Friday the 13th

Many years after Camp Crystal Lake was shut down due to two counselors being brutally killed, one man decides to reopen it. But the new counselors find that in between drinking, smoking weed and having sex there is someone who is not ready to have the camp be disturbed.

Let me lay the awful truth out there: this is a horrible film. Star Betsy Palmer called it a “piece of (excrement)” and she is flatly right. The acting is nothing special, the plot is really thin and not very clever. At times, especially towards the end, it does not even make sense. What makes slasher horror great is typically the gore. But even that is lacking here, the gore is pretty weak, with most deaths being off-screen or from cheesy angles.

Yet, despite “Halloween” and “Nightmare on Elm Street” being the better series, and this film’s reliance on “Black Christmas” for inspiration, I have long considered the “Friday the 13th” franchise to be my favorite. I cannot justify it with the poor plots (basically the same thing happens in all eleven of the films) but I just cannot say no to these movies.

Which is not to say nothing good came of them. Jason Voorhees is now a well-known pop culture figure, surpassing Michael Myers by a long shot. Kevin Bacon made an appearance here as “Jack” before anyone thought “that boy could be a star”. Sean Cunningham directed, and despite his “Last House of the Left” being the better film and went on to make a living from this series. As did Victor Miller, who was an unheard-of writer before this.

And perhaps even more than “Halloween”, this film really launched the slasher craze of the 1980s. The stereotype is a bunch of kids in the woods getting hacked up, not a trio of babysitters being stalked by a station wagon. So, despite its shortcomings, it still deserves credit for everything it inspired.

While the gore is minimal, I have to give some credit to Tom Savini. He made do with what he was given and is even credited as the man who invented Jason Voorhees, which I think makes him somewhat of a hero in the world of horror (besides already being an icon for his amazing makeup and effects). He served as a stunt man and stand-in for the film, too, making this very much his baby.

Adrienne King appears, and this is almost her last job in Hollywood due to an obsessed fan. With all respect to Ms. King, this just adds to the element of the film: beautiful young women appear in horror film, only to never star in movies again because of a stalker. This is the stuff legends are made of. (She did return to acting in the 2000s, but primarily in low-budget films.)

And last but not least, the first of three appearances by Crazy Ralph, who is by far my favorite character from the series (even more than Jason himself or Tommy Jarvis). His “doomed” lines are horror classics now, and they even went so far as to try and get a new Ralphesque character for Part Three (a big mistake, and maybe I will explain this more in my review for that one).

Anyway, you are going to want to see this one if you are a horror fan simply for the classic status it now has. But the sad truth is that you should not expect much. As I said, the other major franchises just blow this one away. Even “Sleepaway Camp”, which was clearly trying to cash in on this film, is debatably the better (or at least more entertaining) film. Although, I think this still beats “Memorial Valley Massacre”. Those debates are something for another time, though…