Director: Sean Cunningham
Rating: 4 out of 10
I know it's a little late in the game to be writing the rules, but I'm stating one here and now: if the movie I'm writing about is over 20 years old, I'm not putting a spoiler warning. You've had plenty of time to catch up with this stuff, so I'm not going to hold back on these old ones. The exception being if I feel the spoiler would really devalue the overall experience of the film. That's it.
So, Mrs. Voorhees is the killer in this one! If you've seen Scream you know they spoiled that already, and if you haven't seen Friday the 13th or Scream then I honestly couldn't say why the hell you're even reading this. I've seen this flick a few times before this viewing, so I know the story and such. This time I was looking to pick out the influences, seeing as quite a bit of this movie came from other movies. I counted 3, maybe even 4, rip-offs, or homages as the filmmakers would call them. The music, with screaching violins during the theme and background score, is straight out of Psycho, which is famous for it's creepy music. The first-person POV steadi-cam is a little technique inspired by Black Christmas, which I reviewed about a week ago. The opening scene of Friday the 13th is almost an exact rip-off of the opening of Black Christmas: we see a house in a medium exterior shot, then shifts to the steadi-cam work as our killer approaches the house, then cuts inside to the people in the house going about their business, then back to the killer sneaking up on the house, and so on. There's even a little moment stolen from The Shining, which is THE MOMENT in that movie. Our heroine is hiding in a food pantry when Mrs. Voorhees cracks open the door and peers through the hole at the scared victim, though not with the same gusto as Jack Nicholson of course.
But, I will give them credit for a few things. Having a woman, an older woman at that, being this gruesome murderer I'm sure was a surprise to most people. It's especially fun watching the movie a couple more times just to imagine Mrs. Voorhees doing all the terrible things, such as jamming an arrow through Kevin Bacon's hilariously off-colored prosthetic neck. Another thing, this movie doesn't really skimp on the blood. If Black Christmas and Halloween were the pioneers of the slasher film, then this is the one that took it a step further. Throats are slit left and right, arrows are jabbed into people's faces, axes are swingin'. Good stuff all around.
Here's where it is unforgivably bad: the dialogue and story. This must have been one of the first horror movies that didn't care if we liked the characters or not, they were going to kill them. And honestly, you don't care about a single character in here. The dialogue is lame and there just isn't any story to latch onto. This film introduced us to the "stupid kids who do all the wrong things" cliche. It has them all: "Is anybody there........hello??" "If this is a joke, cut it out.....This isn't funny you guys!" "Well, that's weird...the power just went out". And this one, the mother of all stupidity: two characters are looking for their friend in her room and find only a bloody ax in her bed, which leads to the exclamation "What is going on here?" followed by the two of them going back to their cabin to hang out. No idea that a bloody ax in your friend's bed could be a sign of a larger issue. You just have to laugh.
I'm not going to delve into franchise sequels in this thing, there's just too many other movies to watch. But, with the face of the franchise shifting to Mrs. Voorhees' son, Jason, the gore, bad dialogue, stupid kids, and lackluster sorytelling would become staples of the Friday the 13th series.
Next: a possible A Nightmare on Elm Street double-feature
No comments:
Post a Comment