The last good horror film may have been one of the first modern horror films—John Carpenter’s 1978-released Halloween (inspired, say many, by Hitchcock’s 1960 Psycho)—which inspired a whole slew of subsequent horror films with its well-timed tension that in itself sustained the viewer’s attention in lieu of gratuitous gore, of which the original Halloween is almost entirely devoid, especially by today’s standards, like the recent remake of Friday the 13th that quite predictably exploits the spurting gift of gore in such a way that many scenes’ money shots are held long enough to be bona fide still shots of the creamy hacked up young flesh.

You might be asking why I bothered to review—indeed, why I bothered to watch—this film in the first place.  I wasn’t high.  I wasn’t trapped in some paralytic stupor.  As ever, plenty of other things could have been done during the 106 minute running time (way off from the 240 minutes I had estimated by the time the credits rolled).

So my answer for penning the review is to entertain my readers.  My answer to why I rented and watched it in the first place—well, I will blame this in part on Netflix, whose Queue is often abused by virtue of allowing me the luxury to rent disposable movies, for I would not likely drop five bucks at Hollywood for many of the films that roll off the ol’ Queue and into my mail box.

Take Brown Bunny, for instance; as much as auteur (sure, why not) Vincent Gallo has entertained me in the past, I ultimately could not bear what was (reportedly) a long and grueling self-indulgent art-house film, and quite frankly, I’d rather watch the relative reliability of my porno library (yes, it’s a library, and it requires a ladder) than see Chloe Sevigny give Gallo head (I’ll admit, I did hit FF and watched a few seconds of the scene to see if Gallo was packing and if Chloe had her technique down, although I was left as flaccid as if the scene were directed by J.G. Ballard, for painfully absent was anything even remotely erotic).

But I digress, and before its white hot intensity gets cold, I must rush back to Friday the 13th Killer Cut, whose addition of “Killer Cut” to the Blu-ray DVD package certainly, as you can imagine, must be in reference to the inclusion of the avant-garde masterstrokes that the mainstream movie crowd was simply not high-brow enough to comprehend or endure.

When it comes down to it, however, I’m afraid endurance is what it’s really all about.  For when watching nearly any modern day horror film, especially those of the slickly produced and gore par excellence variety that Friday the 13th Killer Cut indeed is, one must possess a certain level of endurance that is akin to holding one’s breath underwater for uncomfortably long (perhaps borderline fatal) periods of time.

However, unlike the aforementioned Criss Angelesque feat of endurance, movie endurance—even marathon endurance—is at least rewarded by some form of relief, whether a cigarette break (which I did witness at a runner’s marathon, although it was a run for the reformation of marijuana laws, and it was a joint) or the refreshment of a cold beverage, and the individual is mercifullly reprieved from an otherwise potentially insufferable experience.

What I found interesting about Friday the 13th Killer Cut were the moments of built in relief, such as some bizarre dialogue, which even included a reference to David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, when one of the film’s many stellar actors briefly pontificated about the merits of Pabst Blue Ribbon vs. Heineken.  Naturally, the other form of relief was comical in nature, such as an amusingly choreographed sex scene during which the male (yes, it was hetero—a gay sex scene would be the ultimate horror movie subversion) rambles to his listlessly gyrating partner about a number of oddities that were likely an ill-advised display of ad-libbing, perhaps picked up at the previous summer’s Julliard Shakespeare workshop.

Other bits of dialogue perform the same predictable trick and elicit those “unintended” belly laughs, to be sure, but even more interesting was how one of the writers (it takes a team to put together a horror script) had the insight to name two of the main characters Clay and Trent—the former the protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis’ nihilistic novel Less Than Zero; the latter a supporting character in the novel—and like all of Ellis’ novels, the characters are interchangeable on the basis of similar good looks, dead-pan demeanor, etc,  which incidentally are some defining characteristic of  horror films.

Friday the 13th Killer Cut, then, emphasizes—yet again—how the horror film genre has been maxed out and has yet to be revitalized by a freshness that films such as The Ring (although perhaps more by their Japanese counterparts) promised but ultimately failed to deliver, especially by forcing the invariable abysmal sequels that do not extend the life of the series but merely accentuate how increasingly and quickly played out the films indeed become.