"Friday the 13th": Jason goes to hell

Alright, I know I haven't been updating much (coughATALLcough!) lately, and I actually don't even have the time to be trying to address this topic with any degree of thoughtfulness, but I of course had to weigh in on the slick, CW-stuffed remake of Friday the 13th that is hacking its way into theaters tonight.

I caught the movie the other night with a heart full of anticipation and a head full of dreams of sugarplum fairies and sliced coeds and all sorts of other crap. See, you may remember that I actually LIKED the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake that these fellas churned out a few years back, so I figured that if anyone could manage a successful reboot of a beloved horror franchise, it would be they. (And not, say, Rob Zombie, who can forever suck my ass for his back-alley abortion of a Halloween.)

So it is with a heavy heart that I inform you that this remake kinda shits the bed.

It's not a disaster. I wouldn't go that far. But it misses the point of what really makes Friday Friday, and instead tries to turn it into Chainsaw 2: Leatherface Joins the Mighty Ducks.


First problem: Jason lives underground in a tunnel and keeps prisoners. Wha-wa-WHAAAAAT?! Oh please. Jason is far too busy to be bothered with houseguests, even if they do vaguely resemble his mother. Which brings me to the biggest gaping logic hole in this whole thing: If Jason was indeed alive and saw his mother beheaded in the woods (this reboot conveniently says that the tot wasn't dead, which takes care of the "aging dead kid" continuity issue that the originals had), then why was momma killing the counselers to begin with? This version makes a HUGE deal out of Jason's connection to his mom (who, sadly, is in the movie for all of 23 seconds), so why was the kid pretending to be dead and following his mom around while she killed everyone to begin with?

After a rather disturbing opening 15-minute sequence in which the filmmakers are probably hoping to confuse us, as they kill off the entire cast (saw that one coming from the trailers, thanks), the movie totally flatlines for the next hour. It's not as mean as the first segment (the sleeping bag barbecue in particular is NASTY!) so it doesn't maintain the kind of grueling intensity as Chainsaw, which is okay since it's a body-count movie, not a survival flick. But they also miss the mark by making the characters so humorless and loathsome and the murders so gruesome and unpleasant that it's hard to have fun watching the bodies pile up.

Case in point: Every female character who dies (save one) shows her tits. Even former pop princess Willa Ford has to first waterski topless - TOPLESS! - before getting a machete in her head with her ya-ya's out. The girls are uniformly piggish sluts, and the guys are no better. In fact, in this age of diverse casting, the filmmakers are actually so lazy as to basically say, "Well, if we cast a black guy and an Asian guy we really don't need to give them any other defining characteristics." Um, not exactly, guys.

Go ahead and rewatch the originals - while the characters were horny and ridiculous, they weren't total assholes. The couples actually enjoyed one another, where here all the sex is grudgefucking where the guys slap around the girls and the girls like it.

Body-count movies are supposed to have an element of fun to them. Otherwise the experience of watching over a dozen people die horrible deaths starts to become grating, or even unpleasant. If you look at this Friday remake versus the My Bloody Valentine remake from a month ago (which had its own faults, sure), the Valentine guys clearly "got it" in terms of how to gruesomely hack up dozens of people and make it into a good time, and these guys didn't. Hell, Valentine even managed to put a full 5-minute chase scene where the victim is fully nude and in 3-D, and it still didn't feel exploitative or tasteless like this one does.


But this brings me to the only real reason to sit through all of Friday to the end: The bodacious ta-tas of one Jared Padalecki. Like his Supernatural boyfriend - er, brother - Jensen Ackles, he's using a horror reboot to make his mark on the winter box office. And while Ackles' movie is a better one, Padalecki has clearly been hitting the gym to fill out his costume, and his perky nips may just be enough to guide you out of the woods once and for all.

So while not a total disaster, this wasn't the return to Camp Blood that I was hoping for. It's an unduly misogynistic and occasionally rather boring reimagining that downgrades one of our greatest masked men to being yet another retard in the woods with mommy issues and no sense for decorating. And if I wanted to see that, I'd rent Nell.

Still kicking

Jason, Are You Queer?

In honor of the holiest of holies, I'm reprinting an article I wrote for Pretty-Scary a few years back that turns our gaydar on one Jason Voorhees, "confirmed bachelor".

The story is one that has been with most of us since our childhoods: a deformed, insane, relentlessly murderous young man in a hockey mask dispatches dozens upon dozens of horny teens with an assortment of weapons, all in the name of his dear mother. Jason Voorhees, the phantom of Camp Crystal Lake, has survived psychics, Manhattan, outer space, Freddy Krueger, and Corey Feldman. We know he likes his weapons pointy and his teens randy. We know he is consistent, punctual, and tenacious. And we know he's been wearing the same outfit for the last 20 years. But there is one essential fact that eleven films and countless Fangoria photo shoots have failed to reveal:

Jason, are you queer?

The relationship between Jason and his various Final Girls (and boys) is decidedly undecided. Jason has never been given a love object, nor has he exhibited any real attraction to anyone, male or female. Indeed, the warmest emotion Jason seems capable of experiencing is affection for his mother -- and you don't need a degree in psychology to know which side of the fence that might put him on. Considering that this is the queer column of a website for women, I thought I'd use this installation to map out some arguments about the colliding forces of the queer and the feminine in horror film. Or more specifically, to argue that Jason Voorhees is a polesmoker who goes Mommie Dearest whenever he sees straight kids doing the nasty.

Let's start from the very beginning. Jason was, as his doting mother put it, "special". He needed extra attention and wasn't as physically adept as the rest of the children, and was generally ostracized because he was different. Now, I can't speak for every sissy out there, but that pretty much sums up my childhood. Gay youths are notoriously at odds with their bodies, which they often view as enemies, and many shy away from or are absolutely inept at physical activities because of this discomfort. Last-picked for the kickball, Jason? I feel you.

Now, most people assume that when Jason is referred to as "special", it means he's retarded. Again, a word used often to describe me, well into my teens. And sure, the kid may look a little deformed when he hugs Adrienne King at the end of Part 1, but hey -- let's see you hang out at the bottom of a lake for a few years and see how it treats you.

But let's not take these surface images and language at face-value: remember, this was 1980, and dead gay kids weren't exactly hot ticket-sellers at the box office. Who's to say that "retarded" wasn't code for "queer"? And who's to say that Pamela Voorhees, in all her misguided fury, wasn't just trying to say what would not become a catchphrase for another decade: "I love my dead gay son!"?

"Jason's a WHAT?!"

So Mrs. Voorhees fights for the honor of her sissyboy, and in the end is dispatched by the virtuous, noble Alice, who cuts her head off with a machete. While this may be the end of the Wrath of the Overprotective Mother, it sets into motion a far more fruitful (and profitable) force, the Wrath of the Mama's Boy. Think about it: Jason Voorhees is the most dangerous milquetoast in the history of the cinema. Taking a cue from Norman Bates (who actually wasn't queer, even though he liked to dress up in his mother's clothes -- something that we self-respecting sissies wouldn't even dream of doing... unless mama wears Prada), Jason struggles to keep his mother alive by continually reliving her death, guarding the grounds of her final fury like a hall monitor with a toolbox and an anger-management problem.

This takes dedication, people. It's not like Jason was cursed or anything -- no witch's spell or Voodoo incantation is forcing him to walk the earth for eternity, avenging his mother's murder: he's doing it because he's good and pissed. And honestly, people -- can you picture a straight man spending that much energy doing anything for his mother? Half the time I wonder if the fags are the only thing holding up Mother's Day at all -- my breeder brother (God love him) can't seem to even remember it.

If we return to the classic Freudian approach to the causes of male homosexuality, it's pretty simple: an unhealthy attachment to the mother at an early age (pre-teen, stewing in a lake -- gotcha) leads to a desire to eliminate the father... hey, wait! Where the hell is Mister Voorhees through all of this?!

Deadbeat Dad Elias Todd Voorhees (as he is apparently named) left Jason and his mother, Pamela Sue, when J-Bird was just a pup. It's remarkable that he doesn't ever make any appearance in any of the films (although he was supposed to appear in Part 6, by some accounts). This reunion would have been a Lifetime Movie in the making. Jason, who has grown up distrusting of men, has grown up distanced from any male contact and under the smothering hand of his doting ma. Naturally, Jason comes to fixate on the male force, as it is entirely absent from his experience, and as he becomes sexualized he fetishizes the male and begins to view the female as powerful yet suffocating.

"Y-M-C-A"

At this point, he can go in one of two directions: drag queen or serial-rapist. Luckily, his little swimming accident ensures that neither of these paths is viable (waterlogging his libido and making his legs far too unsightly to wear skirts and hose), and Jason's fury against the male and close (yet conflicted) tie to his mother drives his rage, and his destiny.

Let's think about it: what does Jason seem to be most furious at? Horny teens having sex, right? And why might that be... hmm... Jason has been stunted at a particularly potent age, right as his twisted little hormones were just beginning to percolate. So he's a bit of a disaster waiting to happen from the get-go. But where normal kids could play doctor in the treehouse at that age to work things out, Jason has been sleeping with the fishes and watching Mommy die at the hands of a prissy camp counsellor.

So when he comes to, he's filled with conflicting urges of attraction to the males that have been absent his whole life, and fury at the sexualized females who A) stole his father from his mother, who was, in his mind, virtuous; and B) are now stealing all the hot sausage that he himself wants to sample. So Jason makes it his life's work to take out the hot boys and girls who are impolite enough to crash his pity-party by humping all over his and his mother's graves. Furious at the straight kids for being so free to enjoy their "normal" sexualities while he has to sit at home playing with his mother's head, he unleashes a fury against their hormones that will leave a trail of bodies and a legacy of abstinence-training in its wake.

I mean, really -- why else would Jason be so furious about straight teens having sex? He ALWAYS goes for them first, like he has a particular beef with them. Now, the real interesting thing would be if there were a couple of sissies in any of the Friday Films: how would Jason react to that? But no, the mythos is water-tight, and no such variations are available for consideration. It's Jason vs. the horny breeders, all the way.

So that brings us to the Final Girl, my favorite horror trope. The noble, virtuous woman, having seen her friends fall to the killer's blade, must square off against the Killer Queer (or Uncanny) in a fight that will return the balance of "normal" and "abnormal" to our favor ("our" being normal, pro-creative, and heterosexual, for the most part). Here, the Final Girl is an obvious double for Pamela. Sure, Jason has had his fun with the silly horny kids of the forest, but when it comes to facing his true nemesis -- the woman whose suffocating love has made him the sissyboy he is -- he falls every time.

It's no wonder that the Final Girl takes on the persona of Pamela on more than one occasion, most notably in Part 2 when Ginny -- a child psychology major, remember -- puts on that natty wool turtleneck in order to boss Jason around (come to think of it, maybe he was just furious at his mom's lack of fashion sense...). Before you can say "a boy's best friend is his mother", the feminine (the pro-creative Mother) has vanquished the queer (the asexual, self-generating -- and therefore anti-pro-creatvie "other"), and returned the world to its normal state, where all teens are heterosexual and horny, and little sissyboys stay at the bottoms of lakes where they belong.

But I loved you in Gremlins!

I'm sure this all makes perfect sense. But in the interest of illustration, I thought I'd add a few of my favorite queer moments from the Friday the 13th series:

1) In Friday 2, the penultimate scene finds Muffin, the camp poodle, making a dramatic return to the arms of Ginny, our beloved Final Girl. At this precise moment, Jason crashes through the window and grabs Ginny. Now really, folks -- isn't it quite clear that Jason is grabbing for the poodle, and not our heroine? In the next scene, Ginny is alive, and Muffin is missing. And you think a straight man would go for a poodle like that? A Jack Russell, maybe....

2) In the totally bizarro Jason Goes to Hell, Jason's soul is apparently carried in a phallic, worm-like thing that penetrates men and makes them evil. Not only do we have the use of horrific phallic imagery to scare the boys in the room, but we've got a graphic body-shaving scene that looks like something out of a bad Dave DeCoteau film.

3) In Friday 2, a lady counsellor prepares to get it on with one of her co-workers by slipping into something sexy and spraying herself with a little perfume. One of the places she douses herself is in her lady-regions -- not exactly a celebration of the beauty of female sexuality.

If Michael Bay lays a finger on "The Baby", I'm-a fuck him up big time

Yes, in case you haven't heard, Michael Bay is continuing his assault on everything that mattered from my childhood by "relaunching" the Nightmare on Elm Street series from the beginning.

This of course follows the news that Bay's company, Platinum Dunes, is similarly "overhauling" the Friday the 13th franchise (which was overhauling itself already, from what I could tell) and has already redone The Hitcher, The Amityville Horror, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and was also responsible for turning the Transformers - easily the most beloved cartoon and toy of my young years - into the loudest computer-generated abortion in history.

Of all of these projects, the only I liked was Chain Saw, and I credit most of that to Marcus Nispel (who is also helming the Friday remake, which sounds the most promising of the bunch). But really, Nightmare? Why remake genre-leveling perfection? What could possibly be improved upon ... Heather Langenkamp's acting aside? And Ronee Blakely's? And Amanda Wyss's? Okay, maybe they have a point ... but can they get Lyn Shaye back to reprise her career-defining role?!?!

What's next, you ask? Uh ... how about the Near Dark and The Birds remakes they have in the works? God almighty ... is it too early for Suzanne Pleshette to be rolling in her grave?

Needless to say, if Humbert doesn't get a call to try out for the new Freddy, he is gonna be PISSED...