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Friday the 13th

A review by Brooks Rich

Happy Friday the 13th. This is probably the first slasher film covered on this blog. It seems appropriate that we cover Friday the 13th on Friday the 13th. I'll be honest. Slasher films aren't usually high cinematic art, unless we're talking about the Italian giallo films or Halloween from 1978. 
Slasher films usually have a formula and stick with them. A bunch of twenty somethings playing teenagers go somewhere and are picked off one at a time by some sort of killer. Before being killed, they smoke pot and have unprotected sex...... a death sentence in the world of the slashers. These films rarely go beyond that outline. Nothing wrong with that and even though Friday the 13th is a sort of ripoff of Halloween, it is still a fun and entertaining movie. 

The plot is simple. A group of teenagers, played by twenty somethings and Kevin Bacon, are renovating an old summer campground that was the site of a series of murders. They are picked off one by one until the final girl, it's always a final girl, must confront the real killer. Rinse, repeat, for the rest of the franchise. 

I assume everyone knows Friday the 13th's big bad is the hockey masked killer Jason Voorhees. Does everyone know Jason is not the killer in Friday the 13th? It's his mother, Pamela, played by Betsy Palmer, who gives a wonderfully sweet and deranged performance. I was thinking of covering one of Jason's films but decided to go with the original. The rest of the franchise came out in the midst of the slasher craze.... the early '80s were full of these films. There’s something kind of charming about the first Friday. The kills are a little more tame... subtlety is not a word in Jason's vocabulary. There are some genuinely creepy moments. It feels more in line with Halloween than the rest of the franchise would. Eventually, it just became about how many people can Jason kill and how many creative ways can he kill them. Sometimes.... that's all you need in a movie. 

I think if you're reading this and know you hate violent horror movies, you know not to watch Friday the 13th or any other slasher. But if for some reason you've never seen this, or it's been awhile, and you don't mind something mindless, give it a watch. It's a breezy watch and it is probably worth it for Betsy Palmer's performance alone.




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