As I noted here, my younger daughter wanted to see the new Friday the 13th movie. Mrs Pico had gotten the younger Miss Pico to agree to go to some sappy romance flick with Renee Zellweger last weekend, and the younger Miss Pico agreed only if my darling bride agreed to take her to see Friday the 13th. (Warning: this link to the Wikipedia site has plot spoilers.)
Our good friend, the Most Bitter of Scribes pointed out this article from Debbie Schlissel Miss Schlussel wrote:
This latest “Friday the 13th,” should have been rated NC-17 and, a few years ago, it would have been.
There, I think she got it wrong; NC-35 would probably be closer. The killings are more graphic than in the original, 1980 film and its sequels, which I expected, and the sex — the Friday the 13th series always had a few boobs to show us — was getting close to what you’d find on a porn site. I realize that our kids get exposed to this a lot more than I did growing up — I’m 55 — but this was really pushing the limits.
And I note here that the place was packed with teens younger than my 17-year-old daughter, with 12 and 14 year olds not in the least uncommon.
We had planned to see this yesterday, on Friday the 13th, but it was sold out, and the line winding its way around the cinema — and I didn’t think there were that many kids in our small county — was pretty much a teenager date night (or hang out night) crowd. At any rate, we saw it this afternoon.
[Fair Warning: Plot spoilers following] The movie begins sort of like the original Friday the 13th,
with a campfire scene in which one guy narrates the story of the drowning of Jason. It’s different because it isn’t the camp counselors, but, of course, they get killed. Then comes the title sequence, followed by the main characters in the Cadillac Escalade, going not to Camp Crystal Lake, but some rich kid’s house. It begins with plenty of innuendo, followed by plenty of sex.
As in all of the older films, the moral of the story is: the sluts get killed. If you have unmarried sex around Camp Crystal Lake, Jason is going to kill you, and he’s going to kill you very soon after sex. As in all the films, the victims are running in terror. And, as in all the films, the survivors — the non-sluts, of course, though one girl who doesn’t have sex or show her boobs does get killed in this one — are terrified but manage to overcome their fear enough to fight back. It’s pretty much the same formula as the original movies, just done much more graphically.
Mrs Pico just got home and asked me about it. She asked me if I was as uncomfortable taking the girls to see it as she was when they insisted on seeing Brokeback Mountain, (I didn’t go) and I said yes. Of course, they walked out on Brokeback Mountain, but we didn’t on this film.
If you’re an aficionado of slasher films, then the new Friday the 13th is for you: it pushes the envelope with the sex and violence, but what passes for a plot remains the same. The special effects are limited to the killing scenes, and aren’t really that much advanced over the 1984 Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. But if the slasher flicks aren’t your particular thing, then the new movie really isn’t for you: it’s simply not an improvement over the originals.
Heh. I read your review of the film (NC-35? Ack!) and then unexpectedly found a review of it at Salon.com, wherein the reviewer sought to answer the loftier question: Am I arguing that this is a neoclassical “Friday the 13th” movie or a more rococo one? , (straight face) and then tidily sums it up for us, “But the overarching impulse here is back-to-basics, and the basics of this franchise are tits, rock ‘n’ roll, pot humor, potty-mouth humor and a lot of pointless killings. You’ll have to make your own decisions about whether those are good or bad things, people. I’m not the arbiter of your damn morality.”