Friday The 13th: Review By CBF

The Jason films’ rich mythology starts out with The Original Slasher Flick, "Friday the 13th." Originally filmed in 1980, the story begins with a flashback to 1958 as two camp counselors from Crystal Lake are violently murdered in the first classic scene of the series, dubbing the recreation resort, "Camp Blood."

As the story picks up immediately following the title credits, legend has it that a boy had drowned in 1957, the two aforementioned counselors were murdered the following year in 1958, fires mysteriously took place, and the camp was closed that same year. Bad water prevented the camp from being opened back up in 1962 (did anyone catch that?), and a dude named Steve Christy has been restoring the camp site, dropping an estimated $25,000 on the place, getting it ready to be reopened. We hear of this legend first from Ralph, an alleged crazy townsman of Hope, New Jersey (the near town) who warns the hitchhiking hippie to turn back, and then again from Enos, the town truck driver who offers her a lift. However, the offer was only to the crossroads on the outskirts of town, putting her at the halfway point, and therefore she must walk the rest of the way.

The counselors all arrive except for Annie, said hitchhiker. As they prepare the camp for its reopening to the public, Annie is offered another lift on the secluded, coniferous dirt road leading to Camp Crystal Lake. In the film’s traditional theme, we never actually see the driver, leading Annie to suspect foul play as the driver passes the turnoff for the camp. Speeding rapidly out of control, Annie must leap out of the vehicle, hurting her leg in the process as she bangs it against a rock amidst the foliage. Another death scene takes place here, as Annie’s throat gets sliced trying to evade the mysterious killer. The entire film and its famed kills (10, not 13 like originally planned) are played on the notion of what you don’t see.

As the story moves on during the week, pretty soon we get to Friday…the 13th. A well-lit night due to the full moon, we soon come up on the sex scene, which is really how I remember these movies from my childhood – nudity and violence. Marcie, the chick whose nipples are always poking through her shirt, and her boyfriend Jack (a young Kevin Bacon), decide to head back to their cabin to set the mood off right when it begins to storm. Simultaneously, most of the others begin playing strip poker, to pass the time as the storm advances. Ned, the missing counselor, is unknowingly above Jack and Marcie, in the top bunk, as they proceed to make love, seemingly dead. In the ‘after’ scene, Marcie runs out to the restrooms to take a leak, as Jack lights up a joint to relax. A drop of blood drips from the top bunk onto Jack’s forehead as he looks up and is brutally stabbed through the neck with an archery arrow coming from underneath the bed. Marcie is off’d, too, taking an axe to the head.

The next half hour flies by fairly quickly. The other killings really do become redundant, and are all done in pretty much the same fashion. The only difference is the weapon in which each character is killed with. I can see where themes were set for other horror flicks as electricity is cut, things are shown off-screen and other similar tricks are played on the audience.

As Brenda and Bill are killed off-screen, Alice, the main character by the end, is seemingly the last potential victim still alive. When she discovers her friend Bill’s corpse hanging on a door hook with archer’s arrows shoved into his body, only then does she realize that something is surely amiss. Screaming bloody murder, she runs off into the woods. Hiding out in her cabin, she does stupid things in the midst of hysteria and shock, like pulling on the door handle (?), and tying a rope to the rafters and the door handle, to act as a barricade (actually, that was a pretty smart idea). But she does everything extremely slowly, all the while crying and sniffling, much to my annoyance. I kept thinking, “Come on! Go faster, bitch! The killer could walk in at any second, what are you doing?!? This is just stupid.” Not that I feel that way, but I always say something to that extent when watching horror films and the victim doesn’t do anything to stop from being killed, i.e. curls up in the fetal position on the floor or just screams their f[beep]ing ass off.

The dumb girl then goes on to stand by all the windows, piles furniture against a door that opens up from the outside, and breathes a heavy sigh of anxious relief and leans against a refrigerator. Not really the time to relax, Alice! Her dead friend Brenda is then thrown through the window right next to her and all she does is cry about it, then starts CURLING UP IN A BALL ON THE FLOOR! She then starts crawling around on the floor for some reason and still looking at her dead friend’s carcass, annoyingly begins whining and wailing.

All of a sudden, a Jeep pulls up, the same one that picked up Annie the hippie chick in the beginning.

(Again, Brenda has just been thrown through the window, yet seconds later, Mrs. Voorhees comes driving down the road in her Jeep... Jason with the body throw.)

We know it is the killer, but Alice thinks it is Steve who has returned from town very conveniently. She stupidly shoves everything aside from the door and runs out yelling “Steve! Oh, Steve,” just as we finally come to the reveal. It is Betsy Palmer, and after Alice demands to know who she is, she replies, “Well, I’m Mrs. Voorhees, an old friend of the Christys.”

Alice turns to her for help, and after the lady convinces her that she’ll take a look around and find out what’s going on, comes up on dead Brenda. Mrs. Voorhees then starts spouting off on the legend of the camp, focusing much of it on the death of ’57 – the drowning of Jason – and blaming the two counselors who were killed a year later for having outdoor sex instead of watching him. Palmer does a good job in playing a psychopathic schizo, in the same scene she is spacing out looking at the ceiling and talking to her dead son, whom she sees is still drowning. I think Alice is getting the point here (Duh, it's obviously way past midnight and a storm just passed that doused very heavy rain, and no one just all-of-a-sudden shows up in the middle of the night at some secluded resort. What was your first clue?). “Oh I couldn’t let them open this place again. Could I? Not after what happened. Oh, my sweet, innocent Jason… My only child… Jason.” As she attacks Alice, somehow the dumb blonde gets the upper hand and runs away (what?).

As she stops to think about it, she runs to the woman’s Jeep but Marcie’s carcass freaks her. She then runs all over the place in circles screaming like a lunatic while bodies are popping up out of nowhere scaring the b'jeezus out of her. As Mrs. Voorhees gets up and hears her loud-ass, blood-curdling screams, she races out to finish her off, but hears her footsteps running off in the distance. She then starts talking to herself like a psycho (wait, she is one) as in her mind, she is Jason talking to her. “Kill her, Mommy, kill her.”

I don’t know how, but the blonde chick finds a shotgun. However, she doesn’t find bullets. She starts throwing stuff at Mrs. Voorhees as she walks in the Office cabin to make the last kill. Mrs. Voorhees starts bitch-slapping her (like, really hard!) until Alice pulls a Jackie Chan and uppercuts her crotch with a broomstick (ouch!) and, holding it against the back of her head and wielding it with her hands over top, whacks her across the face. K.O. Alright, maybe I saw that wrong. Maybe it was a rake, whatever.

The next scene finds Mrs. Voorhees getting smacked in the face with a frying pan (How is this happening? No one else stood a fighting chance but the dumb blonde who stands by open windows gets to go head-to-head…?!?). Seemingly thinking to have killed her, Alice just walks around in this last scene, finding her way to the lake, until Jason’s mother sneaks up behind her. They tussle, but in the end, it is Alice who decapitates her with her own machete, and floats off in the nearby canoe until early morning.

The acting was cheesy, but hey it was the 80s, can’t be too harsh on these kinds of films. Betsy Palmer actually did a really good job, along with Kevin Bacon and the guy that played Steve Christy, Peter Brouwer. Directing was visionarily displayed, all credit goes to Sean S. Cunningham for his camera tricks during the death scenes. Visuals were cheesy, too, but gore during the 80s? C’mon. Too bad Jason wasn’t in this film, that is to say, NOT SEEN in this film. Except for his subsequential cameo in the very last scene – as a little boy, no doubt, in which he grabs Alice and pulls her into the lake!

*****

Afterthoughts:

Continuity Error #1: In certain scenes, it seems that Mrs. Voorhees is being helped with the killings. In the Marcie/Jack scene, someone is already in the restrooms hiding. Although, Jack was just murdered in the cabin, so how could the killer already be in the restrooms by now? My view on this, is that Jason is helping her with the killings, as she can't be in two places at the same time. We see a human hand cover Jack's face and stab his neck, so that is obviously Mrs. Voorhees, but we don't see any part of the killer in the restroom nor the kill taking place. Same with the "dream" of Alice experiencing a young Jason pulling her into the water. Which was, in my denotations, just a hallucination by Alice who was freaked about the story that Mrs. Voorhees told her, and dreamt the whole thing, she probably freaked in her sleep and fell in.

Which ultimately begs the question: Why did Jason wait 2 months to kill her? (Note: see my Friday the 13th: Part II review.)

--"Two of my men pulled you out of the lake. We thought you were dead too. Do you remember very much?”

“The boy, is he dead too? The boy, Jason!”

--“Ma’am, we didn’t find any boy.”

***

“Then he’s still there.”