Friday the 13th (1980)

Film: Friday the 13th (1980)

Stars: Betsy Palmer, Adrienne King, Harry Crosby, Jeannine Taylor, Laurie Bartram, Kevin Bacon

Director: Sean S. Cunningham

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

All October long, The Many Rantings of John is running a marathon dedicated to the Horror classics of the 1960's-90's that I'm seeing for the first time this month.  If you want to take a look at past titles from previous horror marathons (both this and other seasons) check out the links at the bottom of this article.

Last week we talked about Michael Myers, the first true super-villain of the 1980's horror craze, where serial killers became not just big box office, but actual headliners in film franchises.  But Mike Myers is not the only major horror icon of the 1980's, and today we're going to get to one of the movies that clearly borrowed from Halloween, but became its own legitimate franchise in response.  Friday the 13th came out in 1980, but it had a slightly different track record than Halloween.  While the 1978 horror film was independently-distributed, the money that it made was something that Hollywood couldn't ignore, and so when a similar film came out, major studios were actually in a bidding war over this minuscule budget horror film, with Paramount eventually winning the distribution rights for a hefty $1.5 million, making Friday the 13th the first independent slasher film to be distributed by a major studio.  This paid off handsomely.  Friday the 13th would go on to make nearly $60 million worldwide, giving it a huge profit, and would run behind only Airplane! as the highest-grossing film at Paramount that year.  It would also span an entire horror franchise that would run for nearly 30 years...though given the plot of this movie, one would wonder how that was possible.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is very light on plot, but essentially we have a bunch of horny camp counselors alone in a campground where two murders took place years before.  The townspeople don't want them to reopen the camp, which they think is haunted, but the counselors, being young & thirsty, don't seem to care.  However, slowly-but-steadily they all start getting murdered, frequently during some act of nudity or sex, and we have only one woman, Alice (King) who is left standing when Mrs. Voorhees (Palmer) shows up and we quickly realize that she is the killer, avenging the death of her son Jason who drowned in the nearby lake while two camp counselors were having sex & not watching him.  After Alice kills Mrs. Voorhees (cutting off her head), she goes out onto the lake and is dragged under by a burnt boy, whom we are meant to assume is Jason...though she survives, she realizes that since no one found the boy, he must still be out there, and the final moments of the film look at the increasing ripples in the lake.

The movie, and your love of it, will depend entirely how invested you are in slasher/horror film culture and camp (as in campy, not in campground).  Friday the 13th by almost any measure is a bad movie.  You get no sense that these counselors are anything other than hormonal, there's nothing built around them as people or trying to grow them as human beings.  Thus, there's no real attachment to them when they start to die other than obviously one of them is Kevin Bacon (whom, it has to be said, is in a speedo that leaves virtually nothing to the imagination in proof that the 1980's handled nudity very differently than we do now).  But the script also doesn't foreshadow enough.  We don't really meet Mrs. Voorhees in the beginning (other than seeing her briefly in a car) or have some mention of Jason before she shows up.  So literally it's a wild third act that feels deeply expositional & like bad writing, as if they were making up the script as we're going along.  There's not enough break between her first scene & her revealing she's the killer for it to really count as a twist (even if most younger audiences likely had the ending ruined by Scream).  Palmer, who was a regular panelist on I've Got a Secret in the 1950's, is the best performance in the film (and only took the job so she could buy a new car), but that's hardly saying much given everyone else is so interchangeable.

That said, I was impressed by the makeup effects in this film.  Tom Savini, who has been a major makeup wizard for decades in horror films, comes up with some genuinely inventive ways to kill off characters, particularly Bacon's death on a camp bunkbed, where he's stabbed through the neck.  Horror films rarely get the due they deserve for pioneering a lot of the best violent makeup that we find is commonplace today in everything from war films to thrillers, but this is impressive, particularly for a film with not a visual effect in sight.

I mentioned above how weird it is that this became a franchise, and that's because Mrs. Voorhees is not the killer for the remainder of the movies.  In Friday the 13th Part 2 and in all of the remaining films in the franchise, the little burnt boy from the lake Jason is the killer, transformed into a roided-up machete-wielding hockey demon.  This is definitely one of those situations where you just have to assume that Paramount, seeing the dollar signs, figured that they had to capitalize on this but didn't think that audiences would continue to show up to see a middle-aged woman as a horror franchise star, so they basically gave us a knockoff of Michael Myers.  Given how poorly this one landed for me, though, I'll likely be skipping the sequels.

Past Horror Month Reviews (Listed Chronologically): The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Love, The Raven, Werewolf of London, Dracula's Daughter, Son of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Mummy's Hand, The Invisible Woman, The Wolf Man, Cat People, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Invisible Agent, The Mummy's Curse, The Mummy's Tomb, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Phantom of the Opera, Son of Dracula, The House of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man's Revenge, The Mummy's Ghost, The Uninvited, House of Dracula, She-Wolf of London, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy, Revenge of the Creature, The Creature Walks Among Us, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, The Blob, Village of the Damned, The Innocents, The Masque of the Red Death, Night of the Living Dead, The Wicker Man, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Carrie, Dawn of the Dead, Halloween, The Amityville Horror, When a Stranger Calls