31 Days of Horror: Friday the 13th (1980)

Friday the 13th

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.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Toxic Avenger (2025)

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When I was a teenager the USA network had a show called Up All Night that ran on Friday and Saturday evenings. They shows movies all night long. It was hosted by Rhonda Shear (Friday nights) and Gilbert Gottfried (Saturday nights). Rhonda did the whole hot blonde bimbo thing and Gottfried, well he basically just did his usual schtick. The movies were usually dumb comedies or horror films; they were almost always of the b-variety. It wasn’t until many years later that I realized a great many of the films were produced by Troma Entertainment.

Troma specialized in low-budget, self-aware fare that always seem to wink at the audience, letting you know they knew their movies were stupid. I loved that stuff as a teenager, but now I find it insufferable. I like low-budget movies. I can even dig the so bad it’s good genre of films. But the thing for me about that is that the films have be aiming for something good. It needs to have attempted to be a good movie and failed spectacularly. That’s what makes it fun. When a movie knowingly tries to be stupid in order to fall into the so bad its good category it just annoys me. Troma often falls into that category.

Admittedly, I say that as someone who hasn’t watched a Troma film in decades. I don’t really know what they’ve been doing since the 1990s. Maybe they got good. I doubt that, but maybe my memory of what they used to do has gotten washed.

Troma’s flagship film was The Toxic Avenger (1984). The main character became their mascot of sorts and there were numerous sequels and various other multi-media projects based around it. It is about a nerdy pipsqueek of a teenager who gets ruthlessly picked on. One day he falls into some toxic sludge becoming a mutant with super strength. He then wreaks ultra-violent vengeance upon his enemies. I watched the first one when I was a teenager and enjoyed it, but I haven’t seen the sequels.

When I heard they were doing a remake I was immediately on board. When it came out on Blu-ray I made it my pick of the week. As I note in that article I wouldn’t actually be interested in the film except that it was written and directed by Macon Blair. He’s an actor and director I really enjoy and I’m always excited to see one of his films. Watching him play around in the Troma sandbox sounded interesting.

The film is pretty much what you would expect from that pairing. Blair is a big fan of the studio and is happy to dive into their mix of goopy violence and goofy comedy. But he’s also too good of a filmmaker to make this truly dumb. He’s also cool enough to get actors like Peter Dinklage, Elijah Wood, and Kevin Bacon to star in it.

Even so it had difficulties getting made. It bounced around for a while in pre-production with several different names attached (Arnold Scwarzenneger was even slated to star at some point) and then once it was made it took forever for it to find any sort of release.

Dinklage is Winston Gooze a down-on-his luck janitor who works for a giant, corrupt pharmaceutical company. It is the kid of place that sells nonsense drugs that are suppossed to heal what ails ya, but really just gives you cancer. They also dump all sorts of toxic sludge into the river. He’s got terminal cancer and a step-son whose mother recently died of cancer herself.

His insurance won’t cover the medical costs of curing his cancer, and one day he goes to the CEO of the company, Bob Garbinger (a wonderfully unhinged Kevin Bacon) for help. He acts nice, says he’ll help, but then has him escorted out of the building, where he’s greeting by some thugs who throw him into toxic sludge. Yada Yada, Winston is now the Toxic Avenger and he gets his revenge.

Blair makes this extremely violent with some truly creative and blood-soaked deaths. But the vibe is goofy so it feels more wild and crazy than truly horrific. Elijah Wood plays Garbinger’s younger brother and he’s made up like Danny DeVito in that Tim Burton Batman movie. He’s having the time of his life.

The whole thing is super goofy. I couldn’t quite get into its wavelength, but again Blair is a good enough filmmaker, and there was a bigger budget with this thing than I expect Troma has ever had before, so it looks good. More or less.

I suspect if you love Troma than this will probably work for you (unless you feel it is a little too “good” for their kind of film). If you have no idea what Troma is, and don’t generally like goopy horror films (even if they are super goofy) then I’d stay way. For me, I’m glad I watched it, but I can’t say I’ll ever do it again.

Footloose (1984)

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I grew up in a small, conservative town in Oklahoma. My family attended a conservative, evangelical-ish church. My parents were conservative and religious, though I’ve since come to realize they weren’t quite as conservative as many folks in their social circles were at the time. I was allowed to listen to rock and roll music, and we watched all kinds of movies, sometimes even Rated-R movies.

My memory is fuzzy but I believe they did not allow my brother, who is four years older than me, to go to school dances. Dancing leads to sexy thoughts which leads to actual sex, or so the thought went. By the time I got old enough they had loosened up on that idea, but I actually had no desire to go to dances. I was way too shy to ask a girl to one, and even if I did, I didn’t know how to dance.

Footloose is a movie about a teenaged boy named Ren (Kevin Bacon) who moves from the big city of Chicago to a small, mountainside, Midwestern town. It is more or less run by the local Preacher (John Lithgow) who instigated a town ban on dancing of any kind. Now, in this scenario dancing doesn’t lead so much to sexing (though certainly, that is still on the reverend’s mind) but to drinking and that leads to death. Or at least it lead to his son’s death when he did some drinking and driving.

So Ren comes to town, and he’s the new kid so he gets picked on by the bullies, one of whom challenges him to a game of chicken on tractors. There’s a little trouble at school, too, which turns Ren into a troublemaker in the eyes of the preacher. But he also makes a friend with Willard (Chris Penn) and the preacher’s daughter Ariel (Lori Singer).

Did I mention the town has banned rock and roll, too? Like all bans of this sort, they don’t do any good and the teens listen to rock and roll, drink beer, smoke cigarettes, and have a little sex. But what they don’t do is dance. At least not in an organized fashion. Queue Ren and his righteous fight to have a school dance.

Though it was a big hit when it came out in 1984 I only just saw it this weekend. I did have the soundtrack though, and it’s killer. I don’t think my parents outright banned me from watching it, but I do remember hearing discussions about how us kids shouldn’t watch it because it promoted dancing and disrespecting authority. Someone also complained that the theme song by Kenny Loggins promoted skipping church to go dancing and having fun.

Had I been interested in seeing the film, I no doubt would have found a way, but it just didn’t look that good to me. Watching it now I can firmly say it is a very dumb film, but also ridiculously fun.

They don’t hammer too hard on the morality of the film, and Lithgow plays the preacher with some nuance and, eventually, some heart. Mostly it is a film that wants to be a musical and loves to do dance montages.

Two of my favorites include Ren getting frustrated by the preacher and running off to some warehouse where he proceeds to drink, smoke and do an amazing dance all by himself. Later, when he learns Willard can’t dance he teaches him. And we are treated to this lovely montage of those two teenage boys dancing together (one might think this film is very gay – one might not be wrong).

I don’t think it is too much of a spoiler to say that the teens get their dance. What I love about the final dance scene is that it isn’t some carousing, dirty dancing affair. No, the teens do a little line-type dance and then mostly just dance by themselves. It is very chaste, just some kids having fun.

And that’s the film. Really pretty dumb, but tons of fun to watch.