More New York Comic Con: Warner Bros. “treated” audiences to a first look at the new “Friday the 13th” reboot. After being shown the loud, rock ’em sock ’em, crash of edits they called a trailer for film opening in six days, we were subjected to the first five minutes of the new film.
What proceeded to unfold was every dumb-teenager-in-the-woods cliche amped to eleven. Fast, incoherent and stupid, we begin with doggystyle sex, leading to the first gruesome death only two minutes in. Over the next couple of minutes, four teenagers are attacked and killed with no context, and while we’d like to say it was “intense” or “vicious,” the fact is the camera moved too quick and jerkily to understand exactly what was going on, so a flash of blood and a scream on the soundtrack is supposed to register as, “That guy got stabbed in this particular way!” The key to shaky cam is being given context as to where the characters are and what the space is that they inhabit, which is why some people use it well, and other people are director Marcus Nispel. One vile and borderline misogynist (borderline??) scene had a woman trapped in sleeping bag, strung from a tree as she burned to death over an open camp fire. Classic it was not and big flashing signs of torture porn glee came to mind. All in all, an ugly, unpleasant, loud, stupid re-introduction to Jason Voorhees.
The q&a featured producers Brad Fuller and Andrew Form, coupled with Derek Mears, who plays Jason, and Jared Padalecki, who plays fodder. Good humored and with a devil-may-care attitude, Fuller and Form were pretty schmucky opportunist types, while Mears was a gregarious giant and Padalecki got to goof off and provide eye candy for the females in attendance. We asked Fuller and Form why, after gaining a solid budget and a massive marketing push, did the world actually need a movie where Jason avoided doing anything interesting and AGAIN returned to Camp Crystal Lake to kill even more teenagers? Their robotic reply was that the world didn’t need another “Friday” movie like that, and that you could refuse to see the movie of your own free will. They then lit up five cigars with hundred dollar bills and sped off on their eight billion dollar rocket bikes to get laid. – Gabe Toro