In 2003, director Marcus Nispel struggled to bring the appropriate gravitas to an ill-advised remake of a genuinely great horror film (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre); charged with rebooting considerably lesser source material, he does a slightly better job. Friday the 13th ’09 certainly doesn’t amount to much, but it’s not appalling: where the TCM redux was solemnly sadistic, Nispel’s latest — which essentially compresses the action of Sean Cunningham’s crummy 1980 original and the even crummier 1981 sequel into one lean 97-minute package — is merely unpretentiously tacky.

It’s also intermittently clever, never more so than in an opening sequence that functions as a kind of self-reflexive gesture: in 15 boob-and-gore-packed minutes, Nispel gives us a sly précis of a Friday the 13th film, complete with an absolutely awesome vintage power ballad to mark the downtime before the carnage. (Paul Thomas Anderson would surely smile).

Unfortunately, the economy of this segment shames what comes next. Having blown their conceptual wad early, the filmmakers simply shrug and push the reset button. The second, full-length narrative — in which a slightly less obnoxious group of youths thoughtlessly choose to frolic in and around Camp Crystal Lake ‘ trudges, methodically and Jason-like, through the same paces (stalk, slash, repeat) so fleetly diagrammed during the overture.