Jason Voorhees has long been a favorite movie arc of mine, some good, some bad, well a lot bad, but it is a very traditional horror story franchise, that I hope will be reborn again following the 2009 release.
Let's start out with Friday the 13th review. Well, actually I don't think review is a good word for what I'm going to do. Perhaps, collective musings is a better term.
An interesting story for its time, 1980. A little boy drowns in Crystal Lake and the mother seeks revenge on camp counselors, the ones she ultimately blames for the accidental drowning of her son. There are some questions I have, like first they show Jason drowning at night in her memory. It makes me wonder first, why he was swimming at night and why the mother herself wasn't there watching him. I think there may be some internal guilt she has, then she uses the camp counselors as the focus of her blame. Regardless, Jason drowns, or that's the plot line anyway.
Friday the 13th has your very typical characters. You have the virginal appearing, modest, do-gooder Alice. You have the couple who is destined to have sex, Jack (played by Kevin Bacon) and Marcie. You have the very happy, sweet, and unfortunate first to die before she even makes it to camp, Annie. You have the goof who is always playing pranks Ned, the camp headmaster, sort of, Steve, the really nice character that you don't want to see get killed, Brenda. The rest are just fillers really, the crazy old drunk man, the guy you don't really care what happens to (Bill) and of course Jason's mom, Pamela Voorhees.
Annie is one of the camp counselors who is hitchhiking her way to Camp Crystal Lake. She gets dropped off in front of a cemetery and frankly, this probably was a bad foreboding for her. She later gets picked up by a stranger, and when the stranger won't let her out of the Jeep as they pass by the exit, she jumps from the car (good move, I would do it too), but does eventually get hunted down and killed.
Does anyone else get the feeling that Steve, in his cut off denim shorts and red bandana tied around his neck, the way he leers at Alice, that he's a sex offender in the making?
There's always a prankster in the group who dies, that would be you Ned who pretends to drown. This is not the first time you will see a "pretend drowning" in the Friday the 13th franchise. The prankster always dies, always.
We learned how many camp counselors does it take to kill a snake, which is six.
We learn, always, always believe the crazy old drunk man who screams "you're all doomed." This is also not the first time you will see this sort of character in the Friday the 13th realm. Get used to it.
We see the merits of playing strip Monopoly and have added this to our bucket list.
Alice was destined from the beginning to be the victor of this movie and she chops of the head of the serial killer, none other than Jason's mom (a huge surprise for the 1980 flick)and before the movie ends, and you see this nice serene lake scene with Alice in a boat before little Jason pulls her out and tries to drown her, then fast forward to where she's in a hospital bed, the sole survivor and she's told, "we didn't see any little boy," and she looks off in the distance and mutters "then he's still out there." Cue Friday the 13th theme song.
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