I’m extremely distressed about the news that keeps cropping up about the Friday the 13th remake, due out on the second darkest day of 2009, Day of Pain and Darkness Eve. Or February 13, 2009 for all of you who don’t find the fourteenth to be a morbid, depressing train wreck of a holiday. But anyway, the reason for my distress, for once, comes not from the day itself but from what will happen that day. Word is, the final list for actors to play the legendary Jason Voorhees includes—I can barely bring myself to say it—Michael Bailey Smith. Yes, the guy who played Pluto in the barely-watchable insult to the horror community, the remake of The Hills Have Eyes.
I’ll spare you all the unpleasantness of me seizing Michael Bay by the collar and screaming “KANE HODDER! IS THAT SO HARD?? KANE! HODDER!!” and instead switch to ennui. Bay is an idiot. A rich idiot who got where he is by pumping out overstimulating, oversimplified brain candy into our theatres. He has no respect for the genre and for its major names. Worse, Jason Voorhees is supposed to be a relentless juggernaut, a force of nature in its own right. Remember, this is that same force that stymied Freddy Krueger on his HOME TURF until Ronny Yu decided to shatter the continuity completely and make Jason—who mere installments before walked lengthwise through a lake—into a hydrophobic. Replacing him with a hopped-up cannibal is a royally stupid idea.
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Tags: Movie stories by Steve Anderson
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