Platinum Dunes doesn’t have what you would call an exemplary record of taking beloved horror films and the ensuing franchises and successfully remaking them.  With A Nightmare on Elm Street in the works and The Last House in the Left coming soon, it doesn’t appear that a single beloved shocker is safe from Hollywood’s attempts to cash in on a name.

Still, with a franchise like Friday the 13th, it’s more about the iconography of the masked killer, Jason Voorhees, than it is about a story arc.  It’s a simple recipe: gather a group of kids together, have them drink a lot, smoke a little dope, have some sex, then watch as Jason picks them off in increasingly creative ways.  How can you screw that up?

In this re-imagining of the franchise’s opener, director Marcus Nispel and writers Mark Swift and Damian Shannon (Freddy vs. Jason) wrap up the first film in record time, as the viewer is given the original’s last moments in a flashback to 1980.  We move swiftly forward, with some new young ne’er-do-wells on the hunt for a patch of marijuana they intend to steal and sell.  

Among them is Whitney (Amanda Righetti), fresh from a stint caring for her dying mother.  What she’s doing with this riff-raff is anyone’s guess.  On the trail of the pot, the gang stumbles across the abandoned Camp Crystal Lake, tells a story any horror film fan knows by heart about Pamela Voorhees and her deformed son, and runs into the sack-headed killer in short order.

Flash forward a bit more and Whitney is missing, trailed by her brother, Clay (Supernatural’s Jared Padalecki), who is warned away from the area by the local law dog and a creepy old lady with a dog who is as sneaky as a ninja until he decides to bark.  Parallel to his search for a sister, Clay encounters a group of young adults who drink a lot, smoke some dope and have sex.   

All this fornicating and general bad behavior takes place at the summer home of one of the kids, a real jerk named Trent - a summer home just across the lake from the camp.  Needless to say, Jason gets peeved about their presence and blood spills in between the boobs and bad jokes.

You may well be saying to yourself, “We know this already, is it any good?”  The answer lies in the question itself.  We know this already.  The scenario is tried and true, the formula as stock as any buddy cop comedy.  The trick these days is to do something with it, like add the kitsch of 3-D like My Bloody Valentine, or go flat-out satire and brilliant with it like Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon.  Or, perhaps, you could just make a balls-out slasher, filling it with some of the most creative kills ever put to screen and amping up the brutality so that even the most hardened horror fan  

the most hardened horror fan of the most has to sit up and take notice.  Sadly, Friday the 13th does none of these things, and emerges as a film that treads well-trod paths and never makes the leap from mediocrity to real horror goodness.  

Not to say that this is a bad movie.  It’s not awful, despite the stupidity of the characters (not surprising in this type of film) and an absolutely grinding score by  Steve Jablonsky, whose audio cues for Jason are just the worst and he should promise not to do it ever again... No, despite these flaws the movie is more disappointing than any-

thing.  It suffers from a lack of brains, and a surprising lack of blood.  The kills are uninspired ( a fatal flaw for a slasher) and the whole movie lands with more a whimper than a bang.  Given the rather juvenile nature of the source material, something fun and/or over the top could have been done here with great effect, but the resulting product is just a way to kill some time.  If you dig on the original series, this one veers enough away that it may disappoint the purist in you, and is nowhere near fresh enough to win a legion of new horror fans who have already seen Hostel and Inside.  Whomever this film was intended for, maybe we can all agree it’s time to put this series to rest until something interesting can be done with it.