Classic Movie Review: Friday the 13th (1980)

When I made the decision to write some Halloween-themed classic movie reviews this month, I looked at the calendar and knew there was one movie that I absolutely had to do. "Friday the 13th." On Friday the 13th. Which is today. I mean, when else am I going to get the opportunity to review "Friday the 13th" on Friday, October 13th, the famously haunted day? When it comes to horror movie franchises in the 80's, there's three major horror film franchises that propelled the slasher horror genre, "Friday the 13th," "Halloween" and "A Nightmare on Elm Street," with their respective superhuman, serial killer antagonists, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Kruger and Michael Meyers. I've been very well aware of these three killers since I was young. It was especially fun to dress up as them on Halloween. I remember specifically being Freddy Kruger one year and I also think I put on a hockey mask and acted as Jason. They're fun characters to be on Halloween. I want to review all three of these classic slashers and I was planning on starting with "Halloween," but I had to rework my schedule a bit and so because of the themed date, we are starting with Jason. But look forward to my reviews of the other two because there's a lot I want to discuss with these three movies.

While I have been very well aware of Jason since I was in Elementary School, I had not actually seen his movie before, so last night watching it was my very first time. That makes this perspective quite a bit different than when I review "Halloween" and "A Nightmare on Elm Street," because those two I have had many, many years of reflecting on. But I think it's kinda fun to have a fresh perspective on some classic movies, eliminating every bit of nostalgia that can sometimes cloud our vision of certain movies. On that note, I do think it's interesting that, unlike it's 1978 slasher predecessor "Halloween" of which this movie was definitely inspired by, "Friday the 13th" was not received well initially. It did make plenty of profit, earning $39.7 million on a $550,000 budget, which was pretty decent for a horror movie in the 80's, and justified them making approximately 700,000 sequels. OK, 12 to be exact. But eight of those were in the 80's as we almost had one per year for the entire decade (they missed 1983 and 1987). But no, despite this, critics didn't like this movie and it took some time for this to be seen as a cult classic. Honestly I can see why. Sure, one can have some nostalgia for the popular character's origins, but this is definitely the lesser of the three classic slashers.

If you are like me and you lived your life without seeing this movie and you don't want it spoiled for you, feel free to click away now because this movie requires me talking about spoilers if I'm going to do this movie justice. Go find a way to watch this movie and come back and finish reading. If you want, this is actually back in theaters today in celebration of the festive day. At least it is in my city. So that's an option. If you don't care about spoilers for a 37-year-old movie or you've actually seen it, then proceed reading. In analyzing this movie, I did my best to think about context and perspective. This movie has every single horror cliche in the book. I mean, the whole premise is a group of teenage kids in a cabin in the woods as they are about to begin work as camp councilors for this summer camp that is reopening. Meanwhile, someone really doesn't want this camp to take place and goes around killing these kids one by one. We don't know who that is because the camera perspective takes a first person approach whenever this killer is around, thus giving the movie a mystery spin on it. But yeah, that's it. Teenage kids in a cabin in the woods with a killer going around. If this movie was made today, I don't think anyone would care for it.

But that's where context comes in. I enjoy horror movies, but I'm not expert enough to know where every horror cliche began. Is it possible that "Friday the 13th" helped create these horror cliches? Jason's thing is that he guards or haunts this lake area because of what happened to him as a kid. I thought to myself that maybe people learned to like Jason so much that other horror movies tried to replicate this, turning it into a cliche. Did people walk out of theaters in 1980 complaining that they had seen this premise a thousand times before? I honestly don't know. Even if so, I'd be willing to bet that this popularity of this franchise and this character bolstered that, so I'm willing to give that more of a pass. Then we have to know that this was made in a time period where people loved their slasher films. You didn't need to come up with anything crazy, epic or super unique. If you made an effectively intense slasher film with some sort of serial killer walking around killing people, a lot of people ate that up. If a movie does a good job of pandering to its audience, I think that's something at least worth respecting even if the movie itself doesn't quite hold up to what we may expect from a horror film in 2017. Movies evolve and change over time and that's perfectly OK.

That said, I have to be honest with my personal opinion. This movie has very little depth to it and it has a cast of characters that I really don't care too much for. I think perhaps the most important part of making a successful slasher horror film is having a cast of characters that the audience cares about. If you honestly feel for your characters and you want them to make it out of this experience alive, then it adds to the intensity of the situation if suddenly their life is in jeopardy and you honestly have no idea if they are going to make it to the next scene. I never experienced that in this movie. We had a group of like 6-8 of these camp counselors and I never developed a strong attachment to any of them. We had two of them separate from the group to go make love in the other room and instantly I knew they had about five minutes of movie time left to live. Sure enough, once the girl gets up, boy gets stabbed from beneath the bed, followed shortly by the girl getting an ax to her head in the bathroom. Well that was lovely. Now let's move onto the next deaths. No real emotion. No intensity during the scenes. I wasn't even super scared. It just felt like a movie void of any emotion or plot as we just watched these kids get killed one by one in this cabin in the woods.

I think the most redeeming aspect of this movie came in the last act of it, which is why I say I have to spoil this movie in order to do it justice. If I just said that it was a boring movie until the exciting and intense ending, I don't think that would be good enough. I mean, this is my only chance to talk about this movie, so I'm going to take that. One thing that I did find interesting throughout is that we don't know who this killer is. We take a book from "Halloween" by doing the first person killer camera trick, only seeing the weapons hit the people or the already dead bodies hiding around the corner for other characters to stumble on. Knowing plenty about Jason, but nothing about this movie, I simply assumed it was the perspective of Jason that we were taking. But no. As it turns out, this is not really Jason's movie at all. This is Jason's mother's movie. She's the killer. And she has some pretty solid motivations because in previous years, her son Jason drowned in the lake and she blames everyone around her. That anger and hate turned her into a psychotic killer and now she is killing all of the people there in order to prevent this summer camp from being opened so that no one has to suffer what she suffered by having her young son drown in a lake.

I say that most of the characters in this movie weren't worth caring about and most of that does have to do with bad acting, that could be attributed to bad directing and/or writing. But when Betsy Palmer as Mrs. Voorhees shows up, she owns every scene she is in. She is extremely menacing as this psychotic killer mother and when she was trying her hardest to kill this final remaining girl, those sequences were really intense. I even kinda cared about this girl, whose name was Alice, and I did find it rewarding when she overcame and decapitated Mrs. Voorhees. She won. She overcame the challenges presented to her and made it out alive. I think that's something that is important in a horror movie, having a protagonist we care about overcoming the evil placed before them. This also sets up for some revenge plots in the next movie. Jason is upset at Alice for killing his mother, giving him solid motivation instead of being a villain that goes around and kills for no apparent reason. Speaking of Jason, he does show up in this movie for a brief moment. Here we are at the end of the movie with Alice floating over the lake after victory and Jason jumps out of the water and gets her. Dream sequence or no, that made me jump like 10 feet. I was not expecting that.

Overall, "Friday the 13th" is a movie that is definitely worth respecting if you are a fan of the horror genre because it did help pave the way to bolster this slasher flicks. And it also gave us the iconic horror villain Jason Voorhees. Yet when compared to the other two movies, "Halloween" and "A Nightmare on Elm Street" that I'll get into later this month, this definitely doesn't hold a candle to those. I give it respect from being a product of its time that successfully delivered the type of film that people liked back in the 80's. And perhaps the horror cliches weren't as big of cliches when the movie was released. But as is, this is a movie that's void of plot for the majority of the run time and doesn't really have any characters worth caring about. When we have a slasher horror filled with characters being killed that leave no lasting emotional weight when they're gone, then that's a significant problem. But Mrs. Voorhees being revealed as the villain surprised me and when she was on screen, the movie was pretty great, so that redeemed the film somewhat. And that final jump scare. Man. If I were ranking individual jump scares in movies, that has to be towards the top of the list and almost made the whole movie worth it. Thus my final grade for "Friday the 13th" is a 7/10.