Where I Watched it: MAX

English Audio Description?: Yes

Before we even talk about this, we need to have a talk, just me and the peeps at wBD.

hi. it’s me. The guy who consistently calls out streamers for nonsensical decisions when it comes to streaming and audio description. Can someone on your end explain to me why you selectively choose to provide audio description for sequels but not the first film? MAX has three of the original Friday The 13th films described, but not the original, and there’s a gap. Serious question, is this how you watch movies? Do you just cherry pick random films out of long running franchises? Or, do you like to know where the story started? Because you do the same thing with Annabelle. The entire Conjuring trilogy has audio description, as do both nun films. but when it comes to the evil doll, the first film is lacking, while the second two have it. Why? i really truly want to know from someone at WBD why you expect blind people to do something that statistically the large majority of people don’t do. Find me the guy who saw 2 Fast 2 Furious, Tokyo Drift, and Furious 7, but none of the other films. Because that’s 2, 3, and 7, which I believe match Jason and his series.

So, for Friday the 13th this year, which is how far behind i am on reviews, i watched the remake. Technically, I had seen some scenes already, as I was working in theatres in 2009, and we used to have to do something called theatre walks, where we had to go into every theatre at least twice just in case someone needed to flag us down for something. It spoils a lot of movies.

So, I finally sat down to watch the whole thing, start to finish. I would have loved to discuss the original, which i had already seen, with audio description, but the remake/requel will do. Technically, even though this predates the use of the term requel, it is basically Part 2 completely remade, like David Gordon Green’s Halloween. This version directly acknowledges what happens in the first and original film, but kicks off with Jason, instead of his mother. That way, we can get some brutal kills. And, yeah, there are some brutal kills here. I’m not sure why everyone hates this movie so much, except for the fact that Jason doesn’t have a mask for a few seconds, but it had a kill that truly surprised me, and it also killed off a character I thought was going to survive. Although, I’m not really sure anyone survives since this ending is so damn ambiguous.

My previous contact with Jason is honestly low. I’ve seen the original, Freddy Vs Jason, played the Nintendo video game, and later the X-Box game 9which is apparently shutting down soon). Rumors are that A24 has the rights to this series. we shall see. It’s so weird that there’s no sequel to this, considering how many other truly awful films got sequels. They used a cheap cast, so it can’t be that, and the film basically has one location. If this is an expensive film, it is for the wrong reasons.

The audio description does not shy away from any of the many kills, where basically no one dies in a nice way. Everyone gets the business end of Jason’s machete (or whatever he has on him at the time) and it gets translated in gory detail. i appreciate that this does have audio description in it, but it’s technically the most recent entry in the franchise, which always seems the easiest to do. Often times, with these long running franchises, the production company will churn out audio description on a legacy sequel, but no one goes back around to the original.

Remember how I mentioned David Gordon Green’s Halloween? well john Carpenter’s classic is stilll missing it. Hulu produced History of The World part 2, which inspired them to host Part 1 for anyone who wasn’t alive back when that movie came out. It didn’t have audio description. Hulu also didn’t feel the pressure to go back and add audio description to predator or predator 2 when prey came out. Currently, I believe DisneyPlus is still hosting the original indiana Jones films without audio description.

I don’t just jump into franchises halfway through. the only reason i watched this was because I thought it was a remake. Luckily, I’ve seen the original, so the references made sense. but, if this had turned out to be more like a Halloween H20, I would have been lost.

It’s not a perfect film, and i really do think a certain character followed “the rules” that should have led them to survive, so I’m not fully pleased, but it’s not the disaster I thought it was.

Final Grade: B