I’ve talked before about how I grew up in the 1980s watching slashers. Though I watched all the horror movies I could get my hands on it was the Friday the 13th series that really did it for me. I wasn’t old enough to watch them in the theater, and my parents certainly wouldn’t rent them for me so I had to watch them on basic cable. Luckily, those films were played pretty regularly. Every Friday the 13th the USA network would play two or three of them, and other stations would randomly put them on for their late-night viewings.
As such, I watched them both edited and out of order. I really don’t know if I saw them all as a teenager. I know I watched the one where Corey Feldman shaves his head, the third one with the terrible 3-D effects, and Jason Takes Manhattan. I think I saw the first one at some point, but I feel like cable stations didn’t play that one all that often, as Jason isn’t actually in it and he became the main attraction.
I remember watching Scream in college, and when Drew Barrymore answered the killer’s question about who the main bad guy in Friday the 13th was, I answered “Jason Voorhees” along with her and was surprised when that was the wrong answer. I can’t remember now if I then remembered it was his mother in the first film that was the killer, or if it came as a surprise because I had not yet seen the film. I definitely watched it soon after.
A good ten years later, not long after I got married, Wal-Mart was selling the films as DVDs for five bucks a piece. I bought the first three, with plans on watching them and then buying the others later. I remember watching the first film and thinking it was really bad. By that point I had discovered the horror films of the Italians and Japanese and watched a whole lot of other horror films. Slashers seemed kind of old hat by then. Boring and derivative. I was also a bit more of a cinephile, and so Friday the 13th just seemed like an excuse to show tits and blood on screen and little else.
Another couple of decades have passed, and I find myself back to being able to enjoy them (I reviewed the first eight films over at Cinema Sentries). With a new Peacock series, Crystal Lake, which brings us the backstory of Jason and Mrs. Voorhees, I decided to revisit the first film.
It is amazing how slow this film is to get started. We do get a kill in the first ten minutes – a flashback to 1957 sits with a happy sing-along at Camp Crystal Lake; a horny couple slips off to get sexy, only to wind up murdered. Then we move back to the present. The camp was closed a few years back when a young boy drowned, but now they plan to reopen it. Annie (Robbi Morgan), the camp’s new cook, is hitchhiking her way to camp. She comes into the nearby town and asks around about how to get there. She’s met with stares and mean glares. She shouldn’t go to “Camp Blood,” they say. A crazy man warns her that she’ll die if she does. Eventually, a trucker agrees to take her close to the camp. On the way, he warns her of the camp’s terrible past. He drops her off at a crossroads where she’s picked up by an unknown person in a Jeep. She gets herself dead.
But then we go a long time before another murder happens. We meet the rest of the counselors. They do some work around the camp. They swim in the lake and generally clown around. Some of them (including a young Kevin Bacon) get sexy with each other, while others play strip Monopoly. It is all fairly tame and rather silly. It is kind of a hang-out movie for a while.
Then the killings begin proper. None of them are particularly memorable. There are some cut throats and a pretty gruesome arrow through the neck, but the later films will do a much better job of bringing the kills. The reveal that it is Jason’s mother (Betsy Palmer) who is the killer comes out of left field. Jason is barely mentioned in the film. There are a couple of lines explaining how the counselors weren’t very attentive, and Jason drowned accidentally, but the film doesn’t make a big deal out of it. His mother is barely mentioned at all. Then, all of a sudden, there she is as the killer. It’s funny, too, because she’s an older-looking, middle-aged woman with short hair and a church lady sweater. She looks nothing like a killer. But Palmer’s unhinged performance absolutely sells it.
It is curious to realize that this film launched a massive horror franchise. It’s not a bad film; I find myself quite liking it (though I can’t really remove all the nostalgia from my mind while watching it now). But I can’t say that it is better or more interesting than any number of other slashers that came out at the same time. We don’t even get Jason in a hockey mask in this one (Jason wouldn’t really show up until the next film, and it would take the third one before the hockey mask shows up.)
But it made a lot of money and spawned sequels, and here I am talking about it some forty years later.