Basic plot: A serial killer violently murders a bunch of teenagers.
Somewhat to my own shame, the only original Friday the 13th movies I’ve seen are the first one, the sixth one, and Freddy vs. Jason, plus highlight clips from most of the rest. It’s a series I’ve been meaning to watch in its entirety for a looooong time (particularly since I knocked out the entire Elm Street series last November), but I just haven’t had the opportunity. Regardless, I like what I have seen. Including this new one.
From my personal experience with the series, it seems like a slasher film in its simplest form. It’s not trying to be super clever like Freddy might be or disturbing, torture gore like Saw or Hostel. It’s just quick brutal violence on teens that should know better than to visit abandoned camp grounds. Granted, keeping in theme with most new horror movies, the gore IS way above and beyond what I remember seeing in any of the other kills I’ve watched from the series, but it still keeps the fast pace with it. The kills range from weak to pretty damn awesome. One scene involving a machete through the floorboards kept me on my toes ANY time the movie went to a close up of feet, and a handful of other kills made the movie as a whole well worth watching as a horror fan.
The story is bare bones, but it has no need to be anything more than that. The first twenty minutes revolve around some college kids on a camping trip and the rest of the movie revolves around a group of college kids on vacation at a lake house. There’s also some guy looking for his “missing” sister, but all of the above seems pretty trivial when the only reason anybody is going to watch this movie to begin with is to see which characters might still be alive at the end of the movie, or more importantly, how the rest are going to bite it. One story aspect of it that was pretty cool was the evolution of Jason, from his mother’s story to the bag-mask to the hockey mask.
When all was said and done, I felt like the movie absolutely met my expectations. It’s got all the slasher movie cliches and brought them out in high volume: sex, drugs, alcohol, and violence are all accounted for multiple time over. The cast is 95% made up of people you don’t mind watching die, just as it should be. You might recognize a couple of the faces, but it really doesn’t matter. You’re only there to watch them die, performance quality be damned.
I heartily enjoyed it and will definitely be grabbing it for my collection someday. I just want to buy all the originals first.








