DVD review: Friday The 13th: The Extended Cut (**)

The Friday The 13th series remains, outside of James Bond and Harry Potter, one of the most successful movie franchises. Released in 1980, the Sean S. Cunningham-directed original, together with John Carpenter's Halloween, begat the template for every slasher film made since then — a group of drag-taking, sexually promiscuous teens being slaughtered by a mask-wearing maniac in as gruesome and gory a manner as possible — although the series' iconic villain — Jason Voorhees — didn't really appear until Part 2, and only donned the now infamous hockey mask in Part 3D. The sequels inevitably fell foul of the law of diminishing returns, so by the time Jason Took Manhattan, travelled to outer space, before duking it out with Freddy Krueger, the series had lost whatever USP it once had.

Here we have a new, though not necessarily improved Jason from the savvy if creatively unoriginal folk at Platinum Dunes who have already brought us reboots of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hitcher and have another A Nightmare On Elm Street in the pipeline. Directed by Marcus Nipsel, responsible for the surprisingly okay Texas Chainsaw remake, this dismal, unimaginative slasher is, ironically, less a reboot than reworking of parts 1-4 incorporating Mrs Voorhees and a sack-wearing Jason into a storyline as formulaic and banal as before, as a group of teenagers looking for a marijuana crop in the woods near the abandoned Crystal Lake are butchered in a 20-minute pre-credits sequence. Flash forward another six weeks, as the brother (Jared Padalecki) of a missing girl (Amanda Righetti) and another group of high and/or horny kids wash up, ready to be dispatched by Jason's machete, bow and arrow...

While this has got everything one could possibly expect in a Friday The 13th flick — nubile teens engaging in pre-marital sex, zero character development, reasonably gruesome deaths — there's nothing new or novel here — unless one counts topless wake boarding — to warrant another go round, other than the obvious financial considerations. Production values are much improved, and the new Jason (stuntman Derek Mears) is more agile and faster of foot, but he ain't the intelligent, tragic victim the filmmakers hilariously claim on the run of the mill extras which feature the usual mix of hype and hyperbole, the pick being the "7 Best Kills" which detail the film's, ahem, 7 best kills. The three alternative scenes, meanwhile, include a different take on how this Jason got his hockey mask, while the contributors to the "Hacking Back/Slashing Forward" retrospective discuss Cunningham's original like it's Citizen Kane.

* A version of this review originally appeared in DVD & Blu-Ray Review