Date Night: Friday the 13th

In which I review a movie that's streamable on Netflix.

When I first started getting into horror movies in high school, I marathoned every one of the Friday the 13th movies: not because they were any good, mind you, but because I figured that they had to start getting good at some point.  You don't make it to ten movies (eleven if you count Freddy vs Jason) without at least one good one.  It turns out that you could, and I have long since moved on from trying to make any sense of its perplexing popularity.

That is, until I came across the Cinema Snob's review of the first movie, which piqued my interest enough to revisit the series for the first time in a decade.  And while far from as good of a series as, say, A Nightmare on Elm Street or Halloween, I was surprised to discover just how consistently decent it was on the whole, not to mention being absurdly better than I initially gave it credit for.

Over two decades after Camp Crystal Lake was closed down following the murder of two of its counsellors, a new group of dedicated men and women are renovating the grounds for its highly anticipated reopening.  The problem is, however, that somebody is just as dedicated to preventing that from ever happening, murdering the would-be counsellors in an increasingly brutal fashion before they can open the grounds to campers once again.

Friday the 13th's most endearing feature is probably that it was made in a time before the conventions of the slasher genre was set in stone.  This means that while we do see victims divulging in sex and alcohol - and being summarily punished for it - little else is familiar for genre enthusiasts.  The killer's identity is kept a secret until the climax, there's surprisingly little gore (at least by today's standards) and the killer is actually a woman.  Regardless of how well any of those aspects actually worked, it does make it a unique spectacle in a genre too often marked by stale predictability.

The cast is a more than reasonable assemblage of young talent, including an especially young Kevin Bacon.  Betsy Palmer is also a far better antagonist than this film deserved.  Sure, she lays it on thick at the end, but any more reserved of a performance would have been too listlessly forgettable, and Palmer plays psychotic so well.

In many ways I respect this movie a lot more than I like it, since so much of what it was trying to do - so much of what makes it so unique in retrospect - simply didn't work.  It bends over backwards to keep the killer's identity a secret, leading up to the grand reveal of some woman that we've never seen before.  For as God-awful as Part V of the series was, it actually managed to pull off its murder mystery plot a lot better than the series' first instalment.

Partly assisted by how hellbent the film was to keep Mrs. Vorhees' identity as the killer a secret, the kills really lack the visceral thrill of later slasher films (or even earlier ones, for that matter).  A lot of damage happens just outside of the framing, and is really more a matter of ticking off victims than it is terrifying us with their dispatchments.  And for as iconic a role as he plays, Crazy Ralph - the town doomsayer - is more annoying than he is foreboding.

Upon rewatching it years later, I have roughly the same opinion of Friday the 13th as I did when I first saw it.  It's an alright, somewhat uninspired and historically unique entry to the slasher sub-genre.  It doesn't always work, but it never entirely fails at what it tries to do either.  It even makes for an especially interesting story arc when paired with Parts 2 and 3.

Rating: 5.5/10

Buy on BluRay:  Only if you plan on buying the first three movies in the franchise as a unit.

So which Friday the 13th movie is your favorite?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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