Friday the 13th (April 9/01)

The one that started it all...and it's not that great.

30 years ago, Jason drowned (or did he?) at Camp Crystal Lake, because the counselors were too busy making out when they should have been watching him. Cut to 1980 and the camp is about to re-open. Counselors are already there, making preparations for the imminent arrival of campers, when they start dying one-by-one. Could their murders have something to do with Jason's supposed drowning? Well, duh.

While Friday the 13th isn't really a terrible movie, it's just not particularly interesting. None of the counselors are really differentiated from one another (well, except for Kevin Bacon, but that's only because it was fun watching Kevin Bacon try to act in a movie like this) and the film eventually just becomes another Alien let's-watch-as-a-killer-stalks-the-last-survivor-around-a-dark-area clone.

The real reason for watching a movie like this is, let's face it, the gore. And yeah, it's pretty good here. I particularly liked one death which saw the victim's neck impaled with an arrow - and you see the arrow going through! That was pretty cool - as was the axe to the face death. But the rest of the movie is essentially filler - I mean, really, how many scenes of teens cavorting can we really take? - and the acting all around is pretty bad.

Cliches abound as well, particularly in the form of a nut job that warns the kids an evil is lurking (his name is Crazy Ralph, for pete's sake!). There's even one of those "hey, what are YOU doing here" scenes, just before the killer strikes. I don't want to spoil who the killer is, but suffice it to say that it's not Jason. When the killer is eventually unmasked,we get the obligatory explanation sequence, in which the killer explains their motives. And it actually makes sense. If I had been in the killer's shoes, I might have gone a little nuts.

There's not really much else to say about Friday the 13th. If you rent it, you pretty much will get what you're expecting, though for late '70s, early '80s revisionist horror, I wouldn't really recommend it. Halloween is far superior.