Yesterday was an even darker day in America than the day the pilot episode of "W*A*L*T*E*R" got pre-empted by the '84 Democratic National Convention. Uh huh, the "Friday the 13th" remake. (On the flip side it was Arsenio Hall's 54th birthday, too, so yay for relevance!) I wish to usher in this auspicious event the only way I feel it can be properly ushered: laughably and comically. On July 28, 1989, Arsenio sat down with Kane Hod...oops, Jason on his late night talk show for world television's first intimate and personal glimpse into Camp Crystal Lake's own machete-lunging, serial-disemboweling, "how-in-thee-hell-did-he-just-do-that?"-superliminal-time-space-continuum-accelerating son of a BITCH:
You could've cut the silence in that interview with a...never mind.
Funny stuff. Arsenio is actually somewhat less unbearable in this clip. I saw Friday the 13th yesterday. I knew it would be terrible, but whoa! Not exactly a remake, and not at all a sequel. It's the only movie worse than Zabriskie Point.
As a fan of the series, I was terribly disappointed, and I went in with the lowest expectations possible. The trouble with this flick, as with the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, is that the team tried too hard to make it scary, with virtually none of the more startling elements of the original films. Shrieking, tension-building string section? Scrapped for a college kid with a Korg. Humorous montage of last remaining girl discovering all her friend's corpses? Scrapped for a not-so-humorous scene with three remaining survivors trying to outwit the unoutwittable. And worst of all: the killings themselves were not very gruesome, too often offscreen, and mostly cribbed from earlier installments.
The director succeeded in making a film that was a "re-imagining" of the second and third movies. Unfortunately, it completely lacked imagination. Most fans of the series who grew up in the '70s and '80s will cringe at the more "human" Jason. Spoiler: he takes a fucking HOSTAGE. And the trailer for the updated Last House on the Left didn't look much better.
Posted by: Clayton | February 14, 2009 at 03:14 PM
Zabriskie Point was awesome!
What, you think house's should stay UN-exploded? That's crazy talk.
Posted by: Joe | February 14, 2009 at 04:06 PM
Don't get me wrong. I love Antonioni's other films, but the dialogue in Zabriskie is unbearable. That, and I hate the Grateful Dead.
Posted by: Clayton | February 14, 2009 at 06:08 PM
You can't be serious. Fucking hell, they are updating Last House?
Posted by: Jonathan Steinke | February 15, 2009 at 06:47 AM
Yep. Or maybe it's a "reboot" and we'll have thirty sequels with the reanimated corpse of Mary taking revenge on the reanimated corpses of her killers, over and over again. It wouldn't be so bad, except that it's Wes Craven remaking his own remake of Bergman's Virgin Spring. Ugh... somebody give me a shotgun already.
Posted by: Clayton | February 15, 2009 at 04:21 PM
Yeah, I love the Jason franchise and got kinda excited when I saw the commercials for the new one. And then the advertisement said it was executive produced by Michael Bay. I knew then and there that it would be an utter steaming pile of failure and didn't bother.
Posted by: JMet | February 15, 2009 at 06:41 PM