Friday the 13th
originally posted 7/9/02
I spent this fourth of July on a mission. While other people were eating hot dogs, drinking beer, soaking in their pools, marveling at the fireworks, I was locked in my room, two fans blowing wildly, neck bent over from a sprain the previous evening, facing my personal demons. Demon, rather.
Because I was a highly imaginative child, I spent much of my youth (especially the nighttime portions) terrified. I remember hours upon hours laying in bed, eyes closed tight, telling myself that the creaking sound was just the house settling- that the squeak was merely an old spring- that the pulsing of air on my cheek wass only a light breeze sliding in through the open window- never believing any of it for second. It took me years to get to a point where I could feel safe when all the lights were out, and even today, I’ll have moments of waking at one am, near screaming because I am absolutely positively no-nonsense friggin convinced that there’s something coming out of the closet.
So: plus side, I am smart and clever and can write all sorts of nifty things when the muse strikes me. Down side, I tend to jump at loud noises and don’t like hanging my feet over the edge of the bed in case something down below gets hungry.
While my brain was, on many occasion, more than willing to make up vague and malefic monstrosities on its own, it often latched on to the things I saw on television and heard about from friends to drive me in to hysterics.
I didn’t see very many horror movies until I hit my teens, and much of the nightmare fuel I got from them was consumed through glimpses of trailers during re-runs of “Night Court.” The Nightmare on Elm Street series was rough on me, but almost as bad was that bastard in a hockey mask. I remember seeing him break into someone’s shower once, and for months after, I was unable to shower without one of my parents standing in the bathroom, keeping me company.
As I get older, I’ve made it a point to revisit the things that scared me as a kid, out of curiosity and perhaps some misplaced yearning for the hysteria of my youth. It was not without some trepidation that I rented the original Friday the 13th; it’s the last of the big ones that freaked me out, and even though I’ve read about a bazillion reviews of it (a bazillion and one, now), I was still nervous that it would somehow be too much for me. The some pre-pubescent neural synapse, left dormant in the dusty corridors I call a brain, would hook on and drive me insane.
Um, I was wrong. I don’t care what anybody says. I don’t care how much some people love it. This movie kinda sorta sucks.
Starring a bunch of nobodies who never did much in the movies, Kevin Bacon, and Betsy Palmer
Directed by Sean Cunningham
This plot is so simple Akiva Goldsmith couldn’t water it down.
Way back in 1958, a bunch of camp counselors were sitting around singing mediocre songs, while a merciless POV shot wanders through the bunks. The girl on guitar and a blonde fella across from her start making googly eyes at each other, until their hormones get the better of them and they break off from the rest of the group, the girl leaving her guitar with someone else so, presumably, we can have some ironic “pleasant music playing while people are dying unpleasant deaths” down the road. (Tragically, this was not the case.)
The two sneak into an empty cabin and climb up to the attic for some lovin’. They giggle and kiss a bunch. The POV of Death (get used to it, folks, you’ll be seeing quite a lot of it) comes up after them, and when the counselors finally notice they are no longer alone, they separate, putting back on their respective clothing. The boy is brutally stabbed, and the girl is stalked by the POV into a corner, where the camera freezes on her screaming face.
Credits role as Harry Manfredini’s shameless rip-off of the Psycho score plays. (I think only the score for Re-Animator- which I love- is more obvious in it’s origins.)
All right, I’m not going on with this. Much as I like structure, there’s no need to summarize this movie. It’s all routine: people walk around, mouth bad dialogue, occasionally have sex, and die in cool looking ways. There is no plot. Oh sure, they script pretends at one, it teases us with bits from time to time: the lust of the Odious Comic Relief, Alice’s business in, what, Minnesota?, Steve Christy’s moustache. And the killer’s motivation isn’t completely ridiculous. But viewed as whole, the “plot” is nothing more than a series of violent deaths, bracketed by the anticipation of said deaths. It’s the cinematic equivalent of the Hook story, or the one about the frat boys who tried to fake somebody’s death. It’s only purpose is to make you jump, scream, and squirm.
I ask myself, with so simple a purpose, don’t I have to admit that the movie succeeds on a visceral level alone? You don’t fault a Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark book because it’s characters lack the complexity of Lepold Bloom.
All right, yeah, there are a few creepy moments in this movie. My favorite is the exit of Ned, Mr. Odious Comic Relief: the sun’s going down, and he thinks he sees someone in a cabin, and he calls out and no one answers, and so, cause he’s in a horror movie, he goes into the cabin and keeps calling out and then he stops. There’s no final scream, no shot of the axe coming down. Just- nothing. (Later, because god knows there can’t be ambiguity in a movie like this, we see Ned’s corpse. Just in case, y’know, we had any doubts about what happened to him.)
Also, the ending bit where Jason jumps out of the lake at the Final Girl is quite the kicker. I’ll admit to being a wuss and speeding through this part; I hate jump scares, and I knew this one was supposed to be rough. More fool me, it still made me twitch on fast forward. Not art, but it gets the job done.
Only, dammit, a few creepy moments and some well-done gore (Tom Savini rules! ) isn’t enough. It certainly doesn’t justify a nine-sequel franchise, even if much of the “mythology” from this movie is jettisoned by the twenty minute mark of part two. It’s junk like this that gives the horror genre its bad name. The fact that a little nothing toss-off could rise up to be one of the defining bench marks of the whole canon is not a good thing, no matter how much ’80s nostalgia freaks would have us believe. (Guess what guys- most Atari games were rot. And no one will ever, ever convince me that Def Leppard is any sort of decent.)
What are my problems here? You mean, aside from the awful acting, mediocre cinematography and blatant misogyny? (Do yourself a favor; go read Lyz’s review for a more even-handed, intelligent dissection of this crap than I’ll ever manage. I’ve already stolen enough from her.) The everlovin slower than molasses, languid as my mother after a three day binge pacing. This movie doesn’t unfold. It drips. It inches. It’s like watching porn download through the slowest modem in the world.
The thing about scary stories, specifically of the campfire variety, is that they are short. Two, three pages tops; speaking evenly, you could probably tell even the longest in under ten minutes. Which is why they work. Try stretching that into a feature length film and it simply doesn’t play. You need to develop the story, if you’re any good, or you need to pad it if you are not. Otherwise you’ll be selling a something that runs shorter than the trailers preceding it.
One develops a story by filling in and expanding things that were thrown to the side in the original, things like developed characters, a more complex story-line, a richer sense of life. One pads by putting in more dead bodies and having scene upon scene of empty “suspense.” By applying a few here and there, tension-building setpieces can be very effective; like Hitchcock said, when you know something is going to happen, and you’re waiting for it to happen, you are about as wired up as you can get. But do this too often without giving a pay-off, the tension will evaporate, and the resentment will rise to take its place.
Example: The Final Girl goes into the kitchen. She looks at the closed pantry door. She walks over to the stove. She puts on a kettle for tea. She goes back to the pantry, opens the door, walks inside, gets some tea. Goes to the stove. Looks thoughtfully off camera. I’m already yelling at this point- please god, gimme a POV shot, a dead body, a frickin’ cat jumping off a table, anything to relieve this, this nothing, this no-energy worthless vacuum of ineptitude. She turns, looks back at the pantry. Ah, I thought. Maybe there’s a body in there. Maybe a hand will reach out to her.
Cut to the next scene. Arrrrrrrggggh….
By then, I was no longer nervous. I was just annoyed.
Which is the way I ended the picture; annoyed, and maybe a little bit relieved that this particular demon hadn’t nearly lived up to expectations. Perhaps I’ll get around to watching the rest of the series some day. As bad as this movie is, it’s not the worst I’ve seen, and it would be interesting to go through the whole series and beat Jason to death with my inane quips.
Final thought: Betsy Palmer? Puh-lease. Clever, perhaps, in theory. On screen, completely inane. I mean, the woman is as scary as, well, Betsy-freakin-Palmer.