Monster of the Day #1935

Updated on May 30, 2019 By Ken Begg 14 Comments

So I kind of get them screwing up Nightmare on Elm Street, because that was a very good film and thus easier to fail with. However, how the heck do you mess up a Friday the 13th movie? I won’t say it’s because people are just tired of them, because there were two Rob Zombie Halloween movies, so you think they could have done at least that well. Yet somehow the film underperformed enough (on a roughly $20 million budget) that they dropped plans for the rebooted franchise to continue. Weird.

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  • The thing is, it isn’t actually that bad of a movie, as far as Friday the 13th films go. It even has the incoherent backstory the original series has. As a Horror fan, I kinda thought it was okay. Beat the hell out of some remakes I could mention.

    Part of what kills it is heart. The first two entries in the original series have a certain something that’s simply not there in the remake. The originals were far from masterworks themselves, more akin to chicken noodle soup, an experience you can enjoy when you don’t want something more… um… interesting. But the people involved weren’t working on something with History and Legacy attached. There was more of a risk of failure for them, of this being not the first of something more but the only chance they’d get.

    You can best see this, I think, with the actors. Not to imply their great thespians rivaling the titans, but there’s a feeling I get watching them that they’re happy, perhaps even excited, to be there. The actors in the remake, while at worse doing a competent job, don’t have that. The director doesn’t have the fire, either.

    The other part of what kills it is that the remakes a copy of a copy. This might also be Nightmare on Elm Street redo’s problem. Both originals have moments that are arguably lifted from the Italian Giallo films. Move far enough from the light, you’re bound to end up in a dark place.

    Or something. Look, I just woke up, the metaphor machine doesn’t work even at full power…

  • Gamera977

    Actually that’s one of the best explanations for why reboots don’t tend to work that well that I’ve heard.

  • Eric Hinkle

    I second Gamera977’s opinion on this. Those goofy old slasher flicks, at their best, had a cast of people happy to be making a movie. That can be (is often?) lacking with these remakes.

  • Rock Baker

    I don’t think this one failed so much due to the premise of making an updated Friday movie, it’s just that the results were so unappealing. The main problem was the cast of characters, who were so unlikable that they made the fodder from the old movies look downright endearing by comparison. I can think of few films where we were presented with such a despicable slate of supposed audience identification figures.

  • zombiewhacker

    If this was a remake of the original, how come Jason is the killer?

  • Rock Baker

    They mingled the first three films together for this story. The entirety of the original entry is in fact only the pre-credit sequence!

  • Eric Hinkle

    Just from that it sounds like a total mess.

  • Eric Hinkle

    You’d think Hollywood would realize that when the victims are nastier than the mad killer, they did something wrong.

  • It worked surprisingly well. But, as the Friday the 13th flicks have all been messes in the first place, maybe that shouldn’t surprise.

  • I don’t remember the film that way at all, but in order to prove otherwise I’d have to rewatch the film, and while I have nothing against it, I don’t care enough to do so.

  • Ken_Begg

    Well, plus, they were films that defined their times. At least in terms of horror cinema. You will never replicate that era of small independent productions getting screen nationwide and going toe to toe with the big studios. (Although Paramount’s distribution muscle undoubtedly helped the Ft13th series.) Certainly fans will never go back and think all these reboot films define horror cinema of this era–except in a cynical way–as the original films did for that time.

  • Ken_Begg

    Let’s be frank, though, the original Ft13th was largely buoyed by gore effects, which were part of an f/x revolution occurring about that time. There was a visceral quality to those Savini effects that can never be matched by CGI blood splashes. And even if the effects in the new movies were as good, they can obviously never be exciting and fresh again.

  • Rock Baker

    One has to get through the first five films to get there, but the main story for the sixth film wasn’t bad. Not great, mind you, but not bad.

  • Rock Baker

    The original also had the advantage of being something comparatively new. It only works if you don’t know in advance the identity of the killer, of course, so few audiences beyond the first group of people that saw the film really got that benefit.