BONUS REVIEW: FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980)

THRILL SCALE 1-10

8

HAVE I SEEN IT BEFORE?

Yes, several times, but most recently in May of 2016

BEST SEQUENCE

Gotta go with the final jump scare. I knew it was coming, I knew exactly what would happen and what it would look like, but it still got me

BEST LINE

"Did you know that a young boy drowned? The year before those two others were killed? The counsellors weren't paying any attention. They were making love while that young boy drowned! His name was Jason."

ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE

64%

ROTTEN TOMATOES CRITICS CONSENSUS

"Rather quaint by today's standards, Friday the 13th still has its share of bloody surprises and a '70s-holdover aesthetic to slightly compel."

IMDB SYNOPSIS

"A group of camp counsellors trying to reopen a summer camp called Crystal Lake, which has a grim past, are stalked by a mysterious killer."

DIRECTOR

Sean S. Cunningham

MAIN CAST

Betsy Palmer, Adrienne King, a bunch of people you've never heard of, and Kevin Bacon

THOUGHTS

• You may be wondering how I can pinpoint with such precision the last time I saw this movie, in May of 2016. Well, there's an easy answer for that: ever since my wife and I started dating, in 2016, with every Friday the 13th that rolled around on the calendar we would watch the next movie in the franchise. Always in order, never watching the next movie when it wasn't on a Friday the 13th, and finally, after almost 7 years, we finished the franchise this past January by watching the 2009 reboot. And now, appropriately enough in October, we have the next Friday the 13th, so we decided to start all over again and we plan on keeping the tradition going. We'll have a fair while before the next one, though; the next Friday the 13th isn't until September of 2024
• I feel like I should stop worrying about spoilers, especially with movies like this. If you haven't already seen Friday the 13th, you probably don't care about spoilers for a movie that's 43 years old (which, of course, is a way of saying that spoilers shall follow)
• Franchise antagonist Jason Voorhees, one of the most famous slasher villains of all time, and one of the most prolific by body count, only appears in this movie for about 10 seconds as a child, and it might be debatable if he even appears at all. Instead, the killer is Jason's mother, Pamela Voorhees. Not seen on camera for the majority of the movie, when Betsy Palmer finally shows up as Pamela, she gives us a fantastically campy performance (pun unintended), while still being chillingly unnerving, especially when we see the closeups of her face and her imitations of her son's voice
• Hell of a way for Pamela to go, too, when things come to a head
• Before Pamela shows up, since we can't actually see her during the kill scenes, the deaths are most effective due to the pretty impressive gore effects. These were provided by the legendary Tom Savini, whom I have mentioned in these reviews before - he worked with George Romero on Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead
• The best death scene was probably Kevin Bacon getting an arrow through the throat. This was only Kevin Bacon's fourth movie, by the way, and perhaps because of this he gets knocked off pretty early. He also doesn't make much of an impression, unless you count a particular shot of him in a speedo. If you know, you know
• Even though I've seen this before, a few times, I didn't know going into it what I would score it on the Thrill Scale. Early in the movie the score was sitting pretty low, but it did gradually tick higher as the movie went on. Despite this, I am definitely of the opinion that Halloween is miles better than Friday the 13th (being two slasher movies cut from the same cloth). If you have the opposite view and think that Friday the 13th is the superior movie, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this
• I kept wondering why I considered Halloween to be better, and I came up with two possible explanations: firstly, Halloween absolutely benefits from Jamie Lee Curtis's lead performance as Laurie Strode, and Friday the 13th doesn't have any characters who even come close to that level of relatability or personality. Secondly, the obscuring of Pamela Voorhees as a killer leads to an unexpected antagonist, and there are some effective first-person shots from Pamela's perspective, but to be unable to see who's doing the killing does lessen the impact, at least for me
• And, now that we've restarted the Friday the 13th rotation, there's a pretty good chance that I'll keep up the movie review tradition and keep reviewing each movie in the series as the day comes along. So for now we shall say farewell to Pamela Voorhees, but next time we'll properly say hello to Jason, although still perhaps not how most people picture him; he doesn't get his hockey mask until movie number 3. See you next September, Jason with a bag on his head!