Written by: Victor Miller.
Produced by: Sean S. Cunningham.
Starring: Betsy Palmer, Adrienne King, Harry Crosby, Laurie Bartram, Mark Nelson, Jeannine Taylor, Robbi Morgan, Kevin Bacon and Ari Lehman.
Release date: 1980.
Budget: $550, 000
Gross Revenue: $59, 700, 000.
So I needed to take a break from watching the Oscar nominated films. There is only so much depth I can handle before I sink into an existential funk and start to conclude that literary film is nothing but an exercise in pretention; a wank, if you will. It’s at these times that I need to consume the film equivalent of a Big Mac.* Something dumb and fun to remind me not to take things so seriously.
If there is one movie completely devoid of intellectual merit, it must certainly be the original Friday the 13th. But is it any good? Not really, no. Just how ‘bad’ is it? Well Betsy Palmer, the actor who played Jason Vorhees’ mother, the original killer in the movie, famously said that the only reason she agreed to do it was because she needed to buy a new car. After reading the script, she called it a “...piece of shit.”
If there is one movie completely devoid of intellectual merit, it must certainly be the original Friday the 13th. But is it any good? Not really, no. Just how ‘bad’ is it? Well Betsy Palmer, the actor who played Jason Vorhees’ mother, the original killer in the movie, famously said that the only reason she agreed to do it was because she needed to buy a new car. After reading the script, she called it a “...piece of shit.”
I am however convinced that the original Friday the 13th (not the remake, I can’t stress that enough) is one of the sacred few movies that has become ‘good’ thanks to the slow passage of time. I want to say that it is like a fine wine, but that analogy isn’t really apt because wine is enjoyable at any time, whereas when Friday the 13th was released in 1980, it was just a shitty copy of the much more successful Halloween.
No, Friday the 13th experienced a strange metamorphosis, probably in the 90’s thanks to the movie Scream, where it became good because of its badness. Watching it for the first time since I was thirteen, I was surprised at how much fun I had. My friend and I spent most of the 90 minutes either coming up with Kevin Bacon jokes, trying to guess which of the stupid teenagers was going to get cut up next, or pointing out the bleedingly obvious sexual symbolism inherent throughout (such as when the innocent teenage girl finds a snake in her cabin.)
The shittier the film got, the more fun it was. By the time Betsy Palmer showed up and started talking as her dead son, saying “Kill them mommy” in a high-pitched ‘kids’ voice, you are so patched into the nervous system of this tremendous piece of shit that you are willing to follow it anywhere. And in terms of bat-shit insane plot twists, you’ll be following it as if it’s the bendiest, joltiest rollercoaster ever made. Just after the protagonist kills Mrs. Vorhees, for some unknown reason, the surviving girl gets into a canoe and floats into the middle of Crystal Lake only to have a deformed Jason pop out of the water and drag her under. Cut to her waking up in a hospital, and at first we think it’s just a nightmare, but then she asks the sheriff if they found the boy in the lake and he says “No.” And she says “Well that means he’s still out there.” Roll Credits.
What the fuck man? So was it all a dream? If it wasn’t, does that mean that Jason has been living under water for all these years? And how come in the later movies he’s a grown man, but in this movie he is still depicted as a kid? Maybe there is an answer in the sequel, which I’m sure I’ll review at a later date. But as it stands, the ending to Friday the 13th deserves an Academy Award for ‘Most Contrived Ending Tacked On The End Of A Movie To Get A Final Cheap Scare.’
To close off, I’ll comment on the special effects of this film, which are actually pretty good. It makes me wonder just how much of the film’s budget went on make-up. Probably all of it. It sure as shit didn’t go to any of the actors, who all looked like they were offered a cabin to stay in, and all the marijuana they could smoke, in exchange for their acting skills. Although, seeing Kevin Bacon get skewered through the
throat as he smokes post-coital pot is something you never get over.
Three stars:
* I am aware that Stephen King penned this phrase in reference to himself, and I love it. Sometimes you do need to stray away from literary films to get a good dose of pulp. And hey, Big Macs do taste pretty good.
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