Horror Remake Vs. Original: Friday the 13th

Friday the 13^th (1980) vs. Friday the 13^th (2009)

In The Red Corner: Friday the 13^th (1980)

Directed by Sean S. Cunningham featuring Adrienne King and Betsy Palmer.

In the Black Corner: The 2009 remake (sequel? reboot? desperate push for greenbacks?)

Directed by Marcus Nispel with Jared Padalecki and Danielle Panabaker

Let’s Get It On! The original cash-in slash-in Friday the 13^th is in the house to represent against its own parasitic offspring. Ch-Ch-Ch-Ah-Ah-Ah away!

Round 1 – Director: Cunningham’s point and shoot style, mixed with stalking camera work and love of violence, puts up solid points for the original. While not as revolutionary as his contemporaries, Cunningham’s style would be emulated for the next decade by up and coming horror directors. The remake boasts Marcus Nispel, who also tackled the better than it could have been TCM remake. He gives the flick a solid visual style and some interesting shots, but really struggles with pacing, especially in the second act (more on that later).

Round 1 Score: 1980 – 22 / 2009 – 18

Round 2 – Cast: Adrienne King’s Alice is drafted with the quickest of strokes, but that doesn’t stop her from being a solid final girl. Betsy Palmer is great as the deranged / devastated mother, which gives the third act a much needed punch in the intensity level. The rest of the cast (including all seven degrees of Kevin Bacon) are solid if not long lasting. The remake does okay; problem is, most of the characters are making bone-headed moves left, right, and center. Despite some major development problems, Jared Padalecki comes off well. The same can be said for Ms. Panabaker’s literal girl next door. One wonders how she could have such a dick boyfriend. Speaking of that, if there was an Oscar for playing a dick, Travis Van Winkle would get it. I wanna punch that guy!

Round 2 Score: 1980 – 20 / 2013 - 18

Total – The Original’s in charge – 42 to 36.

Round 3 – The script: The original’s script is pretty basic. Its roller-coaster structure is enjoyable and efficient, allowing for much running in the dark and slaughter. The remake doesn’t fair nearly as well. Not only are the characters idiots in the highest degree, they’re making all kinds of dumb moves. What makes the whole thing worse is that the title break occurs 24(!) minutes into the flick. That means we’ve only got an hour with our main characters, so none of them are developed in the least. Even a major twist at the end fails to impress because we don’t know or care about these idiot characters. The quality actors can’t save it.

Round 3 Score: 1980 – 20 / 2009 – 7

Total – The original takes a seemingly insurmountable lead, 62 to 43.

Round 4 – Effects: F13 1980 boasts a slit throat, arrow wounds, axe to the head, and plenty of ugliness. The remake is no slouch either: stabbings, arrows to the head, cooking folks in sleeping bags, and fun with a wood chipper. Despite this, I was really hoping the remake would go further, especially with the recent High Tension and Hatchet on the scene.

Round 4 Score: 1980 – 22 / 2009 – 25

Total – The redux isn’t out of it yet, but is still down, 84 to 68

Round 5 – Fear Factor: With its well-oiled, roller-coaster set up, the original works as a fun slasher flick. It’s not with you after you leave the theater, but it’s scary enough while you’re inside. The remake doesn’t fare quite as well. Scenes are intense, sure; but, a lot of the horror is a bookend, occurring in the first twenty and last twenty. The middle is a kind of a horror-less wasteland.

Round 5 Score: 1980 – 25 / 2009 – 20

Total – The original is laying into the newbie, 109 to 88

Round 6 – Overall Film: Friday the 13^th (1980) spawned a dozen other flicks and one of the most financially profitable movie franchises of all time. The remake didn’t manage to get the title card in the right place.

Round 6 Score: 1980 – 28 / 2009 – 10

Final Result: The winner, by knockout, is the original Friday the 13^th! Final score: 137 to 98

- J.W. Brewer

Staff Writer

Follow JW on Twitter

Review: Demons 2 (1986)

Demons 2 (1986)

Director: Lamberto Bava

Demons is probably one of the best pieces of gory grindhouse ever, and mostly because it ended with a bang.  The hero Samurai-Sword fought demon zombies to the sound of 80s rock, before having to kill his new girlfriend, on the back of a jeep, while escaping an overrun city.  What better sequel setup could you ask for?  Demons 2 could feature a whole world overrun by demons and a few select survivors trying to live through the last hours of an apocalypse.  That’s not what Demons 2 does though. 

Demons 2 follows the “give’em more of the same!” tradition of sequels. While the first movie was a bunch of people stuck in a movie theater, being threatened by a demon zombie plague, the second one features a group of people stuck in a large apartment building.  The events of the first Demons are slightly referenced in yet another ‘movie-within-a movie’ narrative device.   This time they push the angle, that these monsters come from the film you're watching, in a much bigger way.  Even as far as to show the first major demon coming out of the TV to attack an unsuspecting viewer.

Wait so… what?  Oh, screw it… whatever I didn’t come here for this to make sense.

If you’ve read my review of the first movie, you know I’m in love with it.  Everything from the goofy acting, the crazy pimps, and demon puss pimples, fills me with glee like a 9-year-old boy.   That love floods over to this sequel as well, but only a little bit.   Demons 2 takes the building blocks of the first and tries to do the same thing, but with just a little extra. It sadly misses its mark.  We spent just too much time making back-story for characters we know are going to die.  We have subplot after subplot in different locations in the building.  They all have their so-bad-its-funny sort of charm, there’s just too many though.    We have body builders fighting demons, a house party turned into ground zero, a pregnant couple, an old lady with a dog, and a child left home alone. 

Luckily Tony the Pimp is back too… but with a different name and an obsession for fitness.

Sure, we get the more of the great creature effects, like the demon baby, but we also have the horrible demon dog, which starts with promise and eventually just turns into a dog with a mask on.  It’s all still gory fun, but it's not as much gory fun.  If you liked the first one, you’ll stand to get a kick out of this, but it doesn’t have nearly the same amount of heart.  I will give it credit for killing both the dog and the kid; two characters you always just assume will live.

           

Then there’s the whole meta-plot ‘movie within a movie’ stuff.  It’s ultimately pointless and hard to follow. So, was the first movie just a movie IN this movie, and they are watching the sequel while we’re watching them in a sequel?  Is the movie from the first Demons in any way related to the movie in the second Demons?  Are the events in the movies within the movies, real life? Is this like The Ring where if you watch the movies, you die like in the movies? Why the hell would you show this movie on TV? What about the mask in the first one? Why is demon blood acidic now? Those questions alone made my brain explode a little bit.  We’re not supposed to worry about that stuff in a cheese-ball gore fest like this. My best advice is to just turn off all of your brain, every brain cell, you just need to destroy it. 

Still, it’s a decent movie to watch at 3 in the morning, when you come home intoxicated, but it’s not good for much else.  Basically, if you like Demons, you’ll at least get a kick out of Demons 2.  If you didn’t like Demons, you should just step back and leave it be. 

Now, just don’t get me started on the rest of this franchise's supposed sequels.

Jesus… I can’t… I just won’t. 

- Will Woolery

Review: Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990)

Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990)

Director: Jeff Burr

Released in 1990, Leatherface is the first movie of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series to lack any involvement of the franchise’s creator, Tobe Hooper. The story follows a young couple played by Kate Hodge and William Butler who are driving across the country to Florida where it is implied that they will break up. That was how the conversation was heading at any rate and I quickly asked myself why I should give a shit about these two people. One is trying to start a conversation and the other is just moping like a poor sap.

While the two are getting some gas, the owner of the station makes some rape-y remarks to the woman and a character by the name of Tex, who just hitchhiked his way over, puts the situation at ease. Tex asks the couple for a ride, and they refuse. Tex then tells them of a road they can use as a shortcut to their destination, and that’s when the owner of the gas station comes out with a shotgun and scares off the couple where they promptly take the abandoned road.

You see where this is going. While being harassed on the deserted road by an unknown truck, the couple crash into a survivalist named Benny and the three of them encounter the Sawyer family, with Leatherface as their hunter.

I was somewhat surprised by the movie’s decision to get right into the action only a few minutes in, but what surprised me more was just how boring it was. It had no problem cutting right to the boredom.  There are some movies that take a while and try to build tension only to leave you hanging sometimes, but with this one, they get to the action, and I was still yawning. It was efficiently banal, because we had seen all of this before. The first TCM was gritty, eerie and savage, whereas the second movie kept that same air to it for the first half of the movie but gave way to a strange bit of humor to the family, while still being exceedingly gory and disgusting. This third movie fails at all of these attempts and adds nothing new to the story.
  
Let me walk you through a quick three minutes and what I was doing during it:
They capture the woman and nail her hands to a chair in the kitchen (yawn). They hit the boyfriend in the head with a hammer (scratching my crotch). The family talks about eating people and the brothers squabble among themselves (doing my taxes). The survivalist they had an accident with, Benny, he shows up and just starts shooting the hell out of everyone (picking my nose, studying the findings).

[SPOILER] The ending of the movie was something that would have gotten a lot more flack if people cared at all. We see Benny get his head cut open by the saw that was somehow turning itself on despite the fact of being underwater and with no one to pump gas into it, but that’s fine. The only problem is that Benny shows up at the very end to escape with Kate Hodge. And I wasn’t paying too much attention, but enough to notice that getting your head placed against a revving chainsaw would cause a bit more damage than the small cut on the side of Benny’s head at the end of the film. [/SPOILER]

Do any of you guys remember Jaws: The Revenge, where we see Mario Van Peebles getting eaten by the shark, only to show up at the end of the movie just floating around the water with a flesh-wound? The same thing happened here. I did a bit of research and found that the Benny character tested well with audiences, so they decided to keep him in there for the end.

Now, do any of you guys remember when one of your friends would pressure you to go see his band or poetry reading, and you don’t really want to do it because you know it’s going to suck, but you feel bad, so you go anyway and watch the performance, and while it is going on, you try to pick out one single solitary thing to compliment your friend on so you can sound supportive, but all you really want to do is get the hell out of there and go to Denny’s? I think that’s what happened with this movie. I think the director showed this to his friends and afterward he eagerly asked them, “So, what did you think?”
And someone went, “Ummm….well….the black guy was good!”
“Yeah,” another one said, “I really liked him! What a great character!”
And so on and so forth, and before you know it, the director is saying to his crew, “Guys! We have to do some re-shooting. The fans really dig Benny, let’s try to have him escape in the end.”
And someone probably said, “But we sliced his head open…”
But the director is probably just shaking his hand at the guy, as if it were a minor detail that can be circumvented.   

This movie surely set a perfect precedent for the slippery shit-slope this franchise would take in the coming years.

- Michael Jenkins