Friday the 13th:
In 1979, some young adults decide to spend a few days having fun at the newly renovated Camp Crystal Lake, which was shut down years earlier because of some brutal and unsolved murders there. Unfortunately for the teens, someone has decided to be a copycat killer and begins picking them off one-by-one, usually after they do something promiscuous, such as having pre-marital sex or smoking some weed. This film was one of the biggest box-office successes of 1980, and, although Halloween is a fantastic movie that set up a lot of slasher movie ground rules, Friday has one thing that that film didn't: gore, and plenty of it. It also had a fair amount of nudity. The original Halloween only had one small scene where a woman is briefly seen topless, and had almost no blood (save for one small moment). This film appealed to the two main selling points of horror films at the time, and the two most primal human interests: sex and violence. The cast, being a bunch of young unknowns, do a decent job with the roles they're given. Kevin Bacon even has a supporting role as a camper who is (spoilers) killed via an arrow through the neck (one of the most memorable kills in the series). This was before he got big with Footloose. Adrienne King (Saturday Night Fever, Hair) does a good job as the leading lady Alice, who is the "last girl", a cliché in slasher films, where the final survivor who defeats the killer is a virgin girl (usually a brunette). Betsy Palmer does a great job as Mrs. Voorhees, the mother of a little boy named Jason who drowned at the camp as a little boy. That's right, Jason was not the killer in the original, it was his crazed mother, who was driven to kill after counselors failed to save her deformed son from drowning, as they were too busy having sex in a cabin somewhere. (Sorry for spoiling the twist.) Palmer has this really creepy moment, where she starts talking to herself, but talks to herself as if it was Jason speaking to her, telling her to kill Alice and the other campers. The movie has some great suspense and really brutal kills, which were considered extremely graphic at the time, some even said it crossed the line. The music is really atmospheric, and the main theme/chant (ch-ch-ch-ah-ah-ah) is iconic and eerie. The composer Harry Manfredini said in an interview he got the idea for the Jason theme by taking Betsy Palmer's line "kill her mommy" and broke it down to just "k-k-k-ma-ma-ma" to create the chant. The direction by Sean S. Cunningham (producer of Wes Craven's classic The Last House on the Left) and writing by Victor Miller are satisfactory, and Miller is responsible for the creation of the iconic Jason Voorhees and his crazy mother. The special effects and makeup work by Tom Savini are extremely well-done and were pretty innovative at the time. You really have to appreciate all the hard work Savini did to make the film work, without him, the film wouldn't have all the awesome effects and gore people love the series for. Friday the 13th may not be the greatest horror film ever made, but it is really entertaining and is one of the most influential and successful horror films of all time. (The ending scare is also one of the most well-executed "jump scares" ever, and is one of the most effective ending scares in any horror film.) 3.5/5 stars.
(Image: Wikipedia)
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