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Friday the 13th (1980)
Straight Rating: 
Slant Rating: 
Reviewed By Fistula
Cast & Crew credits
Before reading this review, we suggest checking out Fistula's F13 Intro first!
For a movie that’s main claim to fame is who’s NOT wielding the blade behind the Steadicam™, the first Friday holds up pretty well today and has earned a place in the pantheon of horror classics thanks in part to many factors, including critical revile and concerned parental backlash – will parents ever learn that the more they bitch about a movie, the more they are guaranteeing its success? - An early appearance by Hollywood heavyweight Kevin Bacon and the timeless bloody hand of makeup wiz Tom Savini.
Stop me if the storyline sounds familiar. Camp Crystal Lake, aka Camp Blood, is set to open up after being closed for years following counselor deaths and the drowning of a young boy (gee, does anyone know what ever became of, um, what’s his name again?). As the young counselors settle in for a night of relaxation, an unseen killer slashes through them one-by-one like Randy Johnson blasting through the Tampa Bay Devil Rays lineup. One sweet counselor, Alice in this case, is left to do battle with the huge, menacing, hockey mask-donning killer…what, it was his mom? You’d be surprised how many people are still surprised by this. I assume that none of you readers are that dense, however. After all, I haven’t gotten a single nasty e-mail for my disparaging opinion of Saw. Plus, I know at least one guy read it, so there is hope (coming soon, perhaps starring Ricky Martin, Rick Astley, or another member of New Kids on the Block, Saw III – Oh yes, there will be more stupid plot twists, cinematic incompetence and morons who inexplicably think that the series is groundbreaking!).
The point of my little spin down Friday the 13th Lane isn’t so much informative as opinion-based. Remembering this, and putting off my now-burning desire to bitch about Saw some more, I’d like to focus on some of the good things about Friday the 13th.
F13 is one of the many timeless horror movies that lives on because of that indescribable 70s feel (yes, I know it was released in 1980, therefore [wait for it, wait for it] it was made in the…70s, I have actually had to argue this point to a guy in Wisconsin before). Face it, there was just magic back then that few – the biggest exception being Rob Zombie’s fantastic Devil’s Rejects – have been able to create since. The sets, the clothing, the cars, the god-blessed absence of cellular phones, it was movie heaven!
F13 came in just under when the ax fell and the MPAA started bullying the horror genre. So, not surprisingly, it delivers a good amount of the red stuff. Savini 1, MPAA 0.
Compared to your average horror movie, the characters, plot and acting quotients of this movie are reasonably high. The idea of making a horror movie at a camp – in a primitive setting with multiple rooms and cabins for people to explore, lots of woods and water for people to stumble upon and a plethora of axes, blades and saws (sorry, I couldn’t resist after that accidentally writing saw, Saw eats ass!) was pretty cool before it became hackneyed. And it still was for a while after this movie, right until Pamela Springsteen drown a girl in an outhouse.
Betsy Palmer does an admirable job as Mrs. Pam Voorhees. I suppose, at that time, it was rather novel to have a woman as the killer. I suppose it would even be surprising today, if only it was humanly possible to watch the movie without having heard the story a million times. On the other side of the ring, Alice, played by Adrienne King was every bit as good as Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween (a movie that is forever tied to F13, more on that later) and was a fine actor in my estimation. Reportedly, she had to give up acting due to a psycho fan, too bad.
Finally, I think the pace of this movie is highly underrated. It’s slow by today’s faced-paced, “if someone’s not dying or being false-scared every three minutes people will leave!” standards, but it wisely takes its time in revealing itself, does a good job with mood and even slows the pace down to a Hitchcockian crawl once Alice is the only one left. It’s refreshing and a far cry from the standard double-twist formula that Hollywood cum-guzzlers cling to today.
So, will history remember F13 as a classic, a catastrophe or simply common? As I look at my Mrs. Voorhees action figure that adorns my desk at work and sigh (it’s been a really long day),it strikes me that there really is no consensus as to whether the original Friday the 13th deserves a seat at the round table of horror righteousness or not. People revere it, revile it or ball it up and add it to the gray, shapeless genre of horror/slasher. It certainly wasn't the birth of horror movies as we know, or knew, them, as some people like to think. Yet, even though it owes a lot to Bava's Twitch of the Death Nerve - hands down the coolest name for a movie, ever, by the way - Friday did set a template for the emerging slasher genre. Some would say that's a very bad thing, but this reviewer says that it’s cool. It may be common today, to call it derivative now is a reflection on how many times it's been copied, not how many times it copied others. Is it better than Halloween? I’d say no, but it doesn’t deserve to be labeled as the second banana/rip-off that it has come to be. Now that the eyeball is in my court, I'll cast my vote for F13 being somewhere below horror classic but far above ordinary horror fare. I’ll just call it a damn good movie and at very least a contributor to the genesis of a genre that, for better or worse, hasn’t went away since.
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