Review“Oh, good Lord! So young. So pretty. Oh, what monster could have done this?” - Pamela VoorheesJohn Carpenter's Halloween, built on the groundwork laid by the Canadian epic Black Christmas, proved to be the most successful ever independent movies till people were convinced there was some scares to be had in The Blair Witch Project. A novice movie maker by the name Sean S. Cunningham noted how simple Halloween was in terms of structure and more importantly how small the production budget had been. Along with writer Victor Miller he distilled the essence of Halloween and repackaged it into perhaps the most influential horror movie of the 1980s. At the time Friday the 13th was strangely picked up for distribution by Paramount who were looking for a cheap property in order to get into the burgeoning horror market that had exploded after the huge success of movies like The Exorcist and The Amityville Horror in the 1970s. Horror was back baby, and in a huge way. Naturally since a major Studio was dialling into what was viewed as an exploitative movie the MPAA, Feminist groups, and various other interested parties, had to have their day in court that only really served to promote the hell out of Friday the 13th and ensure it's opening success. That the movie has gone on to be viewed as a classic of the dark genre is either testimony to how poor the genre is overall or simply due to F13th actually have a few good qualities. Of course I'm not discounting the inante ability of the fringe horror crowd to dial into the most half arsed effort as long as it involves lots of claret, some female flesh, and a plotline that doesn't overly tax them. Steve Christy has strangely followed in the family business of trying to kick start Camp Crystal Lake to the tune of apparently $20k. Why exactly you would want to do this is never explained, but hey must be some profit to be had in kids summer camps. The Camp, dubbed Camp Blood by the locals, has had a pretty interesting history. A young boy drowned while Counsellors were otherwise involved, two Counsellors were stabbed to death in 1958, and various attempts to reboot things have been stopped by unexplained fires, bad water, and camp fire sing a longs. Helping Steve out are a group of potential victims, and heck it isn't long before the first bodies start appearing as Steve finds money just ain't going to cut it. Who or what is killing the Counsellors? If viewed as a movie then F13th fails on most levels, at least in comparison to more professional attempts to actually tell a story or to create an enduring classic. There's little to no characterisation, Annie always wanted to work with children, Alice has a problem with someone back in California, and Marcie has had nightmares about storms in a sort of precognitive fashion. After ninety odd minutes that's it, barely an attempt to full out a character beyond basically throwing them in the way of a sharp weapon wielding maniac. Of course arguably the purpose of a slasher isn't to have the audience identify, or heaven forbid build any relationship with a character, it's to throw a number of inventive death scenes on their plates. Hey I don't go into a slasher looking for a deeper understanding of the human condition, and heck I don't believe anyone else does either, if we had to be brutally honest. While clearly the plot hardly exists beyond getting a group of victims together and then having an unseen assailant pick them off one by one, it kind of works as a basis for the movie. Anything other than the basics would get in the way of the next carefully constructed death scene. There's an attempt at providing minimal motivation to our resident psycho, but it was clearly one of the lesser things discussed in script meetings. On the bright side of the axe, as Marcie discovers, Cunningham has a firm eye for visuals and creating mood. There's some excellent cinematography going down with long shots bringing in the general isolation of the main location. Even detractors have to give Cunningham his due with the use of psycho POV cam, it's chilling and really nails the atmosphere the Director is trying to achieve. The POV is used to not only hide who is voting Counsellors off the lake but also to have the audience unsettled as the body count mounts. It's a startling and unsettling effect that had me nodding my head in approval. But Cunningham doesn't stop there, sure he's constrained by the budget and lack of additional cameras to help build a scene, but we get white fade outs going down and surprisingly effective freeze frames. There's a good Director behind the camera here who knows exactly what sort of beast he has leashed and muzzled. There's a lot of talk about Friday the 13th defining the slasher “rules”, mainly by people who have brought into the whole BS about slashers being formulaic, and for sure you can discern some readily apparent “rules” if you want to stretch the point. The only problem with doing this is the rules get tossed out with the blood bath even in later F13th movies. Don't get me started on Carol J. Clover's complete shoot from the hip “final girl” that came from an overtly pre-determined feminist angle that amounts to nothing more then propaganda. Sure it has launched a thousand sound bites but as we'll find in later F13th movies the concept of the “final girl” doesn't even hold sway in a core slasher franchise. But what the heck, F13th apparently defined the rules for the slasher genre, even though those “rules” didn't necessary apply to even this franchise from the second movie onward! Once again proof positive that supporters of mundane horror outlets don't actually apply any analysis to the genre they apparently support. Through the course of these reviews and a series of essays on the slasher phenomia I hope to dispel a lot of false assumptions about this sub-genre. Guess I'll be watching a hell of a lot more slasher than Ms Clover deemed sufficient for her orderly and self important University paper. Guess we should discuss the standard of acting in the movie, this is where it gets real bad. Besides a surprising casting choice of Betsy Palmer (Pamela Voorhees) and a solid performance from Adrienne King (Alice) the rest of the cast are strictly amateur hour, and yes that includes an early turn by Kevin Bacon. Guess you don't actually dial into a slasher for any concept of great Thespian turns under the spot light. One of the real strengths of Friday the 13th is the score and Cunningham's use of it to ramp the tension in his penny dreadful. At lot of praise has quite rightly been directed to Harry Manfredini's excellent soundscape with the distinctly “ki ki ki ma ma ma” refrain that rivals the best that horror can deliver. And here I include the scores for Psycho, Halloween, The Exorcist, The Omen, and Jaws. But Cunningham also used ambient noise to devastating effect. The eerie call of the birds in the surrounding forest, the storm, and floorboard creaks, to name just a few. Cunningham’s work here remains entirely underrated and deserving of re-evaluation for mine, the Director nails his atmosphere through the use of sound. Overall I'm not sure if “enjoyed” is the right word I would use in regards to Friday the 13th, but it does remain an interesting and entertaining movie. It's not often that you can pin point one single movie and say that movie changed the course of film making, but F13th is definitely one of those movies. Unfortunately that change was from the excellent directions the dark genre was taking on film in the 1970s to the cheese filled teen orientated epics of the 1980s that had all their fangs yanked. Sean S. Cunningham's Friday the 13th marked a move away from scaring horror audiences to trying to titillate them that would eventually give rise to the gorenography of the new century. A new breed of horror fan, term used lightly, was about to be catered for, the gorehound. They didn't care if a movie was actually good or trying to scare them, they wanted “gnarly death scenes” and a lot of blood and human suffering. The lowest common denominator was about to be catered for and still are with modern films like The Loved Ones (Australia) and Hostel coming into “fan” prominance. Friday the 13th wouldn't mean the death of the horror genre, it's a hard beast to kill thankfully, but it would once again allowed the forces of conservatism to point their fingers at the blighted genre and blame many a social ill on it. Not a bad result for a film maker out to make a quick buck on a cheap movie really.
ScaryMinds Rates this movie as ... A classic that somehow rises above it's issues.
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