"Friday the 13th"** 1\2 (out of ****)
As odd as this may seem, for someone that devotes the month of October to horror movies, I never saw "Friday the 13th" (1980) until recently. Naturally I heard of it and am aware of the numerous sequels that followed and the 2009 reboot but I never sat down and watched the movie.
My understanding is "Friday the 13th" was inspired by John Carpenter's "Halloween" (1978), which I consider one of the greatest horror movies of all-time. "Friday the 13th" and "Halloween" are considered to have begun the slasher horror genre and the depiction of gruesome violence against teenagers (in particular females). Minus the teenager part, I'm not comfortable stating these two movies established the slasher genre. What about the films directed by Italian filmmakers Dario Argento and Mario Bava for example? Did "Friday the 13th" and "Halloween" popularize the genre for American audiences? Maybe. I'm more willing to make that statement.
Watching "Friday the 13th" stirred conflicted feelings within me. On one hand this story of a group of teenagers working at Camp Crystal Lake and a supposed "death curse" placed on it, does all the things you hate about horror movies. For one thing, it is gory for the sake of being gory. Some wisenheimer will say the violence depicted here is tame compared to today's standards (Great! Our standards have lowered!). But "Friday the 13th" does something far worst than that. It doesn't take time to create distinguishable, interesting characters. The audience doesn't come to have any relationship with these people on screen. Who are they and why are we watching them? Other than hair color what separates one character from the other? For all those that love this movie, explain to me (without the use of google) the difference between Alice (Adrienne King) and Marcie (Jeannine Taylor)? Or how about Jack (Kevin Bacon) and Ned (Mark Nelson)? All "Friday the 13th" does is create pretty young characters for us to watch die one by one. You can make the agruement so do a lot of other horror movies. True. But one of the things that separates the good movies from the bad is the characters. Do we have compelling, interesting characters? People that we feel we know and like.
Once that became apparent to me "Friday the 13th" was an exercise in patience. How long do I have to sit down and wait for the movie to be over?
I don't want to come off sounding like a pretentious, high affluent movie critic either. "Friday the 13th" does some interesting things. I like the fact the killer is never shown on screen. Every time the killer appears, it is shot in a POV style with the audience in the shoes of the killer. This is interesting because it provides a voyeuristic quality. Voyeurism plays a big part in this movie. That leads to a comparison to Alfred Hitchcock. While "Halloween" may have influence the release of this movie, "Friday the 13th" owes much to Hitchcock's "Psycho" (1960).
For one thing, listen to the score composed by Harry Manfredini. It "burrows" heavily from Bernard Herrmann's theme for Hitchcock's iconic film. If possible, I would suggest listening to each theme side by side. Without revealing the ending of the movie, both come to very similar conclusions, only from reverse perspectives.
There are some scares in the movie and some intense moments to keep you in suspense. That may contradict my statement that the movie was an exercise in my patience but I admit it is suspenseful to see someone about to be killed. Then that suspense turns to disgust when we have scenes where the killer takes an ax and sticks it in someone's head. So, all statements are true. There is suspense, there is unnecessary gory violence, and the characters are simply pawns created to be killed off one by one, making it an exercise in my patience.
When the movie begins we are told it is 1958. We are at Camp Crystal Lake where two teenagers excuse themselves from a larger group so they may find a place to make out. As this is happening we are put in the shoes of the killer and see the two teenagers about to die. Then the movie jumps forward to the present day. We learn the camp has been closed all this time and is about to reopen. We learn, through dialogue, that there was another incident involving someone being killed the prior year in 1957. My question is, why couldn't the movie start with that scene? The larger point is, I don't like the way "Friday the 13th" handles its origin story and the incredibly slow way it goes about finally revealing everything to us.
Understanding a bit more about who could be the potential killer would have created more suspense, kept us involved more in a story, and allow the characters to have more to do than wait to die. They could have been playing amateur detectives, piecing together clues.
By the time the movie does reveal the killer to us, it goes on way too long before everything is resolved. First the movie doesn't show the killer then it shows too much of the killer.
"Friday the 13th" was definitely an influential movie in its own right. Though I hadn't seen the movie before, the character Jason Voorhees, with his hockey mask is an iconic image. The character Jason has become representative of Halloween. A slew of slasher movies emerged in the 1980s and were reborn again in the mid 90s with pretty young teenagers meeting grisly deaths.
I don't like that the characters weren't developed but admit there are some suspenseful moments and I like the musical score and nods to "Psycho". So, I decided to split the difference with my rating. Not an awful movie but not a great horror movie either. You'd be better off watching "Halloween" or "Psycho" instead.
Posts
