Thank God It's Friday the 13th: Friday the 13th: The Remake!

The 2000s were particularly overrun with horror remakes, most of which were terrible. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre had a neat visual style everyone else later ripped off, and 2009's Night of the Demons was a fun spin on an overhyped original. But other than that it was one disappointment after another, except that no one had any expectations for horror remakes, so more accurately it was just one turd after another. The Nightmare on Elm Street remake managed to make the surreal world of dreams boring and prosaic (something not even the astoundingly awful Freddy's Dead did) and the Rob Zombie Halloweens were just a too-long look into the tiny imagination of a grown man who wears Hot Topic shirts.

But fortunately, based Friday the 13th is immune to the normal desecration implied in a remake, partly because every Friday the 13th movie after the first was essentially a remake with one added gimmick (Jason, 3D, being the last one, Scooby Doo Jason, Zombie Jason, Jason Vs Carrie, Jason Takes Manhattan, being the last one, space, and Freddy, respectively). In this one, the gimmick is that it's 2009, and film as an artform is essentially on life support (it's since died), so why not remake an unremakeable film?

You can't really tell but he has hair this time.

The first scene is the end of the original film, and unnecessarily clears up that Jason wasn't drowned at all and saw his mother go on a killing spree and get beheaded. Not that it matters, but I liked the ambiguity in the original series, and I always preferred to think he really drowned. But whatever, this is the remake so they can do what they like.

We then flash forward to the present, except it's 2009 so paradoxically we actually flash forward to the past. For 2000s kids, this is what will have to pass for nostalgia.

This image has been censored for nudity.

So this chick with the frightening bolt-on tits and her friends get sliced up by Jason after stumbling into his weed field because Jason is a stoner in the remake. The only survivor of the massacre is Whitney, whom Jason spares and imprisons in his underground tunnels because she looks like his mom, I think, except not how he'd remember her but OK.

Then Whitney's brother comes looking for her, running into a new batch of walking corpses including a guy who keeps insisting he's unlikeable to the point that I like him out of spite. I forget his name but I'll call him Brad because it's probably something like that. Remember when Tucker And Dale Vs Evil called their evil Chad guy Chad? That's what is known in writing as "on the nose" which means it's too apropos. It makes you look actually bitter you're not a Chad instead of being funny. Whatever, I'm Team Brad for this movie.

Based Brad.

Meanwhile Jason comes across a man who has an intimate relationship with a mannequin, and kills him. In the man's house, sack-wearing Jason (the Part 2 component of the remake) finds a hockey mask, so he wears the hockey mask instead. This is what's known as the origin story of the hockey mask, but it's so half-assed and no one cares where the hockey mask came from anyway, so the scene just stands out as being really self-conscious for no reason.

"At last I have a mask with which to strike terror this Friday the 13th: The Remake" - Jason

I mention this because the writing team are the same guys who wrote Freddy Vs Jason, and have spoken a couple of times about things they wrote that got changed around, so maybe they had a more elaborate story planned for the mask but even that is distressing to me because it would mean they thought the mask was in itself important, as opposed to just being something J-Dog wears because he's self-conscious about his appearance because he's mentally a child. Then I realise I'm actually thinking about story and character in a Friday the 13th flick, and I wonder whether if I weren't like this I might have been an engineer or an astronaut or something gay like that.

One of the things the writers mentioned that got switched around later was this girl's death: she was originally meant to slowly drown because she was too scared to swim for shore while Jason was standing there watching her. This would have been a great and very different way to kill someone off. It could have been really sad and dark and exploited deep-seated fears people have about the water and the wilderness. Instead she just gets stabbed through the head, which is so unmemorable that until I rewatched the remake for this article, I had thought they actually did the drowning scene. A scene I never saw was more memorable, but was cut. This type of decision blows my tiny mind.

Team Brad has the best pitsluts.

There follows an inexplicably lengthy secks scene, featuring this semen demon played by Julianna Guill and best boi Brad the douche, intercut with NPCs dying left, right and centre, to which Brad and Stacy are probably unintentionally funnily oblivious. The fact that Brad alone - whom we're supposed to dislike - gets to smash before dying makes me wonder whether the writers changed their minds and became Team Brad during the second draft or something. Don't get me wrong, this is a Christian blög and sex is for marriage, but it's just weird in a good way to see wanton celebration of normative heterosexuality in a movie anymore. Expect the next remake to feature two beanmouthed xirs scissoring through a hole in a sheet.

Finally Jason shows up to kill everyone and Whitney's brother finds her and blah blah blah who cares. Friday the 13th isn't about resolution. It's about moments. It's about the clouds crossing the moon like in Un Chien Andalou, and ominous dreams about raining blood, and strip monopoly, and the sadness of wasted youth. If you're a tryhard film snob who thinks the original is some bullshit slasher, watch it back to back with the remake, and then kill yourself. The remake is everything it needed to be, but it only highlights what we've lost as a culture, and it was all downhill from here. One day, if it survives the cultural revolution, our descendants will look back at this one and feel that same loss.