Friday the 13th

WHAT WAS it Anton Chekhov said about “the woodchipper over the fireplace”? If you see a woodchipper in act one then, before the curtain falls, one member of the cast must be fed through that device.

Well, okay, he was actually talking about a rifle, but the principle remains the same and the folk behind this remake of a slasher classic clearly know their Chekhov. Having shown logs being turned into shavings early on, they make sure that, before the final girl is slain, tendons are ground into scarlet pulp.

If you need to know what Friday the 13this like, then you need only glance at the other remakes ( The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Amityville Horror) that have emerged from Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes production company. Like those releases, it is bad, but never so bad as to become unwatchable. I jumped three times and laughed twice.

A dizzyingly long prologue honours the original film’s exploitation sensibility by inviting female campers at a remote lake to wave their breasts at stoned young men in rude T-shirts. Before long, a madman with a machete has skewered the decadent youths. Then the titles come up on the screen and the whole process starts again. Stay in your seats for a further six months or so and Platinum Dunes will, no doubt, find a third posse of idiots to feed into the nation’s timber-grinding implements.

As has been the case with all the company’s films, the slick professionalism of the enterprise lessens rather than increases the sense of unease. These things are best done on low-budget equipment, with actors who can’t act and catering from the local chip shop. Heck, for the price of a cinema ticket, you could make a better film yourself.