Friday the 13th: Critic Reviews

This film is (be)head and shoulders above the recently reanimated likes of Prom Night and My Bloody Valentine.

The undying Friday the 13th franchise gets a surprisingly decent reboot in this stylish, playful example of the decapitated hottie genre.

Unlucky for one and all. This dismal horror franchise-remake returns us to Camp Crystal Lake.

The story has been pulled from its shallow grave, but not at all reinvigorated. Rather, it's been dusted off and repackaged for the sole purpose of raking in millions from foolish audiences.

The movie knows it's a slasher flick made solely for commerce, it knows we know what it is, and yet it insists on feigning the song and dance.

It's The Hills, Bromance, The Real World, and Rock of Love with a body count.

For one ticket price, you get three shoddy Friday the 13th movies packed into one, which might constitute entertainment value if any one of them constituted entertainment.

Soul-deadening homage, thy name is Jason.

This film is so last-century.

You really have to screw it up to dishonor the memory of a movie as s****y as the original Friday the 13th. Heads should roll.

Friday the 13th is about the best Friday the 13th movie you could hope for. Its technical credits are excellent. It has a lot of scary and gruesome killings. Not a whole lot of acting is required. If that's what you want to find out, you can stop reading.

An SUV of dramatically varied teens (sluts, nerdy sluts, one black guy, other sluts) visit Camp Crystal Lake. Pot is smoked. Sex is had by all. Also, topless water skiing.

As Jason sequels go, this is one of the best, though that's not saying much.

To acquire a new generation of fans, it should be either horrifying or hilarious, and this Friday the 13th is ultimately neither.

The series reboot is much the same, but it's easily the most effective -- and scary -- entrant in the franchise.

While there is plenty of gore and gratuitous sex, the movie acknowledges the ridiculousness of it all, trusting that the audience -- one hopes -- is in on the joke.

To say the new film is better shot and cut than those barebones gorefests of the Reagan era is to say nothing much, as even series fans would agree.

Not to second-guess our law-enforcement authorities but... is the Crystal Lake PD really doing such a good job?

For all its attempted jolts, it's not all that scary. The genre is reduced to 'Who gets it next and how?' and never for a second makes us care.

Faithfully adhering to the precepts of the slasher flick, it might even seem honourable if it weren't so disreputable.

Despite an evident appetite for mayhem, however, Bay is not the right guy to produce slasher movies. Horror requires intimacy.

This Friday the 13th is glossy, good-looking garbage, acted out by a cast of big-chested androids (male and female alike) and with the original series' rough edges smooved over.

Remake, reboot, re-envisioning -- whatever you call it, it amounts to the same thing: a cynical money grab.

It's business as usual at Camp Crystal Lake, with very little in the way of fresh jolts or an innovative visual style that would have really revitalized the hokey franchise.

The original handful of Friday films had a certain low-rent elegance about them, and this slickly done, dimly lighted, whiplash-edited update loses that too.