Friday the 13th (2009)
(aka Friday the 13th, Part 12)
d. Marcus Nispel, 98 minutes

Film Plot Summary

The film opened - under the credits - on June 13th, 1980, at Camp Crystal Lake.

In a grainy, black-and-white sequence (backstory from the original film), final surviving Camp Counselor (Stephanie Rhodes) was chased through woods during a rainstorm by Mrs. Pamela Voorhees (Nana Visitor), who claimed: "You're the last one. I've killed all the others. It'll be easier for you than it was for Jason." The angry mother believed that the counselors had to be killed as punishment for negligence, and for letting her young son Jason (Caleb Guss) drown.

The counselor slashed Mrs. Voorhees across the neck with a machete, beheading her (# 1 death). Jason (not drowned but very much alive) had witnessed the killing from the vantage point of a tree above. Afterwards, he jumped down and looked at his mother's locket-necklace, as he heard her tell him (in voice-over) to seek revenge:

"My special, special boy. They must be punished, Jason, for what they did to you. For what they did to me. Kill for mother."

He left the scene with the machete in hand.

Crystal Lake in the "Present Day" (approx. 20 years later?)

A group of five backpacking teens (including two couples) were hiking in the woods near Crystal Lake:

• smart and pretty Whitney Miller (Amanda Righetti)
• Whitney's boyfriend Mike (Nick Mennell)
• Richie (Ben Feldman)
• Richie's sexy girlfriend Amanda (America Olivo)
• nerdy dweeb Wade (Jonathan Sadowski) with a GPS receiver

They were there searching for a secret, growing cash crop of marijuana, but couldn't locate it. They camped for the night near the "broken-down" cabins of the old camp. Around the campfire, Wade described the notorious story of the abandoned camp, that had closed down about 20 years earlier. He described how:

"Some woman, she went f--king nuts. Killed all these counselors. Blamed them for her son's drowning. He was like deformed, or retarded or something. Mom got hers. Apparently there was one survivor. This girl, she cut that lady's head off with a machete. It gets weirder...Her son, Jason, he came back. He was actually there. He watched his mom being beheaded."

Everyone was skeptical of his story and didn't believe it.

Mike and Whitney left the group to walk in the woods, while Richie and Amanda were forced to listen to Wade's ramblings about technology at the campfire. Bored by the talk, Amanda opened her shirt and pulled down her bra to display her breasts to boyfriend Richie to entice him and get him to pay attention to her, then poured massage oil over them, and threw her bra at him. They retired to a tent to have sex, while Wade wandered off into the woods, listening on iPod headphones and singing along to Night Ranger's "Sister Christian." While urinating, he stumbled upon the location of the weed -- and then looked up and saw burlap sack-headed homicidal killer Jason (Derek Mears) - Wade was the first victim to meet a customary fate, slashed with a machete (# 2 death) (off-screen).

Meanwhile, Mike and Whitney (ultimately, she was the surviving last girl) checked out a run-down shack that they found near the abandoned Camp Crystal Lake. Whitney thought it might be a homeless person's residence, where they both found old artifacts, including a hanging of camp counselor whistles on cords, and the necklace-locket with a picture of young Mrs. Voorhees in it. Mike commented: "Hey, it looks like you." In another room, "a little kid's room," the wood headboard was carved with the name JASON - and Mike wondered: "Wasn't Jason the name from Wade's story?"

In the tent, the couple were interrupted in rear-entry love-making by the sound of twigs cracking. Amanda heard something, and told Richie she suspected Wade: "I think Wade's watching us." He replied, "Let the perv watch," and they proceeded to continue thrusting -- their silhouettes outlined on the outside of the tent. They stopped a second time when another twig snapped, and she insisted that the reluctant Richie (with a "boner") leave the tent to investigate, bribing him: "You're not gonna get any until you do."

In the patch of marijuana, Richie found Wade's discarded light stick, a severed ear attached to Wade's iPod headphone cord, and then - Wade's bloodied body propped up next to a tree. In the camp area, Jason slashed at the tent canvas, dragged Amanda in her sleeping bag to the campfire, and tied her up above it, upside down -- burning her alive inside (# 3 death). Hearing her screams, Richie ran back to the camp, where he stepped into a bear-trap and watched powerlessly in pain as Amanda died near him.

In a back room of the shack, Mike and Whitney also discovered a candle-littered altar with Mrs. Voorhees' severed head in a hole in the wall. At that moment, Jason returned to his home, where he attacked them by stabbing his machete up through the wooden floorboards. Mike was cut through the leg, hand, and other body parts before he was pulled completely through the floor into the basement and killed (# 4 death).

Whitney fled back to the camp, where she found Amanda's scorched body next to the campfire. As she went to Richie's aid in the bear trap, Jason ran up (not his usual lumbering style!) behind her and cut Richie's skull vertically in-half with his sharp machete (# 5 death). Whitney crawled backwards on the ground, as Jason chased her and raised his machete - then, the scene went black.

[Later, it was learned that Whitney had been kidnapped and chained up in Jason's lair because she resembled Jason's mother at an early age. She had the locket around her neck, admired by the serial killer.]

Six Weeks Later --

Another group of college coeds pulled up in a van at a gas station/outpost in the Crystal Lake area, preparing for a weekend party at a luxurious summer cabin on the lake. At the counter of the outpost/convenience store was a guy named Clay Miller (Jared Padalecki), who was dedicated to looking for his sister Whitney and carrying a stack of MISSING posters - she hadn't been heard from in a month and a half. There, he first encountered the group of college kids - the seven included:

• uptight, snobbish rich kid Trent (Travis Van Winkle)
• Trent's adventurous girlfriend Jenna (Danielle Panabaker)
• Nolan (Ryan Hansen)
• Nolan's blonde girlfriend Chelsea (Willa Ford)
• Chelsea's sexy friend Bree (Julianna Guill)
• Asian funny man Chewie (Aaron Yoo)
• black Lawrence (Arlen Escarpeta)

They were on their way to the cabin of Trent's parents. After arriving at the plush cabin with mounted animals on many of the walls, some of them played a drinking game.

A New Jersey police officer named Officer Bracke (Richard Burgi) stopped Clay, riding on his motorcycle in the town of Crystal Lake. Bracke insisted that two 10-year veterans had been put on the case of the missing Whitney - they performed three dozen interviews and did a county-wide search. He asserted that there was no evidence that anything happened to Whitney: "There's no car, no witnesses, nothing." Clay believed that Whitney wouldn't have taken off with her boyfriend, since her cancer-stricken mother had just died - and in addition, she hadn't attended the funeral, something very unlikely ("That's not possible").

However, Bracke stressed that Whitney wasn't in town: "Might wanna try looking someplace else." Later, Clay stopped at an old house with a front yard littered with junk. He spoke to an Old Lady (Rosemary Knower) about his missing sister, and was blankly told: "She ain't missing. She's dead...People go missing around here, they're gone for good." She hinted that the territorial killer just wanted to be "left alone" and that the area did not like outsiders.

At a barn, Clay spoke to a redneck hick named Donnie (Kyle Davis), who was using a wood-chipper. He was warned that the property owner Mr. Garike might shoot him. Clay was told about a kerosene thief in the area, yet Donnie hadn't seen his sister Whitney. As Clay left, he was offered dope for sale (presumably from the Crystal Lakes woods area where Wade had originally found the weed patch).

In a later scene set in the barn, the dope-smoking hick was looking at a Hustler magazine centerfold and making crude comments ("Let Daddy have a little lick"), after which he investigated a noise in the attic, armed with a puny croquet mallet. He spoke to a naked female mannequin that he had named Gina, and stroked her plastic surface. He had lost his virginity to the fake dummy when he was younger ("You're still tight as ever. I'm gonna f--king pound you so hard"). When Jason approached from behind, Donnie ripped off Jason's burlap sack-covered head and looked upon Jason's deformed face. His neck was sliced by a massive swing of Jason's machete (# 6 death). Instead of returning the sack to cover his face, Jason found a hockey-mask on the floor and adopted it as his new facial cover-up.

Trent gave permission to Nolan and his girlfriend Chelsea to take his van to the dock area, but explicitly forbid them to drive his boat.

Back at the cabin of Trent's parents, Clay found himself at its door during his search for Whitney, where Jenna was helpful and friendly to him, and invited him in for a drink. However, Trent rudely objected to his presence, claiming it was a "private party." When Clay was forced to leave, Jenna joined him for "company" to search on the other side of the lake (into Camp Crystal Lake) for clues regarding Whitney's disappearance.

Nolan and Chelsea defiantly disobeyed Trent by taking the boat out onto the water, where Chelsea wake-boarded topless. When she fell off the ski-board, boat-driving Nolan was shot with an arrow through the back of the head (an amazing shot from the shore with a bow and arrow) - it emerged from Nolan's forehead (# 7 death).

The driverless boat struck Chelsea in the head, causing a severe wound. Dazed, as she was swimming to shore and the dock, she saw hockey-masked Jason staring at her from the woods with his machete - she called out: "What do you want from me?" She hid under the dock with Jason standing above her, when she was stabbed through the dock's boards into the top of her skull (# 8 death) - Chelsea's naked torso rose out of the water as the weapon was pulled upwards.

Clay and Jenna explored the cabins of the dilapidated Crystal Lake camp area, and came upon Jason's place. Exploring with flashlights, they discovered various play-dolls (one with male genitals), and a board displaying lots of knotted ropes. After going outside, they watched in hiding (under a large stack of canoes) as Jason returned, hauling a decapitated corpse (hick Donnie's body) flung over his shoulder, and another sackful of disembodied body parts. After inspecting Clay's dropped backpack, Jason shone spotlights in the area and overturned the canoes - but the two had already moved elsewhere behind archery targets.

The two ran back to Trent's cabin to warn the others. During their flight, Jason was alerted to their path in the woods by an elaborate network of underground tunnels that he had built (?), rigged with bells attached to trip wires that signaled where intruders were located. Inside Jason's bunker, Whitney was held prisoner in chains, wailing in the echoing chamber: "Help me!" Her brother's backpack was deposited near her, and she found the MISSING posters, realizing that Clay was searching for her. Using a wire from Wade's broken GPS receiver, Whitney attempted to pick one of her chain locks when Jason stymied her - but she was saved from serious harm when he saw the locket around her neck.

Back at Trent's cabin, Bree was drinking and dancing provocatively, with Chewie watching and making lewd comments: "In my next life, I wanna come back as one of the buttons on the ass pocket of her jean shorts," but he was reluctant to go over and talk to her ("I have a better shot at f--king a penguin than that girl"). Bree suggestively whispered to Chewie how to drink from his flaming shot glass - "Just bring it to your lips, blow, and suck." He replied: "You're really good at that" - but then burned his lip, and accidentally broke a piece of furniture ("a family heirloom") when he fell. Enraged, Trent directed Chewie to the outdoor tool shed to acquire tools for fixing the chair (Chewie boasted: "You won't be disappointed. They don't call me the 'wood wizard' because I masturbate alot").

In the well-stocked shed, Chewie found more alcohol and other mostly-unused sports equipment, including a basketball and a hockey stick ("You're even curved to the left, like my penis"). When Jason materialized behind him, he offered him the stick ("Are you looking for this? Because it completes your outfit"), before Jason assaulted him -- and slowly stabbed Chewie with a screwdriver into his throat below his chin, and then stuck into his brain while his head was held back (# 9 death).

Just before Chewie's death, Bree had led Trent upstairs for sex -- where she stripped while astride him, while he admired her body after she removed her bra: "Oh, wow! Your tits are stupendous..." During intercourse, he kept complimenting her: "Your tits are f--king --- just...so juicy, dude...You got perfect nipple placement, baby." She filmed them doing it with a hand-held video camera, projecting them onto a large-screen TV display nearby, while he cautioned: "This better not go on the f--king Internet." They were listening to Santogold's "Shove It (Featuring Spank Rock)" as they kept thrusting together.

At the same time in the living room, loner Lawrence was preparing to masturbate to a picture of a sweatered model in a winter season mail-order catalogue ("Gonna have to do"), when Clay and Jenna returned to the cabin. They warned a drug-dazed Lawrence: "There's a guy out there carrying a dead body" - and they called the police to report a homicide. Jenna attempted to warn her unfaithful boyfriend Trent and Bree, but they ignored her repeated knockings on their door. They approached orgasm together ("I'm close baby, I'm close"), as Jason watched them from an outside window, while they agreed to each other that the sex was great: "That was stupendous...To say the least."

The power to the cabin was cut off, as Clay warned everyone ("There's a killer out there"), including a distrusting, disingenuous Trent. Jenna reminded everyone that Chelsea and Nolan never came back. With a wok frying pan and fireplace poker in his hands, Lawrence went outdoors to locate Chewie - in the tool-shed, Chewie's upside-down body dropped from above and dangled in front of him.

And then Lawrence became Jason's next victim - after a struggle in the shed, as Lawrence ran outside, Jason grabbed a double-sided axe and accurately threw it, end over end, into the middle of Lawrence's back. Although his dying screams of "Help me!" were heard by the others, Clay was suspicious that it was only a lure: "He's using your friend as bait. He wants us to go out there." To finish the paralyzed Lawrence off, Jason picked him up, turned him over, and slammed his body into the ground, forcing the axe to emerge from Lawrence's front (# 10 death).

Jason then appeared on the cabin's roof with his machete, while Trent ran upstairs to get his revolver. When Bree followed him upstairs and went into the bathroom and noticed an open window, she looked behind the shower curtain. Jason grabbed her from behind, covered her mouth to muffle her screams, picked her up, and impaled Bree back-first onto a mounted trophy set of sharp-pointed deer antlers on the inside of the bathroom door (# 11 death).

When Officer Bracke drove up to the darkened cabin and knocked on the front door, Jason jumped off the roof behind him, and stabbed him with the firepoker through the left eye - and pierced it through the door (# 12 death). The officer was left impaled or pinned there.

Clay and Jenna fled upstairs, just before Trent discovered Bree's corpse in the bathroom. In terror, all three scrambled outside and as they were hijacking the officer's car, Jason tossed Bree's body from the second floor into the vehicle's windshield. Trent ran through the woods toward the main road (losing his gun in a small pond), while Clay and Jenna fled in another direction. Ominously, a tow truck stopped but when the unseen driver only motioned for him to come forward, Trent was wary that it might be Jason. The masked killer caught up to Trent, however, stabbed him in the middle of his chest with a machete, and then impaled him on three-pronged tow-hook poles mounted on the back of the truck (# 13 death), as the driver sped off.

Jenna and Clay returned to the Crystal Lake campgrounds, where they again entered Jason's shack and heard Whitney screaming from below. They discovered a trap door leading to an illuminated basement tunnel and Whitney's location. [Note: a wheelchair from a previous victim was hanging on the wall.] Reunited with his sister, Clay freed her from chains by breaking them with a hammer, while Jenna announced that Jason was hurriedly coming toward them.

At a single tunnel exit hole with space for only one person at a time, Whitney and Clay made it through, but Jenna was killed when Jason stabbed her from behind with his machete - the blade burst out the center of her chest (# 14 death). As Whitney and Clay climbed out of the tunnel system into an overturned school bus, Jason grabbed Clay and knocked him unconscious, but he soon revived and saved Whitney from Jason's clutches. The two continued their flight to the barn (from earlier in the film), where Jason followed and attacked. Although Clay fought valiantly, he was almost killed when Jason pushed his face toward the wood chipper.

To save Clay, Whitney impersonated Jason's mother - using Jason's memory of his love for her to cause a distraction. She showed him the locket and told him: "It's OK. You can stop now." Clay was able to recover, and plunged a bear trap into Jason's back, and wrapped a chain around his neck. Whitney threw the chains holding Jason into the spinning metal spikes of the chipper, suspending him off the ground, and then pulling him backwards toward the spikes. He was constrained long enough for Whitney to stab him in the chest with his own machete, as she told him: "Say hi to Mommy - in hell!" (# 15 death - temporary).

In the final scene the next morning, Clay dumped Jason's seemingly-lifeless body off the end of the dock into Crystal Lake, along with his mask - and the necklace-locket. As Clay went to comfort her, in the film's "boo" ending, Jason suddenly burst from the water through the dock, and grabbed Whitney from behind as she screamed, and the film went to black.

Film Notables (Awards, Facts, etc.)

A re-imagining or rebooting of the original film from 1980, from Michael Bay's production company Platinum Dunes. It contained elements from the first few films of the series, and some references to other films in the franchise. The 12th film of the series.

Opened on Friday the 13th in February, 2009.

With a production budget of $19 million, and box-office gross revenues of $65 million (domestic) and $90.6 million (worldwide). On its opening weekend, it set a new record for a horror opening with estimated sales of $40.5 million (domestic).

With more bloody gore, sex/nudity (gratuitous toplessness), etc. than the original film, and with lots of stereotypical characters (including a token Asian and African-American, and a few vapid blondes).

Body Count: 14 (all committed by Jason), plus Jason's temporary death (# 15).