By Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti, Adam Archer & Peter Guzman (WildStorm)
ISBN13: 978-1-0-84576-625-2
I’m not the greatest fan of modern horror movies, especially the frankly daft and usually logical-integrity free “Slasher-movieâ€. I really, really don’t mean morality here; I can be as nihilistically cynical as any hormonally drenched teen, and what guy doesn’t like vicarious nudity, gratuitous sex and gory giblets everywhere?
What I have trouble with is the creation of unstoppable, inescapable, unkillable monsters as Brands. Fear isn’t going “boo!†or making audiences jump, it’s the build-up; the piling on of tension upon anxiety till you just want it to be over. For that you need at least the possibility that the brand-name can be defeated. Without engaging that hope and desperation all you have is an ever increasing spiral of baroque stunts and shallow effects, ultimately pointless and hollow.
For example: A group of teens are hired to renovate Camp Crystal Lake, the rural paradise where so many wayward kids have been chopped into liver-sausage by the ghastly hockey-masked ghost of Jason Voorhees. They’re obnoxious and they get naked and they die grotesquely. That really all there is to it.
Accepting that I’m not the target market, this book (collecting the first six issues of the monthly comic) has credible artwork but not even the usually excellent scripting of Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti can get me to engage with this disparate cast of cadavers-in-waiting. I can’t even dislike them enough to look forward to their inevitable deaths. Maybe if they were people you really want to see killed like bigots or celebrities…
Competent but limited, and absolutely and only for kids over eighteen…
© MMVII New Line Productions, Inc. Friday The 13th is ™ New Line Productions, Inc, (so7). © 2006, 2007 New Line Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.