I hadn’t originally planned to write about any of the films Michael Bay produced under his Platinum Dunes banner. However, since today is Friday the 13th, and the only film in the series currently available on streaming is the Bay-produced 2009 remake, I figured what the hell.
In 2001, Michael Bay co-founded Platinum Dunes, a production company initially dedicated to remaking a whole bunch of classic slasher movies. Not sure if that was actually the expressed intent, but that’s what they wound up doing. The company’s first production was the 2003 remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, followed soon after by remakes of The Amityville Horror, The Hitcher, and A Nightmare on Elm Street. In the middle of all that, naturally, came the 2009 remake of Friday the 13th.
It had been six years since the last Jason Voorhees film, Ronny Yu’s ridiculous monster mashup Freddy vs. Jason. Platinum Dunes released their Texas Chainsaw remake that same year, which had been a pretty big hit, so the folks at New Line Cinema approached Bay & Co. about revitalizing Jason the way they’d done to Leatherface. Freddy vs. Jason writers Mark Swift and Damian Shannon returned to write the new film, which they approached as not so much a straight remake, but a remix of familiar elements from throughout the series.
I’m no expert on these movies, but I can at least appreciate how they mix and match this stuff. Jason enters the movie wearing the bag on his head like in Part 2, then halfway through dons the iconic hockey mask that he gets in Part 3. A climactic fight scene takes place atop a burned-out school bus, a visual callback to Part 6. And so on, and so forth. But where a lot of legacy sequels would bend over backwards to make sure you notice all this stuff, Friday ’09 just kinda tosses em in, and if you notice, then good for you. If not, no big deal.
The story follows two different groups of dumb teenagers trekking to Crystal Lake for a weekend of camping and sex and whatever else teenagers do in the woods. Our first group of victims make their way to Crystal Lake, where two of the guys hear tell of a crop of marijuana growing near the lake. They certainly find it, and they also find Jason Voorhees ready to gut them like a fish. Is it his marijuana? Is he protecting his investment? Or is he a DEA sleeper agent out to take care of anyone dumb enough to go looking for the fabled Crystal Lake Kush? That would be a wild development. (Dear Michael Bay, I have an idea.)
Anyway, six weeks later another group of kids show up to party down at a lake house owned by Trent (Transformers‘ Travis Van Winkle)1 and his family. As they enter town, they meet a guy named Clay (Jared Padalecki) who’s putting up flyers all over town looking for his missing sister Whitney (Amanda Righetti), the last girl we see Jason attack before the film’s title card (23 minutes into the movie, by the way). They go to the guy’s lake house, do drugs, have sex, all that fun stuff. So of course Jason crashes the party, killing everyone but Clay and Jenna (Danielle Panabaker). Clay and Jenna discover Jason’s hideout, where they find Whitney still alive, held captive by Jason for the crime of looking just like his mother.
If I’m being perfectly honest, Friday ’09 does a better job than most of the Friday the 13th movies I’ve seen. A few of the kills harken back to kills from the original run of movies. A guy gets an arrow through the head (kiiiinda like Kevin Bacon getting arrowed through the throat in Part 1); a guy gets stabbed with a screwdriver (kiiiinda like Crispin Glover and the corkscrew in Part IV); a girl gets killed in her own sleeping bag (kiiiinda like in Part VII). They’re similar, but spun just differently enough to feel new. They’re also refreshingly simple. It’s kinda nice to see a simple Friday the 13th story played straight down the middle. It gets in, does its thing, and gets out.
Of course, there’s also a direct nod to Silent Night, Deadly Night, as Jason kills one of his victims by lifting them up and impaling them on a set of wall-mounted deer antlers. Is this actually a reference? Or is it just conveniently similar? Hard to say, but there IS a character who walks around wearing a shirt that says “F**K CHRISTMAS”. And how THAT guy didn’t get the Silent Night themed death is a mystery to me. Then again, I may be biased.
So what, if anything, does this movie have to do with Michael Bay? Not much, honestly. It was made under his Platinum Dunes banner, but all signs point to his co-producers, Brad Fuller and Andrew Form, taking the lead on this one. The film does have that very sleek, modern music video vibe that Bay helped pioneer, but that could also simply be the house style for Platinum Dunes. Without diving into that world to find out, I’m gonna put that one down as a ‘maybe’. The score is credited to longtime Bay composer Steve Jablonsky, so there’s that.
Bay himself was apparently not a fan of how Friday ’09 turned out. IMDb says he walked out during the premiere because he found all the sex gratuitous. He’s not wrong, there is a lot of sex in this movie, but that’s a feature of the series, not a bug. Not sure what his particular hangup was. Personally, I thought this was a pretty solid update of the Friday the 13th series, sex and all. That’s what we watch these for; that, and gruesome gags galore. Right?
Friday ’09 made $92 million on a $19 million budget. Despite nearly quintupling its money at the box office, it’s still the last we’ve seen of Jason Voorhees. Fifteen years and a couple aborted sequels later, Friday the 13th remains trapped in copyright limbo.
Anyway, this was a fun little diversion from the gauntlet of mainline Michael Bay movies. I might even recommend it! Happy Friday the 13th, everyone!
- According to Michael Bay, the Trent that Van Winkle plays here is the same Trent that appears in Transformers, meaning this version of Jason Voorhees exists in the same universe as Optimus Prime. So if you wanted to know what happened to Trent after Mikaela left him for Sam Witwicky… ↩︎
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