Friday the 13th




Released: 1980

MPAA Rating: R

Genre: Slasher

Nuts and Bolts: Camp Crystal Lake is haunted by a strange death curse. Councilor Steve Christy tries to re-open the grounds in time for summer, but there is one thing spoiling his plans. Someone is killing off all his camp councilors! The secrets of Camp Crystal Lakes checkered past are exposed and only one shall survive to tell the tale.

Summary: In 1957, an eleven-year-old named Jason Voorhees inadvertently drowns in the dark waters of Camp Crystal Lake in Southern New Jersey. A year later, an unknown assailant viciously murders two of Crystal Lake's camp councilors. (They get nailed while making woopie in an upstairs cabin.) The camp eventually falls into disrepair and Crystal Lake earns the nickname of Camp Blood, with legends of a death curse abounding.

Flash forward to 1979. After years of mishaps, Steve Christy takes it upon himself to renovate the cursed campground. But mere weeks before reopening, the murders begin happening again! (Cue scary music)

One by one, each of the newly hired councilors fall beneath the blood stained blade of a savage killer. Eventually, counciler Alice Luker discovers the identity of the serial murderer. Pamela Voorhees, mother of young Jason is revenge stricken against all employees of the campground. It is her belief that if the councilors of 1957 had been doing their jobs, then her precious Jason would have never drowned.

After discovering the bodies of her mutilated friends, Pamela and Alice get into a final battle on the shoreline of the lake. Pamela's machete gets knocked from her hand and Alice takes the advantage and gathers up the fallen weapon. Mustering the last of her reserve, Alice decapitates Pamela Voorhees, her head landing on the sandy beach.

Unbeknownst to both Pamela and Alice, Jason had in fact SURVIVED all those years beneath the lake. Disfigured and suffering from brain damage, he becomes the unfortunate witness to his own mother's death; an experience that would change his life forever more.

As Alice rows a boat out into the middle of the lake, the monstrous form of Jason erupts from the waters and attacks her. Alice survives and reports the event to local police. The police dredge the lake but can find no evidence of Jason Voorhees' existance.

Note: Although the film was released in 1980, the events that occur take place in the summer of 1979. This is clarified by the date on Pamela Voorhees' tombstone as shown in Friday the 13th Part 4: The Final Chapter.

Acting/Dialogue: The acting in this is fairly common of most films of thsi time period. Not particularly dreadful, but not all that well either. Special props goes to Betsy Palmer (Pamela Voorhees) who really IS one creepy fucking bitch! The dialogue in this however, is piss poor. Especially the scene involving the councilor Annie, who hitches a ride with a local yokel truck driver. Thank God this dizzy bitch is one of the first to die!

Gore: Although the gore level would probably be considered tame by today's standards, in the style of the time period, it makes for a truly gruesome film. Plenty of sliced throats and axes to the forehead. (Not to mention an arrow through the esophagus and a good old fashioned beheading!) All in all, the gore is VERY realistic looking and even today I still find myself saying, "Awww shit! That's fucking gross!"

Guilty Pleasures: There are a few decent guilty pleasures in this one. Not the least of which is seeing Kevin Bacon getting an arrow shoved through the back of his neck! There are a couple of ass cracks and one partially exposed boobie, but not much more than that on the nudity scale.

The Good: The biggest plus for me with this film was the fact that the entire location and theme was based on a real life campground in Southern New Jersey, not too far from my old home. (Camp NoBeBoSo) Coincidentally enough, the sur name of the killer(s) was based on the name of a small town known as Voorhees, New Jersey.

Friday the 13th is a very atmospheric film. It draws you in and you really feel like you are right there with the characters. The topper to all of this is the INTENSE fucking music score by Harry Manfredini. The Friday score will go down in history as being one of the most well known Horror movie themes of all time.

A great character of much needed attention is that of Ralph. Ralph is the town Doomsayer who first tells Annie that Camp Crystal Lake has a death curse. He eventually rides his rickety old bicycle to the camp itself in an effort to warn the other dickheads of the fate that awaits them. Naturally the little asswipes turn him away believing him to be little more than an old drunk. Ralph is truly a character of Shakespearian proportions. He basically embodies the archetype of Shakespeare's fool; a character that always knows more than his contemporaries and is almost universally ignored. I compare Ralph to the character of the court jester from Willie Shakes' King Lear. Needles to say, the crazy old fucker survives this flick. We will see Ralph again preaching his gospel later on in Friday the 13th Part 2.

The Bad: Corny acting and sub-par dialogue are the bane of this flick. Although Betsy Palmer, Kevin Bacon and Pete Brouwer all do commendable jobs, the rest of the cast would have been better off had they joined a troupe of travelling mimes.

The worst bit in the whole flick is probably the scene with the cop. I guess he's supposed to be comedy relief but it just came off as cheesy pointless filler. All he really does is cruise by the camp on his motorcycle and accuse the councilors of being a bunch of pot heads. This does nothing in the way of elevating the plot or establishing the characters. Pointless and stupid, they would have been better off without this scene. Leave the C.H.I.P.s beat to Eric Estrada.

There was one bit that I thought was strange that I would like to spend a little time on. At the end of the film, we finally get to see Jason Voorhees. To the viewer he appears to be a boy roughly eleven to thirteen years of age. This doesn't make a lot of sense as far as continuity since Jason would have been an adult at this point roughly the age of thirty-five. Now considering that the first Friday was meant to be a stand-alone film, the character of Jason was likely intended to be a ghost at the time that he attacks Alice. This would explain the lack of difference in chronological age. There's another scene that supports the ghost theory. At the point just before Brenda gets killed, she hears child-like voices coming from outside crying "Help me, help me." (In retrospect, this could also have been Pamela Voorhees since she was known to slip into a Jason persona herself. But if you listen closely, the voices are very obviously that of a child and NOT that of an adult pretending to sound like a child.) As we all know, Jason survives beyond the first movie, so he is obviously not a ghost. I suppose the easiest way to explain this is to say that what we (the viewer) actually saw were Alice's preconceived memories of what Jason would have looked like. After hearing Pamela's tale of woe, her imagination only allowed her to remember the boy that died and not the adult maniac that truly attacked her. (Okay, okay I admit it. It's a weak fucking excuse to a glaring error in continuity. But hey, can you do any better?

The only other disappointment is that Jason is NOT the killer in this film. Now understand that I first saw this film years after the Friday franchise began taking off. So knowing that the films were supposed to be centered around a freak named Jason, I was a bit underwhelmed when I discovered that he was barely even in the movie.

Great Lines:

"It's got a death curse!" --Ralph speaking to Annie, the newly hired campground cook.

"Then he's still out there." --Alice telling the police about Jason despite the fact that they didn't find him.

Overall Rating: 7 out of 10 severed heads. They don't make classics like this anymore.
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