 |
| Jason trying to collect Alice's student loan payments |
Happy Octoberfest once again. I hope you have your reading glasses on because I've got eighteen, count 'em, EIGHTEEN Halloween posts coming your way. It's time for our
Friday the 13th vs
A Nightmare on Elm Street showdown. Let's get started, because we've got a lot to cover.
Following the success of
Halloween in 1978, the slasher film genre was born. A "slasher movie" is any horror movie defined with a large body count. While
Halloween's was only four bodies, it started the wave of horror movies to start casting sexy girls as dumb damsels with big yams who get axed because they can't pay attention while some schmuck is giving them a good boning in a dank forest cabin. While
Halloween invented the notion of these events occurring as a trope, a commonplace, a very foundation piece of the genre, another series took them and made them household gags. This is
Friday the 13th, a movie that teaches us it is
not okay to have premarital sex because odds are you'll get a harpoon through the chest during. A movie that the director even admitted was nothing more than a cash-in on
Halloween's success, and not only was it too a box office success, it would spawn
NINE fucking sequels. Do you think that's enough?
 |
| Crazy Ralph could've been the killer |
The movie opens in the summer of 1958 at Camp Crystal Lake, two counselors named Barry and Claudette sneak away from a campfire and into a storage barn. They prepare to have sex before an unseen assailant enters and murders them. Literally right from the get-go, the entire franchise is letting us know what we're going to be seeing repeatedly happen for the next decade.
Twenty-one years later, on June 13, 1979, newly hired camp counselor Annie Phillips (Robbi Morgan) asks for directions to the reopened Camp Crystal Lake. An elderly man named Crazy Ralph (Walt Gorney) warns her against going, claiming that the camp has a "death curse." Despite only have one murder in its entire history, the whole camp is cursed now. Seems simple enough. A friendly truck driver named Enos (Rex Everhart) agrees to give Annie a lift halfway to the camp. During the drive, Enos warns Annie about the camp, informing her that a young boy drowned at Crystal Lake in 1957 and about the two murders the following year. Really? Two? We only saw the one... well I guess I'll eat my foot now. After Enos drops her off, Annie hitches another ride from an unseen assailant, who chases her into the woods and slashes her throat. Well, the main character's dead. Time to roll credits...
 |
"I thought I was going to be a small-time actor, then I
took an arrow to the neck" - Kevin Bacon |
...wait, she wasn't the main character? Ah nuts. I guess we gotta keep going. At the camp, counselors Ned (Mark Nelson) , Jack (Kevin fucking Bacon), Bill (Harry Crosby III), Marcie (Jeannine Taylor), Brenda (Laurie Bartram), and Alice (Adrienne King), along with the owner Steve Christy (Peter Brouwer), refurbish the cabins and facilities. As a thunderstorm approaches, Steve leaves the campground to stock supplies, leaving his camp counselors to fend for themselves in an otherwise abandoned summer camp. Meanwhile, the killer arrives at the camp and stalks the counselors. Ned sees someone walk into one of the cabins and follows, only to be killed off-screen. Later, while Jack and Marcie have sex in one of the cabin's bunk beds, they are unaware of Ned's body directly above them, with his throat slit. In the film's most iconic scene, Marcie leaves to use the camp bathrooms and during her absence, Jack's throat is pierced with an arrow from beneath the bed. The killer then follows Marcie to the bathrooms and slams an axe into her face. Meanwhile, Brenda hears a child's voice calling for help and ventures outside her cabin to the archery range, only for the range lights to turn on as she is attacked off-screen. Steve later returns to the camp and is confronted by the unseen killer, who stabs him. So, as you can see, these kids are getting whacked one-by-one pretty quickly. I mean the movie is only ninety-five minutes long, so with this many deaths they have to get hacking pretty quickly.
Alice and Bill are worried by their friends' disappearances, and why they've only chosen now to notice is beyond me. They leave the main cabin to investigate, which is... such a bad idea. They discover a bloody axe in Brenda's bed, the phones disconnected, and the cars inoperable. Boy, this killer has been a busy-body, haven't they? When the power goes out, Bill goes to check on the generator and is murdered by the killer. Alice then heads out to look for him. Upon finding Bill's body impaled with arrows to the generator room's door, she flees back to the main cabin to hide only to be traumatized further when Brenda's body is thrown through the window.
 |
Marcie trying the new Axe product...
*ba dum tss* |
Hiding inside, Alice sees a vehicle pull up and rushes outside, thinking it is Steve. Instead, she is greeted by a middle-aged woman named Mrs. Voorhees (Betsy Palmer), who claims to be an old friend of Steve's. As Alice brings her inside, Mrs. Voorhees begins to reminisce that her son Jason was the young boy who drowned in 1957. She blames his death on the counselors who were supposed to be watching him, but they instead were having sex and not paying attention to Jason's drowning. Sex and Camp Crystal Lake do not mix. Having sex at Camp Crystal Lake is a surefire guaranteed way to get yourself killed. If this isn't a PSA for abstinence than I don't know what is. Revealing herself as the killer, Mrs. Voorhees turns violent and rushes toward Alice with a bowie knife, attempting to kill her. THAT's RIGHT! The killer in this movie isn't Jason, but his mom! That's... unexpected for someone who only vaguely knows something about this franchise. In the ensuing chase, Alice finds Annie's body inside Mrs. Voorhees' car, because I guess she just needs someone to talk to on long car trips (though that would smell nasty after about an hour) and Steve's body hanging from a tree. Following a confrontation in which Mrs. Voorhees is knocked out, Alice escapes to the shore. Just as she begins to relax, Mrs. Voorhees finds her and attempts to kill her again with a machete. During the final struggle, Alice ultimately decapitates Mrs. Voorhees with her machete, in one of the silliest slow-motion scenes you'll ever see. Afterwards, a traumatized Alice boards and falls asleep inside a canoe, which floats out on Crystal Lake.
 |
| This is the face most dentists make |
Just as Alice awakens and sees the police arriving the next morning, Jason's decomposing body suddenly emerges from the lake and drags her underwater. She then awakens in a hospital, where a police officer and medical staff tend to her. When Alice asks about Jason, the officer says that there was no sign of any boy. Alice says, "Then he's still there," as the lake is shown with a single ripple on the open water. This, to me, ruined the ending. The ending to the movie should've been the decomposing Jason coming out of the lake and taking Alice underwater. The bullshit about it being all a dream and then her saying "then he's still out there" shouldn't have been added, but that's just me.
So there you go, the inaugural Friday the 13th. It set up a lot of tropes that would be abused in the future sequels, but considering what we get in future sequels, it isn't really that much of a "dumb" horror movie. It's pretty cheesy, hell what horror movie isn't, but it still works. It's just Halloween, the movie it was trying to cash-in on. It's simple, not really all that gory, a little crude, and overacted as hell. The entire franchise wouldn't start getting "campy" (pun intended) until the sequels would tear it to pieces. Stick around, because Cody's Halloween 2018 Spectacular has only just begun.
No comments:
Post a Comment