Cut to the present day: a bunch of idiot teenagers are looking for a mythical field of weed to steal, smoke, and sell. One of the actors in this gang is Ben Feldman, just a few years before he’d go on to greater fame in Mad Men and Superstore, joining fellow Friday the 13th alums Kevin Bacon and Crispin Glover in the Too Good For This Shit Club. After a standard-issue quota of boobs and blood—alongside a weird Blue Velvet reference that feels like a sign of the screenwriters’ boredom with this material—Jason arrives and slashes up the teenagers’ campsite. (For the record, the gnarliest death goes to America Olivo’s Amanda, who Jason zips into a sleeping bag and roasts over a campfire.)
But at the last minute, Jason ends up sparing and kidnapping one would-be victim: Whitney Miller (Amanda Righetti), who looks uncannily like his own dead mother. It’s a modified version of a plot point from Friday the 13th Part 2, which is not quite enough to justify how incredibly contrived and stupid it is.
The remake’s most novel idea is its quasi-revisionist take on Jason Vorhees himself. This Jason—played, for the first (and apparently last) time by stuntman Derek Mears—is a deranged survivalist. He doesn’t speak, but his murders are apparently motivated by a desire to protect his home at the now-closed Camp Crystal Lake, and to hold onto the new “mother” he has found. He’s smart enough to set some fairly elaborate traps, and he sprints after his victims instead of stalking behind at a menacing walk.
The dead weed teens and the Whitney kidnapping sequence turns out to be yet another prologue, because 25 minutes into the movie, we suddenly cut to six weeks later. Our new hero is Whitney’s brother Clay, a sexy bad boy biker played by Supernatural’s Jared Padalecki. Clay believes—correctly—that his missing, presumed dead sister is actually alive. (Apparently the families of the dead weed teens didn’t care as much, because nobody comes to Crystal Lake knocking on doors trying to find them.)
Clay quickly crashes into a different group of horny college kids, who have come up to Crystal Lake to party in a lavish cabin. Their ranks include quintessential nice girl Jenna (future Arrow star Danielle Panabaker), wacky stoner Chewie (Aaron Yoo, fresh off Disturbia and 21), and lovable idiot Nolan (Veronica Mars’ Ryan Hansen).
They’re all dead by the end of the movie, of course. But as usual, there’s one kid that deserves a special spotlight. This time, it’s Trent (Travis Van Winkle). Even in a franchise that has had more than its fair share of smug, douche-y rich kids, Trent is a special case—so hilariously, cartoonishly evil that it feels like the whole movie is just an elaborate wind-up to his big gory death scene. Trent is introduced loudly whining that Clay is holding up the line at a gas station by questioning the attendant about his sister’s tragic disappearance. He spends most of the cabin party freaking out about his friends spilling beer on his dad’s stained oak table. And when he inevitably cheats on Jenna, he spends the entire sequence mumbling to himself about the breasts of the girl bouncing around on top of him: “Your tits are just so juicy, dude. You got perfect nipple placement, baby.”
Unfortunately, Jason Vorhees eventually corners Trent and skewers him through the hook on the back of a tow truck, eliminating Friday the 13th’s only real source of entertainment. The entire third act is a dutiful slog, as Clay finally finds Whitney in Jason’s underground lair. The reunited siblings team up to kill Jason via a wood-chipper and a machete, dump his body back into Crystal Lake, and hang around on the dock just long enough for one last jump scare, when Jason pops out of the water to kill them.