Friday the 13th (2009) ***1/2

Jason Voorhees has been slaughtering teenagers longer than most of the audiences going to Friday the 13th this weekend have been alive. On-line you can find death toll lists that puts his spree in the hundreds. Hundreds! And people keep coming back for more.

Friday the 13th is really a hybrid kind of movie. It's considered a remake or reboot or re imagining or whatever it is when a characters has become stale and needs a new generation of fans. You get a short introduction of what pushed Jason to do what he does, then it goes right back onto the series well dug track of how many kids in the woods he can kill over the next 90 minutes. You do have a little bit of an extra plot with one teen searching for his missing sister. You know how that's going to go.

Derek Mears is the 11th man behind the mask and even though he plays him as more human than the previous few films he still has that hulking killing machine look instead a hillbilly in the woods protecting his land. The rest of the cast is your typical "I've seen them somewhere before" but they're just cattle for the slaughter. This movie is about the introvert in them mask.

The script is a major let down, written by the pair that gave us the wonderful dialogue in Freddy vs. Jason. It seems as though they wanted to amplify all the stereotypes from the old '80's slasher film in this one: ex. Instead of one guy lighting a joint they stumble on a field of marijuana. ex. Let's have a sex scene every ten minutes. True the originals were pure exploitation but this film became campy with all the magnified stereotypes. Of course we need to find out the ultimate question: Who pays Jason's power bill? Does he sell some of that weed? Is THAT why he's killing people, because they're ripping off his stash?

Once you get past it's attempt to be super campy Friday the 13th does have some great scares and if you're a fan of gore some great kills, too. Director Marcus Nispel makes up for the terrible script by giving the film a great atmosphere that really adds to the stalking at Crystal Lake.

What you have to remember about Friday the 13th is that it's a franchise. We can't call it McDonalds because James Bond is McDonalds, but let's call it Burger King or Taco Bell. It fills a need and one will always pop up every once in awhile. As I've said before these slashers are our Frankenstein or Dracula. Bogeymen. We'll always have Bogeyman to kill the self processed jock or class clown because we can't do it. When I was leaving the theater after watching this a little kid no older than 10 or 11 says "That was freaky. Do you think they'll make another one?"

I just had to laugh.