At the movies: Friday the 13th.

Platinum Dunes must be stopped.

Their remakes of The Hitcher, The Amityville Horror, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre took beloved (well, except for Amityville) horror films of eras past and remade them as slick-looking, empty-headed drivel. And now, in taking the most brain dead of horror franchises, the Friday the 13th films, they've managed to take dumb films and make them even dumber.

They spent countless millions of dollars on production value (and the locations all look beautiful), but all the money in the world can't replicate the idiotic charm of the original Friday the 13th films, and the cast has absolutely nothing to do except get killed. Aaron Yoo, from Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, makes the best impression, but even he is simply bogged down by the utter ineptitude of this new Friday. And as for ostensible lead Jared Padalecki, he is much better served by his show Supernatural than he is by this film.

A new bunch of idiot teenagers is on their way to Camp Crystal Lake to see the sights, swim, do drugs, take part in some topless waterskiing, and have premarital sex. Naturally, they're doomed, and legendary slasher Jason Voorhees is sharpening up his machete, antlers, woodchipper, hatchet, archery set, and chisel to carve up some teenage meat. But without the subtext of the initial run of Fridays (up through Part VII or so), which combined reactionary mores, Cold War nuclear dread, and the shameful "me first" ideology of the 80s, there's simply no reason for this film to exist.

We have a few good kills, one exceptional kill (it involves a sleeping bag, but not in the way you'd expect), no quotable dialogue, and a pittance of gore. I was never dreading this remake, because the original Fridays weren't exactly a sacred text to begin with. But lo and behold, Platinum Dunes have managed to once again snatch defeat from the jaws of a beloved franchise. And they want to tackle A Nightmare on Elm Street next? Blasphemy.

At the movies: Mirrors

This one was a catastrophic disappointment. I've been on the Alexandre Aja train ever since Haute Tension, and I maintain that it's a work of damned near genius. His The Hills Have Eyes remake was a bloodthirsty and brilliant rethinking, and I'm eagerly anticipating his 3-D take on Piranha. But this effort, a julienning of the Korean film Geoul sokeuro and Poltergeist III, is just not up to snuff.

Kiefer Sutherland, sidelined as Jack Bauer due to the writer's strike, is an alcoholic cop recovering from accidentally killing another cop. His family life is in turmoil, and he's crashing on his sister's couch and working as a night watchman in a creepy burnt-out edifice of a department store that was once a hospital.

Anyway, there's something evil in the mirrors. The explanations are ridiculous, the dialogue is just awful, and even Kiefer is in over his head. Some of the effects are great, but the gore is often too CG-based and the final confrontation is just stupid. The only part of the film that actually feels like an Aja movie is the opening pre-credits sequence, which uses the cinemascope frame and incidental reflections in a way which remains stylistically of a piece with his amazing work on Haute and Hills. The rest feels like something some studio execs stepped on (20th Century Fox, I call you out), and the main musical theme seems to be ripping off the same bolero that The Doors' "Spanish Caravan," Jam & Spoon featuring Plavka Lonich's "Right in the Night," Fantastic Planet's "Carry on Columbus," and the main theme to Don Coscarelli's Phantasm films all rip off.

The film is thirty minutes too long by far, and surprisingly boring, especially for an R-rated horror film. What really strikes me as odd is that for a film that rips off so much of Poltergeist III, it doesn't angle for any of the really creepy mirror stuff in that film.

I will give full credit for the remarkable set work that Romania's artisans helped craft- in particular, the edifice of the Mayflower department store is a marvel. But that doesn't make up for just under two hours of shock stabs and creepy light phenomena. There's some good moments and two really gory deaths. That's about it. I still have hope for Piranha 3-D, though.