Friday the 13th (1980)
A camp in New Jersey named Camp Crystal Lake is being re-opened after a run of bad luck which included bad water, several fires, a drowning and two unsolved murders. As several future counselors try to get the place in shape, they fail to notice that an unexpected guest has arrived, and they begin to get murdered horribly one by one. Just who, or what, is responsible?
Acting wise, this film is average. There is nothing really cringe worthy here, but there are a few standouts here and there. Kevin Bacon obviously showed some promise at this early age and it is a shame he didn't get more screen time before his now famous departure. Laurie Bartram as Brenda actually seems to have a nice strong personality that I liked a great deal. Other cast members do decent enough jobs so you are never taken out of the action. Adrienne King as Alice, our heroine is actually pretty nice. No Jamie Lee Curtis mind you, but still pretty nice. She conveys a feeling of terror quite well, and when she is being tormented, you buy it. The real standout in this film is Betsy Palmer. I love this woman. I really freaking love her. She has to be one of my favorite villains of all time, possibly even more than her protégé. What is nice about Palmer is this is against type for her and then some. She was primarily known for the film Mister Roberts and the TV series I've Got a Secret. This past of hers as the woman next door was probably the reason there was so much backlash against her for this film, despite it actually being one of her best performances. You heard me right. Betsy Palmer is fantastic in this film. She is genuinely frightening as a character. When you first meet her, it is all smiles. She is actually a comforting presence, but once she gets into her monologue, you know something is amiss. Her monologue before the big reveal is thick with atmosphere, and it is due in no small part to her performance. When she finally goes ape shit, oh boy does she go ape shit. She can turn it on and off like that. One of her creepiest talents is one that has been mocked many times. Speaking to herself in the voice of a child who she claims to be her dead son. "Kill her mommy. Kill her." Every time she says that I crap my pants. From a sweet middle aged woman to a mad rage powered animal, Palmer never got the chops she deserved for this film. Getting nominated for a Razzie here was just plain wrong and I attribute that more towards "oh, she played a nice lady before so she can't play a mean lady." Not as bad as nominating the score for The Thing though.
More so than any of the sequels, this film takes advantage of the wooded setting. It is beautiful. Nice peaceful creeks, thick and green forest, beautiful shining lakes and cozy wooden cabins. While it is beautiful, you do get the feeling of isolation. The woods are thick and hard to navigate, the lake is a formidable obstacle, and the cabins offer little protection from the intruder in your midst. The camp itself is used very nicely. Rather than the mad spree seen in subsequent Friday films, this one has a meticulous one by one trimming of the cast, and the camp is the perfect place to do it. The buildings are far apart and there are a host of places to stash a body, and you as the viewer know this. Damn it this camp is just plain creepy. Once that storm rolls in you know you are in for some serious shit, and the good kind of shit. The cabins are used very well in my favorite part of any slasher film, the chase scene. The chase scene is where that one surviving character, usually a very attractive and likable woman, has to face down the killer alone, but not before getting her cardio up. In this film, the chase scene is more of a twisted game of hide and seek. There is not a lot of running, but there is a lot of hiding in closets, locking doors and waiting for the right moment to strike type things going on. It really doesn't reach a visceral level till the final round, which I actually like. Instead, it makes very good use of the camp itself. You follow our final girl around as you await the next time ol killer lady will come out. It is exploited to its fullest.
Before the big reveal, the villain of the film is done much better than any other Friday film. Jason was a hulking monstrosity that grunted, groaned, and the like. Here, the killer is like a phantom, walking in and out of buildings unseen, waiting to pounce from the dark shadows. All you see are creeping feet and the occasional hand, but even that is when the film is being generous. Usually you don't see anything at all, almost like the weapons are doing all the dirty work on their own. Though not quite as effective as Halloween, this does make the killer an un-personified force, but it ultimately seems
less human in these segments which is why I like it. Any corner could hide them, any breath of wind could be them, any thud could be your doom. That is what works in this film. An unseen, unknown thing that walks among you, and is waiting for the opportunity to strike. The sequels lost that and they lost it fast. The last one that even attempted the same approach was Part 4, and by then the series was already getting tired.
Writing wise, the film is fine. Before the meat of the matter gets started, it plays out like a typical semi comedic coming of age film. The cast in the film is actually pretty likable and they do stand out as individuals, unlike the sequels where they became indistinguishable fodder for the killer. There is some cringe worthy dialogue, mostly from camp prankster Ned, but I write that off as an asshole who thinks he is funny but really isn't. There are some memorable lines, mostly from Palmer's character. There is some attention done to characterization in the first part of the film, which ultimately makes the main body more frightening and more nasty. Despite being average in the writing department, I actually cared whether these characters lived or died. I didn't want them there for a nice effects shot like all the ones in Friday's to come would be.
The effects in this film are astonishing. It starts off pretty basic with blood coming from the belly. You could do that with a water balloon. Once we get to our first throat slitting on the other hand, things change. We get arrows through necks, axes to faces, arrows in eyes, decapitations. Very grisly stuff, and all done by master make-up artist Tom Savini. Friday still remains one of his claims to fame, and it really is some of his best work. Unlike stuff like The Prowler or The Burning, the stuff in here is very simple and not elaborate, which ultimately sells the effect even better. His stuff in Friday 4 seemed too over the top to be real, while this stuff is gruesome but grounded in what the average human could conceivably do to another one. His makeup on Ari Lehman as Jason is very well done. You only see him in the dark and for a brief moment at the end, but he really does sell the deformaties the character has come to be known for. It just goes to show that Savini can also create a new character and not just kill the old ones off.
What disappoints me about this film is that the cinematography and editing really are average. There is really no exciting shots in the film or well edited sequences, which makes it come across as rather amateurish, which it sort of is. I feel that had the filmmakers really looked at Halloween, they would have seen it was not just telling a simple hack n slash tale, but it was doing it with an artistic eye, which is one of the reasons the film has endured. Here it just kind of felt like point and show stuff, which while it may be the basic purpose of a film, is not the way to make a great one. There is one scene however that does everything right, and that is one of the greatest scares in movie history.
Spoiler
After Palmer has been dispatched by our heroine, she sets herself adrift in a canoe and waits for the police to arrive in the morning. When they do, she breathes a sigh of relief. However, the decaying body of the child Jason jumps out of the water and pulls her in without warning. I did NOT see that coming when I first saw the film and I jumped out of my skin. I should have seen that one coming because I knew what a jump scare was. The shots of the lake are breathtaking, the editing is spot on to create the right mood, it just works so damned good. Why couldn't the rest of the film be like this? It is like a commercial for perfume where all hell breaks loose in the last few seconds. Its purpose is to get you to relaxe before it gives you that jolt. This was taken from Carrie, but it was done just as well here.
The ability of this film to actually frighten on the other hand is another story. I actually still get spooked out by this movie, and I don't spook easily. There are some brilliantly unsettling moments here as our phantom killer stalks the shadows, waiting for the next unlucky acting hopeful to wander too close. Probably the most effective of such moments involves the above mentioned Laurie Bartram, as Brenda. After leaving the main cabin, she enters the camps bathroom and shower building, which is here another cast member quite literally got the axe earlier. She brushes her teeth while humming, unaware she is being watched. In a nearby shower stall, from the shadows, there is someone there. The young woman is oblivious as a hand reaches out from behind a curtain, gently pushes it aside, and vanishes back into the blackness. She seems to feel something is amiss but she leaves, writing it off. Returning to the stall, the curtain is now completely ajar and the light fixture about it is swinging gently. Whoever was there, they just followed Benda out. This moment really is nicely executed, and is one of the few times the film truly shines in editing and cinematography. The shot of that shower stall alone induces shudders because you know damned well that someone is there, and there is also most likely a dead body there too. Friday the 13th is packed with several such moments, though they do at times feel spread a bit too thin. Had the film focused more on such ominous creepy moments, it probably would have been better received by critics. Instead, they focused on the gore and tits, and there isn't even that much tits. But this film really does get that spooky on. When I first viewed it at age 14, I really felt like it was a re-visitation of a classic campfire spook tale, so I got nostalgia along with my scares.
Ki Ki Ki Ki Ma Ma Ma Ma. Lets talk music. Harry Manfredini has made so much mad dollars off of that one riff, which has become the one unchanging element in the series, but what about the other music? Well, it is acutally pretty good. I recognize it the moment I hear it, and it doesn't even have to include the classic riff. This movie owes a lot to its pretty effective score. Granted, it is no Halloween score, even though this film had a larger budget so they were able to get more resources together and actually hire somebody. What I like about this score is it is quite a classical sounding piece. There is a great usage of violins and harps, as well as the occasional bell. There are lots of jolty noises that you can almost feel in your body. Halloween, while its score is better, never created a sense of physical discomfort, which is one of the reasons I like this music so much. It actually feels violent, like a stab or a slash. The whole Ki Ma thing was just icing on the cake. My thoughts on that? Well, I actually quite like the Ki Ma riff, which was done to reflect the schizophrenic nature of the film's antagonist. Kill Mom. Ki Ma. Perhaps a bit obvious, but still spooky. I still catch myself doing it every now and then.
Sean Cunningham is defiantly not a great director, though this film has set him for life. It might interest one to know that Cunningham actually made this film to finance a television series based on a children's film he did called Here Come the Tigers. Cunningham's dream was to make a career in such films, and while Friday the 13th gave him a nice house and put food on the table, it pretty much killed that dream because he was never approached to do anything other than horror films again. Don't you just hate it when that happens? Even Roger Ebert, who passionately (and I might argue bordering on irrationally) hates this film described Cunningham as an intelligent man who was victimized by the success of this series, which Cunningham will agree with in a certain way. I am not sure if this film qualifies as a great work. I would argue it does, but just barely. Even then I would be in a minority. Cunningham sadly never had a career, and he might have turned out something pretty special. This film, despite the reputation it has, shows real promise.
Sequels and how they relate to this film. Like Halloween, the sequels were done for the dollars and not for the scares. In that light, they are not as strong. The sequels to this film have the odd reputation of outshining the original, even though they are inferior examples of film. It was they who started many of the clichés associated with this series, like sex and drugs equals death. Do you know that the heroine in this film puffs a joint? Granted she got killed in the sequel but she survived this one so it still counts. Jason just wasn't as scary as ol Betsy, at least not after part II. Though I love parts II through IV very much, they are just not as good as this one is. They are too out there, too imaginative in their dispatching methods, focus too much ON the dispatching methods and really only perfected the chase scene, which should be the highlight of any slasher film. The final chases of those three films are really the only parts that show cinematic skill. Everything else is just filler for film and filler for graves until that final 20 minutes gets started. I want a scary movie, not an effects show. This was a scary movie.
So yes. I like Friday the 13th. I would call it a guilty pleasure, but I feel this is a legitimately underrated horror film. The sequels are very overhyped, what with everyone talking about how cool Jason is. If it isn't scary, it isn't working, and that is coming from a modest fan of those films. The incredibly silly nature of those films also seems to have rubbed off on this modest little stalk n slash chiller, which is pretty damn sad. I feel that the main weaknesses of Friday the 13th are that it focuses too much on being short and to the point. The plot is already simple enough. What could have sold this film better was it being done in style, something the filmmakers had the resources to do, as evident by the skill in which the final jump was done. In spite of my criticism for this movie, I do feel it deserves a place of true honor, and not because of the clichés it set. As a film on its own merits, it works. Friday the 13th will always hold a special place in my heart.
