From the moment that my dad caught me watching a grimy old Betamax copy of Tobe Hooper's
Texas Chainsaw Massacre back in sixth grade, I've never really felt like I had to defend the crap that I watch, read or listen to. At the same time, I've always kind of enjoyed rattling on about it -- which isn't the same as recommending it, obviously. When questioned by those with better taste than mine, I've always kind of shrugged and grinned and tried to compensate for my lousy judgment with sheer moronic enthusiasm.
I was never a huge fan of the
Friday the 13th franchise. I'm sure there are lots of people out there who are, but to me it was always the Burger Chef of the early '80s slasher boom -- seedy, sleazy, an unapologetically capitalistic move, with none of the relentless faux-Midwestern gracefulness of John Carpenter's Pasadena masterpiece. But last night I stayed up late watching this year's Michael Bay remake, prepared to hate every second of it, and I have to say, it held my interest. Not because it was any good (it wasn't, really) or even particularly scary (at one point during an interview with the director, you can see that he has a copy of
Herb Gardening for Dummies on the shelf behind him, and I posit to you, how could anyone with that book direct a scary movie?) It contains actual lines of dialogue such as: "Dude, your tits are so juicy" and "You have perfect nipple placement," and despite what the filmmakers seemed to have thought they achieved, the suspense is kept to an absolute minimum, like a special effect they couldn't quite afford.
I even scoured the bonus footage to try to figure out why in God's name I felt compelled to watch this whole mess, and I think what it comes down to, depressingly enough, is not the quality of workmanship, but the continued deterioration in my tastes. Like otherwise sane grown men who start tinkering in their workshop or watching World War II documentaries on the History Channel, I seem to have become developed the inexplicable ability -- desire, even -- to watch Jason stalk around dispatching pert-breasted animalistic twenty-somethings with a bow and arrow, a machete or a screwdriver.
In the bonus making-of documentary, the filmmakers blather out the usual baloney about honoring the obligatory sacraments of the Vorhees mythos -- the hockey mask, the machete, the psuedo-morality of Jason's endless revenge fantasy. But the fact is that, viewed now, from a perspective of thirty years down the road, these things
have taken on a bizarrely profound, almost sacred quality. They're almost like religeous artifacts that have been passed between so many hands that they've become both instantly recognizable and oddly impossible to analyze. The last rays of sun off the lake, shining through rusty screen door of the cabin, the imagined smell of mothballs and pine, of rusty tap water, the creak of the old wooden dock and the humid breath inside the hockey mask -- there's a universal end-of-summer hopelessness to these elements that transcends the innately greedy clumsiness of whatever the producers have tried to do by "rebooting the franchise" with a shot of a topless girl waterskiing, or an Asian dude named Chewie getting stoned, or even a line of dialogue like, "You have perfect nipple placement." In other words, like Taco Bell, it's almost impossible to fuck up. And for that, I suppose, I'm grateful.
