Camp Crystal Lake Reopens

What was the best way to spend Valentine's Day Weekend? Why, watch the Friday The 13th remake, of course! Filled to the brim with gratuitous nudity, splashy gore and wooden acting; the movie is surprisingly better than it has any right to be.

Director Marcus Nispel and Producer Michael Bay decided to make this film closer to its inspiration than they did with their previous outing, Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

While Massacre was a remake of one film, Friday is a re-imagining of a series. The film starts with a flashback to the end of the original Friday The 13th, quickly explaining where Jason comes from and why he has his Mother's head by the bathtub. There are nods to different films in the series (look closely for the wheel chair towards the end) and the characters have the same motivations as those in an other Friday The 13th movie. They're all horny teens who want to smoke grass and drink. the new Camp Crystal Lake is a familiar place from a misspent youth at the horror movies.

For all the similarities to the original series, there is one difference that sets this film apart from the others. Jason is no longer a carbon copy rip off of the Halloween series' Michael Myers. Jason runs and kills. There is an unexplained bit where he keeps a girl chained up in an abandoned mine shaft, but hey, this is the same series that gave us the following gems...

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The film has some laughably bad dialogue ("Oh my fuck!" and "Fuck you, gun!"), lots of topless women (saving the most "spectacular" for last) and PLENTY of machetes in the face. All in all, I'd say it's a great way to forget about stimulus packages and plane crashes for an hour and a half.