So Jason Vorhees goes into a movie theater...
Well, it was a dirty joke and the joke was on me.
First, a bit of disclosure.
I am not one of those anti-remake people. True, 99% suck but the
upside is we get nice reissues of the original movies on DVD we would
never get. Do you think there would be an uncut My Bloody Valentine
without the remake? No. Those snazzy new DVDs of the first Fridays
with part 3 in head-ache inducing 3D? Never would have happened
without these money grubbing remakes.
And who knows, maybe one day we will get another The Thing or The
Fly, remakes that actually built on the original movie instead of
rehashing or just plain reducing what made the first one great into
pablum for the masses of prepubescent girls and weak-kneed teenagers
that thought the Chainsaw remake was scary as hell.
Until then we got a white trash Michael Myers with a Nazareth
soundtrack and Ethan Hawke trying to be a bad ass in Precinct 13.
(Son, you may be a good actor but you sure as hell ain't Austin Stoker.)
And we get the new Friday.
Deep breath.
Try not to cuss.
Too much.
You know, I actually had hopes for this one. As much as I love
the series, and I do love it, there is not too much to screw up here.
The plot line is simple. Hulking mongoloid who witnesses his mother's
decapitation kills teenagers. Repeat. Sure, he turned into a hulking
ZOMBIE mongoloid later on. And he fought a psychic. And went to
space. And fought a magic child molester. Still, the basics are
simple. Large retarded man-child in the woods, choppin' meat.. Easy,
right?
Wrong.
These guys screwed the pooch then sold the video rights. It's like instead of remaking the series, they remade the bad reviews.
Maybe the characters were one dimensional, but they were
memorable. Sure we all hated Shelly with his Jew-fro and practical
jokes that were not that practical nor were they jokes but we felt bad
for the jackass when he tried to score with the hot Latino chick Vera
and struck out.
Are we gonna remember the knuckleheads in this new movie? Hell, I
can barely remember their faces. There was the guy who sang Sister
Christian. There was the guy from Supernatural who was looking for
this sister and who did the whole look pensive thing he does well and
in every episode. There was the sister whose last line to Mister
Vorhees should be tattooed on the forehead of whoever wrote it so they
can be bitchslapped by anyone literate enough to read such crap or who
has a friend that can read it for them and is nice enough to pass on
the bad news. And then there was the black guy.
Don't get me started on racism in movies. It's a conversation you
will surely regret as it will turn into a rant filled with obscenities.
I will tell you how King Kong is nothing but a parable to keep black
folks away from the white women. (A king in his land, brought here in
chains...was doing fine til he chased the blond home.) Slasher flicks
have been labeled racist in the fact that the black characters always
die early. And I admit, there is some validity to that. But never
NEVER did the Fridays have a black character die in such a way that it
was like a visual racist pun.
He died in the woodpile.
A woodpile that was about 200 feet from where the wood was chopped.
That was still pretty damn far away from the house.
Why would a woodpile be so damn far away from the chopping area, yet not right next to the woodpile?
So there would be a Nubian in the fuel supply.
I thought it as I watch the dude fall then I got mad at myself
when I did. Then I got pissed off at whoever wrote it. Even if they
had never heard the line, someone along the line had to have and said
nothing, thinking it was funny.
Now I will carefully climb off my soap box.
I could get into the whole Jason taking a hostage, Jason being
able to rig a sweet alarm system throughout the woods, Jason being, it
seems, the first Mongoloid master electrician or Jason scurrying
through a series of tunnels like a Viet Cong in a bad Chuck Norris
movie. But I won't.
You see, a lot of people actually enjoyed this movie. On one of
those web forum things I go to, one guy said maybe those who hated are just
too old to enjoy these movies anymore. You just can't identify with
the teenagers anymore, he says. Who knows, maybe he is right. Maybe I
am getting too old for this shit.
All I know is I watched my childhood get fingered for a hour and a
half and I paid for the privilege and am sick about it. You see, when
sex and money are intertwined someone is a whore. I just gottta figure
out if it was those who made the movie or me.
R.R. Moore
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