Friday the 13th, the Twelfth

The Best Drinking Game For Staying Sober:


Directions: Buy a bootleg DVD of Platinum Dunes latest foray into raping your childhood and impregnating it with false memories that alter past films into pieces of art. Next, crack open the first type of beer you ever drank while watching a decent horror film. What, it’s only 9 in the morning, you say? Don’t worry. This is one game that will keep you singing the alphabet backwards with only a few mistakes. In other words, you will probably pass a sobriety test with flying colors.


Turn movie on. Ready? Here comes the hard part:


Take a sip whenever...


The lighting is bright enough to show you anything at night

You can see Jason in full view for longer than two seconds of screen time


A female blonde is fully clothed


You say to yourself, “this will be awesome!” (i.e., because there’s a rusty and ready wood chipper an inch from a character’s head) and it actually is


A character you like dies

A character you like lives


A character you like exists onscreen

There is the slightest acknowledgement that the setting is a summer camp


Anything about Jason’s sudden urge to kill after 29 years of laying low, installing flood lights, and practicing archery is explained

I don’t know about you, but I’m incredibly thirsty.


As I’ve said before, I wasn’t expecting a franchise that has previously churned out imitation I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter quality installments to be brilliant, but how hard was it to construct a mildly interesting, perhaps even slightly scary film? Too hard, okay. How about a cheeky horror romp that pays some form of homage to the eleven films that came before? No? Here’s an idea: just give me one death scene that I’ll remember two hours later. Fine. I’ll make it easy: release a remake of higher quality than the disgrace that was 2006’s The Hitcher. Seriously, EVEN THAT wasn’t possible?

Did I just say what I think I said? Did I call The Hitcher 2006 a better movie than something else made by human beings? With hands? And presumably at least a few brain cells? Remind me to pack an extra sweater on my way to hell.


I wouldn’t be so offended by the mediocrity of F13.12 if it hadn’t made $42 million and counting this weekend. Yay, horror fans actually paid for something! Well I hope we enjoyed it because we can probably now expect another 11 sequels over the next decade. Hey, there are two more 13ths in 2009 that land on Friday, so perhaps Michael Bay will go kidnap a few more CW refugees to get the right timing. It’s not like he needs to wait for a script or anything. Say what you will about the Saw series: I’ll take Tobin Bell’s hoarse whisper and the writers’ mild dedication towards providing plot and character intricacies over badly lit death scenes of obnoxiously bland catalogue models any day.

If you’ll excuse me, I need to go have a drink and formulate a plan to destroy Platinum Dunes before Jared Padalecki signs on to play Freddy Krueger and the script is rewritten so he doesn’t hunt in dreams, but just starts hanging out in the dressing room of Victoria’s Secret until his bloodless defeat by Paul Blart, Mall Cop. Crap. Did I just give Michael Bay a bad yet inexplicably lucrative pitch?