People don't like their Escapist fantasy messed with. It can be hard for many to understand why Horror is escapist fantasy, it is, and it really has nothing to do with people wanting to be killers, or the dark side of human violence, or anything else, as there isn't generally that much direct association with the villain.
Let me be honest, the real world is boring. People strive to get away from it. Horror movies generally feature the premise of a bunch of generally ordinary people who get caught up in extraordinary events. Chased by unkillable murder machines, surviving against zombie hordes, exploring creepy abandoned locations, it's all very differant from what most of us do, and tends wind up being unexpectedly exciting. While most of us would never want to be in a horror movie as such things tend to go down (which would lead to our inevitable, horrible, screaming death) the idea of cool stuff happening and being in the middle of it is exciting and adventurous, and captures the imagination. Genere fans typically go to great lengths mentally contriving their zombie survival plan, or thinking about what they would try and do if they say confronted the mythology of Friday The 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, or on a video game front what it would be like if they found themselves in Silent Hill. One of the reasons why you see such stereotypical characters as well is to make the situation somewhat believable (more so than many kinds of fantasy) since everyone probably knows people at least similar to the ones in the movie.
The problem with reboots like "Friday The 13th" is that what the studios are doing is playing around with mental constucts and mythologies that have been around for a couple generations of movie goers. These things are popular based on their expanding mythology and for being what they were. You decide to reboot it and change everything around and that slots off the fans who invested a lot of imagination in it to begin with. Those doing reboots, not just of this, but of other properties, totally seem to miss the point that if they are going to change things substantially, there is no point in using a well known franchise name, because anyone whom that franchise has meaning to is just going to get cheezed off when you make alterations to it.
On a lot of levels I can agree that for it's genere "Friday The 13th" was not horrible. The problem was that there was no reason to make it "Friday The 13th" had they taken the time to create their own killer, and try and build up their own mythology, rather than mess around with an existing one, they might have found something with these (relatively good) production values going over a bit better. Ironically it's the lack of creativity and willingness to take risks that is creating these kind of relative bombs. Had they taken the big name director and reasonably large budget for a horror movie and channeled it into a new franchise, it probably would have gone over better. In this case the big franchise name and what was supposed to go with it, actually hurt them IMO.
I've noticed a general tendency in "Movie Defense Force" to look at movies that were dragged down by their own self-imposed baggage more than anything. I suppose on a lot of levels things like this, Aliens 3, and the like are not terrible when you try and look past the ways they turned their respective liscences into their own downfall. Typically ignoring continuity that the fan base they were tapping really liked as a whole, and was arguably superior to their own product from a creative perspective. Something like "Aliens 3" got panned by "Aliens" fans because the then more relevent and known "Dark Horse" continuity was simply vastly better and effectively de-canonized and ruined by the movie, and with "Friday The 13th" there was never any real point to rebooting it for the people to whom that
franchise name was going to matter.
I'll also say that Jim's defense of some of the things that were "out of character" in this movie and which he defended by referancing other things Jason did in previous movies, is a bit out of place. See the idea of Jason using a Harpoon wasn't really fitting of the character, and didn't go over very well at the time. That's why you didn't see him running around harpooning people or using ranged weapons after you saw that kill, and you kind of had to dig to a relatively early installment to find a place where he did it, and they didn't mess with it again because it didn't work. By having Jason come out as "Mr. Psycho Survivalist" and shoot people with bows and such your going in a direction that any decent writer or director should know had been tried and failed.
What's more, despite his relatively humble beginnings, and the "twist" of the first movie, this was always a series intended to have supernatural undertones and seem like paranormal/unreal stuff was going on even when it wasn't (and it got really over the top to begin with). I think it was explained by some of the creators when he started to become popular that Jason himself isn't really either a man, or even an undead entity, at the end of the day he's more or
less the manifestation of a curse placed on the camp and surrounding area.
At any rate, perhaps the most important thing to consider is that by making Jason so relatively "normal" it also hurt the mystique. People who go to see Friday The 13th after this many installments want to see the usual trappings, but also expect things to be insane. If they just wanted to see what is more or less literally just some guy in a hockey mask as opposed to something supernatural, they could go see plenty of other perfectly normal slashers. The reboot turned Jason from a really campy form of nightmare fuel, into just another psycho rural dude. When you look at it from that perspective and remove everything that made him special down the road, was he even a paticularly good/entertaining psycho rural dude now that we've had however many "Wrong Turn" movies, not to mention Rob Zombie's fairly popular "House Of 1000 Corpses" and "Devil's Rejects"?.