Friday the 13th

MOVIE #1,191 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 10.13.23 50 MOVIES IN 32 DAYS! Today is Friday the 13th. It is VERY spooky when we get a Friday the 13th in the spookiest month of the year, so I have decided to review the ENTIRE Friday the 13th movie franchise starting today. This series will run on weekdays through the 27th, featuring all ten canon feature films and culminating with the 2003 crossover hit, Freddy vs. Jason. Just like last year, when I critiqued the whole Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, I have not seen a single one of these movies beforehand. As a kid born in 1981 who was terrified of horror movies, these were just never on my radar. But I’ve gotten really into the genre as an adult and it’s time to make up for this grave blind spot in my film viewing history.

Also, as with the Freddy movies, I know a decent amount about the story and history of these flicks. I was well aware that Jason doesn’t don the hockey mask until Part III and that he isn’t even the killer in this, the original from 1980, among other less important factoids like Crispin Glover acting like a weirdo in the fourth installment. But I am gonna do my best to go in with a clear mind and fresh eyes, and give each entry its due.

I thought this film was good, though not spectacular by any means. I appreciate its indie roots but it’s hard not to see it as a cheap Halloween slasher rip-off to some degree. One thing that plagues this series as a whole — and perhaps the subgenre in general — is that there are far too many interchangeable and often bland characters. Mostly, it seems, they exist solely as numbers to pad out the death count. And even the final girl isn’t fleshed out in any meaningful way (although Adrienne King is still good in the role of Alice and shines in the climax — alas, even though she survives, she doesn’t make it to the sequel). Luckily, there’s Kevin Bacon so we can all go, “look, there’s Kevin Bacon.”

And maybe it’s because I just watched Terrifier 2, but this violence and gore is pretty tame. Even compared to something like the first Nightmare movie, it feels PG. This isn’t necessarily a complaint, just something I found surprising. It’s a pretty slow burn for large swaths, which is fine and would have been better if, again, the characters were a little more memorable.

So that’s that. This little 500K movie-that-could got distributed by Paramount and spawned nearly annual sequels for the rest of the decade. Is it all downhill from here? Come back on Monday to find out.

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Friday the 13th is a 1980 American independent slasher film produced and directed by Sean S. Cunningham, written by Victor Miller, and starring Betsy Palmer, Adrienne King, Harry Crosby, Laurie Bartram, Mark Nelson, Jeannine Taylor, Robbi Morgan, and Kevin Bacon. Its plot follows a group of teenage camp counselors who are murdered one by one by an unknown killer while they are attempting to re-open an abandoned summer camp with a tragic past. It was released on May 9, 1980.