19. Friday the 13th (1980, Cunningham)
By Eivind Langdal
1st November 2009

…includes spoilers

“Then he’s still out there”.

Yes, Alice, he still is. Jason is still out there. I am, of course, talking about the ending to Friday the 13th, which now has become the beginning to what eventually became one of the longest running series in horror film history. It’s a good closing scene, especially in the moment when a malignant Jason pops up from the water to give the film one last scare. It’s sad then, that the 90 minutes preceding it are such an abomination. Though I had seen Jason X a long time ago and Freddy vs. Jason not long after that, this was the first time I had seen any of the Friday the 13th movies. Before putting it on, I knew I wasn’t going to watch a masterpiece, but I thought I at least could have some harmless horror fun.

“Harmless” is a descriptive word for Friday the 13th. This is a tame film, derived of any sort of tension whatsoever. I can’t remember a single memorable moment from it, apart from the aforementioned ending. I have seen a ton of slasher films before this one, but most of them had at least something that would make them worth catching. Sure, very few of them were well scripted, but at least some of them were scary. Friday the 13th is not even that. It’s simply one and a half hour of teens getting throated, slashed or stabbed by Miss Voorhees, a disturbed individual who is trying to stop the reopening of Camp Crystal Lake because her son drowned there two decades ago after the camp counselors were too busy having sex to watch him. There’s no tension. There’s no terror. Only random murders.

Having Miss Voorhees be the main villain is an interesting trivia in retrospect, and I can’t deny there was a smile on my face when that final frame made its appearance and it was clear this was only the warm-up. So it’s sad then that Miss Voorhees is a more interesting villain on paper than she is on screen. Sure, the idea of having an over-protective mother be the antagonist is an interesting twist (especially if you, unlike me, didn’t know this before seeing the movie), but it is ruined thanks to some atrocious acting by Betsy Palmer as the maternal killer. Admittedly, she doesn’t have an easy job, as the character supposedly channels her son’s spirit by talking out loud in what I guess is meant to be his voice, but even when that’s not happening, she is still just bad, bad, bad.

And so is the rest of the cast. The only reason you may remember any of them is because there has to be one obligatory survivor (who’ll get enough screen time to ensure you remember her for at least a few days) and because one of them is played by Kevin Bacon, who doesn’t exactly give a performance that would make you believe he would ever be cast by Clint Eastwood in Mystic River. Still, the actors do provide the film’s only scares with their ridiculous large amounts of hair. That’s gotta count for something, right?

Friday the 13th frustrated me. I thought I knew what a bad horror was, but even Blair Witch 2 wasn’t this much of a disaster. The film is like a repeated loop, really, where each scene consists of someone being killed after having walked out in the dark alone. The only real change is that it’s a new person for each murder. Or is it? After all, the characters in this movie are so one-dimensional I really struggled to tell them apart. If you held a gun to my head and told me to recite their names, you’d have no choice but to shoot me.

Maybe some of you will yell “sacrilege” at this review (if anyone is reading the column at all, that is). Maybe I am out of my league here. And I’m fine with that. I don’t want to point my finger at people and their opinion. But if you want me to call Friday the 13th a good movie, you’re going to have to fetch that gun again, because this is a piece of entertainment that has no merit other than that it just so happened to have one of the most iconic titles in film history and somehow managed to twist that into some sort of legacy that ensured that people still know of this film three decades after its conception.

Of course, a horror film named Friday the 13th were bound to come along sometime, but couldn’t it been given to a scarier film? Couldn’t it be given to one that showed at least some sort of artistry? Couldn’t it be given to a film actually using the date Friday the 13th as something else than a random plot point? I guess not. At least has that memorable “ki, ki, ki, ma, ma, ma” sound (that’s short for “Kill, mama”, by the way). I guess that deserves a mention.