Friday the 13th(Blu-ray) (2009)

"...(be)head and shoulders above the recently reanimated likes of "Prom Night" and "My Bloody Valentine."  Clark Collis, Entertainment Weekly
"There's an itch for this kind of material, and here it is scratched -- to the bone.  Nathan Lee, The New York Times
"...replete with gee-whiz gore, gratuitous sex and nudity and party-loving teens with a penchant for ending up on the wrong end of a pick ax.  Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald

Editor's Note Following his remake of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, director Marcus Nispel tackles 1980's slasher favorite to bring unstoppable killing machine Jason Voorhees to a new generation of gorehounds. Lasting 10 films and going to any length (including New York City and outer space) to provide Jason with fresh meat, the FRIDAY THE 13th series was always about inventive death scenes. Nispel streamlines the events of the original (where Jason?s mother was the killer) into an extended prologue before providing an original story in which Jason begins his killing spree and finds his iconic mask. Decades after the death of Jason's mother, a group of twentysomethings descends on the backwoods town near abandoned Camp Crystal Lake in search of a rumored marijuana crop. Whitney Miller (Amanda Righetti) finds the old Voorhees house and discovers a locket revealing that she resembles Jason?s mother. Jason (Derek Mears) arrives and, thinking she is his mother reincarnated, holds Whitney captive. Weeks later, Trent (Travis Van Winkle) and his friends arrive to stay at his father?s vacation home, while Clay (Jared Padalecki) shows up to look for his missing sister Whitney. Meanwhile, Jason finds a hockey mask to cover his startling face and begins to satisfy his bloodlust with the hard-partying new arrivals. Working once again with producer Michael Bay, Nispel crafts a FRIDAY "reboot" that is slick and well-made, giving audiences exactly what they expect from the franchise: blood and breasts in equal measure. With knowing humor, he plunges directly into the saga, leaving the titles until 15 minutes into the film, at which point Jason has already dispatched several victims. After that, there is topless waterskiing and death by a wealth of means, all of which will have fans glad to have Jason back from outer space.

	Danielle Panabaker
	Aaron Yoo
	Derek Mears
	Amanda Righetti
	Jared Padalecki
	Travis Van Winkle
	Michael Bay - Producer
	Brad Fuller - Producer
	Sean S. Cunningham - Producer
	Steve Jablonsky - Composer
	Andrew Form - Producer
	Daniel Pearl - Director of Photography
	Mark Swift - Screenwriter
	Damian Shannon - Screenwriter
	Marcus Nispel - Director

New York Times
"Set in the present-day, with a story line that references the original's mythology, this movie attempts to reboot the concept, if that's the word, of this undying series. The surprise is that it does so with vicious aplomb..." 02/13/2009

ReelViews 5 of 10
Sometimes I wonder if there's a point to reviewing something like this. Then again, if I shared my thoughts about Sex and the City, why not Friday the 13th? Let's get this out of the way at the start: If all you're looking for is breasts, blood, and gore, this film hits pay dirt. None of the killings are terribly inventive, but they are plentiful, and why bother being devious when axes, machetes, knives, and pointed sticks will do the job just as well?...Friday the 13th opens with a bang - a high-energy prologue that sets up the pieces and knocks them down before announcing the film's title. Had the rest of the movie followed suit, I'd be recommending it to more than tits-and-gore lovers. Alas, the main story is a mess, with all the cliches firmly in place...The thing that's the most frustrating about this new Friday the 13th is how little creativity went into this re-imagination. The original may be a landmark on the cinematic landscape in terms of its importance to the genre, but it was not a great motion picture. There was an opportunity here to take the basic idea and do something special with it. For about 15 minutes, it appeared that was happening. After that... we get something that's more soulless, more pointless, and less enjoyable than anything in the original. Remake, reboot, re-envisioning - whatever you call it, it amounts to the same thing: a cynical money grab. This movie exists for the same reason that Rob Zombie's Halloween travesty was made - because the studios behind the projects won't give up until every last cent is bled out of the titles and they survive only as punch lines to bad jokes. This is the twelfth movie featuring Jason Voorhees, Camp Crystal Lake, and/or some combination of the two. Do we really want a thirteenth? If you can answer "yes" to that question, especially with this one unseen, then you deserve what director Marcus Nispel and co-producers Sean S. Cunningham and Michael Bay have provided. - James Berardinelli

Chicago Sun-Times 6 of 10
"Friday the 13th" is about the best "Friday the 13th" movie you could hope for. Its technical credits are excellent. It has a lot of scary and gruesome killings. Not a whole lot of acting is required. If that's what you want to find out, you can stop reading...Since the original movie came out in 1980, there were 10 more films -- sequels, retreads, fresh starts, variations, whatever. Now we get the 2009 "Friday the 13th," which is billed as a "remake" of the original...It will come as little surprise that Jason still lives in the woods around Crystal Lake and is still sore about the decapitation of his mom. Jason must be sore in general...So far in the series, he has been drowned, sliced by a machete in the shoulder, hit with an ax in the head, supposedly cremated, aped by a copycat killer, buried, resurrected with a lightning bolt, chained to a boulder and thrown in the lake again, resurrected by telekinesis, drowned again, resurrected by an underwater electrical surge, melted by toxic waste, killed by the FBI, resurrected through the possession of another body, returned to his own body, thrown into hell, used for research, frozen cryogenically, thawed, blown into space, freed to continue his murder spree on Earth 2, returned to the present, faced off against Freddy Krueger of "Nightmare on Elm Street," drowned again with him, and made to emerge from Crystal Lake with Freddy's head, which winks...I know what you're thinking. No, I haven't seen them all. Wikipedia saw them so I didn't have to. The question arises: Why does Jason continue his miserable existence, when his memoirs would command a seven-figure advance, easy? There is another question. In the 1980 movie, 20 years had already passed since Jason first went to sleep with the fishes. Assuming he was a camper aged 12, he would have been 32 in 1980, and in 2009, he is 61. That helps explain why one of my fellow critics at the screening was wearing an AARP T-shirt. - Roger Ebert