Friday The 13th (2009)

This new telling of the story of Jason Voorhees - the indestructible, hockey-masked slayer - begins by subverting the twist ending of the original.

This version makes it clear in the opening flashback that it was Jason's mother who killed the camp counsellors because she thought they had let her deformed son drown in Crystal Lake.

But Jason had survived and made it back in time to see his own mother beheaded before his eyes by the last survivor.

The film then jumps to the present day and a bunch of potheads are going camping in the woods, near Crystal Lake, looking for a legendary field of wild weed... instead they are ambushed by the adult Jason (Derek Mears), who still inhabits the derelict summer camp.

All this in the 25-minutes before the title screen!

Six weeks later and another bunch of obnoxious college students, headed by chief douche bag Trent (Travis Van Winkle), have come to stay at a lodge owned by Travis' parents on the far side of the lake.

Meanwhile, Clay (Supernatural's Jared Padalecki) is in the area looking for his missing sister, Whitney (Amanda Righetti), one of the earlier band of delinquents, and getting nowhere with the unhelpful locals.

Little does he realise that Jason has actually kept her alive because she bears a passing resemblance to his dead mother.

There's even an underlying suggestion that the locals are somehow complicit in Jason's murders (the old woman who says: "He just wants to be left alone" and the total lack of follow-up by the authorities when one victim is impaled on the back of a passing pick-up truck), but this is never explored - to the detriment of originality in this movie.

Trent and his cohorts quickly discover the area's brutal secret though, and Clay is drawn into their nightmare as he tries to rescue his sister from the clutches of the iconic, unstoppable serial killer.

Directed by Marcus Nispel (who also helmed the far superior remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 2003; not that the original needed remaking), Friday The 13th is very "by-the-numbers" with the requisite amount of female nudity and violent deaths, while, sadly, adding nothing new to the mix.

Where Nispel's Texas Chainsaw Massacre expanded on the characters of the original film and added new layers of subtext, Friday The 13th is just a re-imagining of the old story in a new location, with new disposable victims.

Perhaps we've been spoiled by such imaginative horrors as the Final Destination franchise, but even Jason's most creative attacks are actually quite mundane and there is certainly more luck than judgement involved in many of his killings.

The extended cut DVD gives us 101 minutes of mindless, low-brow entertainment, but totally lacking in lasting impact.

All the characters, even Clay and Whitney, are two-dimensional ciphers that we never get to really know - or care for - and, to be honest, most of the victims pretty much deserve what they get from Jason.

It isn't even made clear why, at the end, having defeated Jason (as the film structure dictated they would), Clay and Whitney roll his body into the lake rather than calling the police (as any sensible, right-thinking person would do), except that it serves the plotline and thus leaves the door open for a (wishful-thinking) sequel.

Friday The 13th is good for what it is: an urban myth-style retelling of a well-known tale for a generation that might only have known of the original second or third hand.

I still would have preferred a sequel to Jason X than this trite reboot, but perhaps I was just too sober (and too old) to fully appreciate the movie's nuances?