Many Days of Friday the 13th - Part 1

Friday the 13th (1980)

     Ah, Friday the 13th.  The slasher fan's bread and butter.  It's a series that's lasted 11 films and a remake.  It's gone through good films and bad ones.  It's gone from Paramount to New Line.  The film was originally made with one idea in mind.  Rip off Halloween.  That's all Sean Cunningham, the creator and director of the first installment wanted.  And to make it more extreme.  Up the blood, up the sex.  He wanted a good film for drive-ins, which are where most of his previous films did their business.  (That includes the one he produced back in the early 70s, Last House on the Left, which was directed by Wes Craven.)  By all accounts, he made one of the most successful horror franchises in movie history... well, not with critics, but financially anyway.  Made on a budget of around $550,000, the film ended up making $39,754,601.  That's right!  It made back it's budget over 70 times!

     The first film was made in the fall of 1979 on a very small budget at a Boy Scout camp in New Jersey called Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco.  (It's now a summer camp, oddly enough.)  It featured no-name actors, including a then unknown Kevin Bacon.  The story of the film is pretty typical slasher fare.  There's a legend that a boy drowned back in the 1950s at the old summer camp.  A few years later, two teen counselors were murdered.  The camp has been closed since then, the townspeople spooked.  The place obviously has a death curse on it.  Now someone is getting ready to re-open the camp, and counselors have arrived to make the place livable before the kids arrive.  To no-one's surprise but their own, it becomes a bloody nightmare with many deaths.

      I love the way this film was advertised.  It's so cheeky!  The whole trailer was just teasing you about how many deaths you'd see.  By 1980, so-called dead teenager films started to become a very lucrative way to make money.  They were done on the cheap, and they did well in theaters.  Sure, the critics and the moralists hated them, but money talks and bull%^@ walks.  People loved to go to the movies and get scared.  Whether this movie does that or not is an open debate.  I don't think it's scary in the least.  It doesn't even really have good jump scares.  However, it's pretty fun.  Modern audiences would no doubt find the movie very slowmoving and pretty darn tame.  Remember, this is one of the first slasher films.  The gore in this was considered very brutal at the time.  The rampant sex had yet to really enter the series.  (Kevin Bacon gets it on, though.) There's little nudity in this one.  It's pretty much some cliched teenagers doing teenager stuff while working to get a camp ready for the first hour of the picture.  There's some point of view shots from the killer, but the killer doesn't really DO anything until the last 30 minutes.  In a way, it's slower paced than Halloween!  

     Oddly enough, the picture above, while a publicity photo for the first film, was never filmed in this way.  You don't see the girl's death.  It wasn't even filmed.  This is simply a publicity photo.  However, the film has many great deaths in it.  I won't ruin them all for those that like to be surprised by such things, but I will name a few.  There's a hatchet to the head, a corkscrew through the throat, and a beheading!  And you see a real live snake being macheted in half, sadly.  (I'm not a fan of on-screen deaths of real animals.  It was allowable back in the 70s and very early 80s, and was exploited by many horror film directors.)

     While this film did popularize the slasher craze, it's not the greatest.  As I said earlier it's slow.  It's got major pacing problems, it's not titillating enough for today's fans of sex and gore, and most of all, it's quite amateur looking.  Not to blast Tom Savini's great gore effects, but they are dated.  It doesn't bother me, as I don't take this series seriously.  It's not bloody Halloween, it's not even Nightmare on Elm Street.  Others do, though, and they may be disappointed.  You must view the film through 1980 eyes, and too few are willing to do that.  It also doesn't have the same killer as the rest of the series, but I'm okay with that.  I find this one more creative...  And boy is the eventual killer campy as hell!  Get it?  Campy?

     I like this movie, but I don't love it.  It's not even amongst the best of the series.  It's pretty middle of the road as that goes.  However, it did start a trend.  A trend that only lasted a few years, but was very strong.  So strong that it's inventiveness effectively killed it.  By 1986, the MPAA decided it was time to get tough on these films.  They started to demand there be less gore and on-screen deaths to secure an R rating.  These films couldn't be wide-released under the X rating, so they had to comply.  This is what moral panics cause.  I'm glad today's MPAA lets just about anything in R rated films.  The Friday movies are tame by today's standards.  Even by the early 90s, I had elementary school friends that had seen the entire series.  I didn't start until I was 15, due to my parents' strict rules on R rated films.  (That being I couldn't watch them.)

Stay tuned in the next few days for more reviews and discussion on the rest of the series!