Friday The 13th (1980)

In honor of the upcoming explosive remake of the film-series equivalent of "The Guest That Wouldn't Leave", I thought I'd review the original series. The remake already cracks me up, with the extended trailer being a second-long shot of everyone killed in the movie. (13 people, get it?)

Suspense is over-rated, I guess. Although one of those 13 looks like it might actually be the mad killer his own self, so there's some suspense there if you don't know that it's impossible to kill a successful horror villain.

WARNING: I'm going to spoil like crazy since the movie is almost 30 years old, and it was pretty well spoiled on the day it came out.

As a little background, I should note that I rather despised this series as it was happening. I saw one in the theater. I saw the first one on TV because I'd heard so much about it. I saw the third one in the theater, because it was in 3D. (I saw, I think, all of the 3D movies that came out in the '80s, and they had two things in common: They ranged from bad to unimaginably awful, and the glasses made my eyes hurt.) That was about it until long after the series ended (the first time) in 1993.

For various perverse reasons that would require you to report me to Children's Services, I'm not going to explain how it is that I've become something of an expert on the series. You'll just have to take it on faith that I am, and that I'm very, very sorry for what I've done.

Anyway, over time, I began to appreciate the sheer awfulness of the films. They're not just bad singly, they're bad as a series. Jason Voorhees is an iconic slasher now, of course, but it took six movies to come up with the complete ensemble and "character" that he's now recognized as--and which only lasted for the next two movies before the series ended with the ninth. (Though the modern "reboot", of course, skips all that.)

The basic premise of the film is simple: Halloween had cost less than half-a-million to make and made nearly $40M, couldn't similar returns be had for an even cheaper movie that stole the best ideas?

If you think I'm being snarky, I'm not really: One refreshing thing about F13 is that nobody making that first movie had any pretensions whatsoever. The various interviews of cast and crew that can be found start with, "Well, I needed the money and ..." Betsy Palmer needed to buy a car (scroll to last question).

The story itself borrows more from Scooby-Doo than Halloween: Mysterious disappearances at a summer camp are caused by a completely unknown character who is unmasked at the film's climax. (In the above article, Palmer says that she told director Cunningham that it was unfair only to show her at the end, but that he was right. I'm unconvinced. It did feel like cheating.)

As I said, they're stealing from Halloween, which basically had a slasher who was hung up on sex and fond of posing bodies in freaky ways, so they base the story around naughty counsellors who have sex and smoke pot, and really does some very elaborate body posing. I mean, we're talking wires and pulleys--it's extensive.

Which adds to the absurdity when we discover that 54-year-old Betsy Palmer is the culprit. Not only is she able to easily dispatch virile young Kevin Bacon (and his prominent penis), she's able to lift bodies into trees and cause them to fall out at appropriate moments.

She kills Bacon by grabbing his forehead from underneath the bed--hella long arms--holding him down, and driving a knife or spear through the mattress, through his spine and out through the front of his throat. And then turning it.

So, it's not just a cheat, it's a ridiculous cheat. And then Palmer finds herself challenged trying to dispatch the frail Adrienne King. Their fight scene is, admittedly, pretty intense.

Oh, what? You wanted to hear about Kevin Bacon's penis? It's not a big deal (ha!), he waves it around more than Harvey Keitel. It may be accidental in this film but during the swimming scene, he's wearing a very, very tight Speedo-like brief. Did I mention that he's circumcized?

The scene where young Jason Voorhees makes his appearance (to the "Love Theme from Friday the 13th") is definitely a shocker though it, too, makes no sense. We have to assume that he is some sort of undead creature, since the whole impetus for the slaughters was his death. (Plus, the flesh is falling off his skull.)

Or we could assume it was just a dream.

The next movie will completely undermine any logical or even coherent supernatural explanations for what Jason is or was.

A lot of imagined slasher conventions grew up around this series. For example, because Michael Meyers of Halloween killed everyone but the virginal Laurie Strode, there's this imagined cliché that the "good girl" is the survivor. But as a veteran of '80s horror movies, I can assure you there seldom was a good girl. And in this, first in the series, Jason's first modern victim doesn't have a chance to do anything. She's just killed for having the audacity to apply for a job at a summer camp.

The survivor, Alice (Adrienne King), is not a good girl, either. Although she's not shown having sex with the camp director, the implication is there. She is shown smoking weed, too. Although the "one female survivor" trope is the rule for, I think, most of the movies, the big problem here is that the characters are bland enough to completely interchangeable.

Now, if the purpose of the movies is to showcase gory special effects, we can give at least the first movie its due: This was pretty graphic stuff for the time, and fairly convincing. Of course, as time has passed and movies have gotten shorter and shorter shots, those full 2-3 second gore shots have aged very poorly.

High definition makes it even worse: You can pretty much see how all the effects were done now. In fact, in some shots, the fake skin is so obvious as to make you wonder how you ever fell for it.

This movie duplicated Halloween's box office success but lacked a director like Carpenter whose idea of hell would be producing sequel after sequel of the same crap. Hence, the next eight movies.

Believe it or not, the series goes downhill from here: Way down.