Friday the 13th (1980).

Let's move on from one horror franchise...to a much much more famous horror franchise. I know it isn't Halloween any more...or 1980 but I just want to watch something trashy in a different sense, for a while. This is a way for me to get mainstream and yet look at very similar films to the ones I've been exploring on this blog for the last couple of months. I'm a little Full Moon'd out, if I'm honest. So I hope you enjoy!

Friday the 13th is one of the few horror franchises where fans admit that the sequels are actually worth a watch and as I don't have quite the connection with this franchise as I do say...the Halloween Franchise, I thought I'd sit down and take a look at all of the films, minus Freddy Vs Jason and the remake, which I'll leave for another time.

Also I know there is the whole R vs Uncut debate and I honestly have no idea which versions I have, as the UK certificates are different to the American ones and when you search for 'Friday the 13th Uncut' on Amazon you get this odd boxset which only includes the first 8 movies, so I didn't bother with that.

Friday the 13th was made for around $550,000 in 1980 dollars (that is still less than a million in today's pounds) and was one of many films to be inspired by Halloween. The big difference Friday the 13th had from so many of the other Halloween clones was that it had Paramount behind it, the first film of its kind to have major studio backing and the results were clear, this grossed close to forty million dollars in the box office, making it one of the most successful slashers, ever.

However, it wasn't all roses at the start, mainly thanks to bad words from snooty critics, despite the public loving the movie. Something to do with moral implications or some bullshit, I don't care, the critics always do this crap with these kind of movies. Over the years critics never particularly warmed to the film as such or really claimed the film was any less crappy the first time around they experienced it but they at least accepted Friday the 13th's style and the impact that had on mainstream cinema. What do I think? Well let's dig in!

Much like with many of the slasher classics, Friday the 13th is largely a revenge movie. A story of a woman driven mad by the death of her son who through her insanity turns Camp Crystal Lake into hell on Earth. Dubbed 'Camp Blood'...imaginative, the townsfolk claim the camp is cursed with all the people that have died there over the years, along with all the mysterious fires and other such things going wrong. No one was ever caught for any of it, spooky! Despite all this Camp Crystal Lake is preparing for one of its many reopening's and things begin to go wrong from the very start...

Our final girl comes in the form of Alice Hardy, who would appear in this movie and the first Friday the 13th sequel. Although she is largely bland and uninteresting, it should be noted that she seems to break the basic final girl rules, considering she has a romantic backstory, I'm going to assume she isn't a virgin. She drinks with the others and plays strip monopoly (until the storm interrupts). And given the way characters react to her, there is nothing masculine about her at all. She also lacks the basic final girl functions, she does little to progress the plot and although she has all the trappings of final girl, they don't seem like central parts to her character or the main driving forces either. Well done for avoiding that feminism trap, sort of - I guess certain changes need to be made, when you change your slasher into a woman. However, the next Laurie Strode, I think not.

Friday the 13th is weird to watch in 2012, by now the whole slasher at a summer camp thing is basically one of the most over used plot outlines ever and yet here, this is the movie that really formed so many of those clichés we've become so accustomed too. So can a movie be called clichéd if it is the reason those things are clichés in the first place? It's funny too, it was so much easier to be a slasher in the 80s, just cut a phone line and you've practically cut them off from the rest of the world. Unless they couldn't get wifi or mobile phone signal at camps, the slasher would have a much harder job in 2012.

Thanks to a general grindhouse feel, this film feels dated as hell. I think Halloween (and this isn't just fan bias) has actually held up much better than this film has. Some of the gore effects, just look plain awful here - that being said, I can at least appreciate how the film slowly but carefully ramps itself up. The deaths grow more and more extreme and more and more gory as the movie progresses, while still keeping an element of fear because the genre hadn't slipped into pure ridiculousness, yet.

Barry Abrams' cinematography is pretty awful...I know that this is a low budget production but you can really tell when a cinematographer is trying too hard. I mean sure, there are some good locations and some great atmosphere but I don't really know how much that is down to him as opposed to being down to Cunnigham's direction.

So do I recommend it? Although the set up is interesting with the whole backdrop of a alleged cursed summer camp, the film manages to still be quite boring, until the third act at least. I mean it brings some interesting ideas to the table, duh, this was the inspiration for an entire sub-genre and the first and second acts both have their fair share of scares, but the pacing is just painful. Cunningham directs it well, there is no denying of that, I'm pretty sure I'll miss him as I go through the franchise but this film is just a mess. Namely that the movie never really feels like it knows what it is doing or where it is really going, leaving the film to feel all over the place. The film grows tiring with the constant stop starting. And whenever the film does seem like it's going to get going, finally, we have more scenes of the counselors faffing about. I perfectly understand the purpose of setting up a utopia and tearing it down with an advocate of chaos - but there is no sense of that here, no sense of ramping dread or danger, no sense of that collapse, because the characters in the movie don't actually catch up to the audience in what we know right until near the very end, and although those last twenty minutes or so are the slasher at its finest, it wastes most of the impact it could have had taking over an hour to get there. Maybe it's just fanboy bias, but I liked this film better when it was called Halloween. Obviously for the genre importance, those glorious last twenty minutes and some solid scares throughout, this film isn't a complete 'avoid' from me, but I can only really recommend this to those with the greatest of patience, you will be rewarded...eventually. Everyone else just give it a miss, you'll be bored.

Think About It!

-Locke