Friday the 13th (1980) Movie Review
After 30 Years, the Original "Slasher Film" Still a Fan Favorite.
Aug 6, 2009
The "Slasher Film" is Born
Desperate for a hit movie to keep his lights on, director Sean S. Cunningham had an idea to combine the suspense elements in Halloween with the grisly special effects in Dawn of the Dead. Briefly considered as Long Night at Camp Blood, it quickly became Friday the 13th to exploit the holiday angle of Halloween. Cunningham’s investment of $700,000 - raised by placing ads in Variety to enlist backers, not to mention to see if somebody would sue if they already owned the title - not only produced a bona fide box office hit but also a phenomenon. This movie spawned ten sequels, numerous imitations, a video game, a remake in 2009, an in-name only television series, comic books, novels, merchandise, documentary books, a definitive web site titled Campblood.net, and His Name Was Jason, a feature-length documentary DVD released in 2009. It also introduced what became known as the "slasher film", which usually encompassed a whodunit with several violent and creative murders, and further launched the career of makeup legend Tom Savini, who impressed Cunningham with his makeup effects in Dawn of the Dead. Never popular with mainstream critics, the Friday the 13th phenomenon endures and cast and crew members are wildly popular at horror film conventions today.
Welcome to Camp Crystal Lake
Two decades after a boy drowning, an unsolved double homicide, mysterious fires and supposedly poisoned lake water, Camp Crystal Lake is being prepared to re-open after years of being shuttered with bad feelings. Steve Christy (Peter Brouwer), son of the original owners, is viewed with a jaundiced eye in Crystal Lake for re-opening the infamous “Camp Blood”, and among those is “Crazy Ralph” (Walt Gorney), the local prophet of doom who warns the townspeople about the camp’s “death curse”. But that is all a distant memory to Christy and new hires Alice (Adrienne King), Bill (Harry Crosby), Brenda (Laurie Bartram), Annie (Robbi Morgan), Jack (Kevin Bacon), Marcie (Jeannine Taylor), and Ned (Mark Nelson), who arrive and start readying the property on Friday, June 13th, 1979, not noticing their being observed and stalked by an unseen presence.
Long Night at Camp Blood
Aside from an encounter from "Crazy Ralph", where he visits the camp and tries to warn the counselors of impending doom, the group enjoys a day of work and play. But as a thunderstorm closes in, so does the vindictive killer, isolating and murdering the counselors one by one. After a terrified Alice realizes that she is the last one standing, Camp Crystal Lake gets a surprise visitor: one Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer), a Christy family friend and former employee who tries to reassure and comfort a grateful Alice. After viewing the carnage, Pamela laments that Steve should never have tried to open “this place” again, after all the trouble of long ago. Trouble that started with the 1957 drowning of ten-year-old Jason Voorhees (Ari Lehman), who is revealed to be Pamela’s son. When Pamela explains how inattentive counselors were responsible, and how she felt she couldn’t ever let the camp ever be re-opened, Alice begins to realize that Pamela Voorhees isn’t the savior she thought she was…
The movie was filmed at Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco in Blairstown, New Jersey, in the early fall of 1979. Still a fully functional summer camp today, it has been serving the scouting communities since 1927. In the intervening years it has become very modernized with a large parking lot, additional cabins, health rooms, and chapels. The property is privately owned by the NNJC Boy Scouts of America, is not available to the public for visits or tours, and fans and the curious are turned away. The Blairstown Diner, however, located at 186 State Route 94 in Blairstown where Steve Christy had his last cup of coffee, is very welcoming and accommodating to fans, who fill the place to capacity every Friday the 13th. On Friday, July 13, 2007, Roy’s Hall in Blairstown (which appears early in the film) had sold-out screenings of the film at 6:30 and 8:30 pm, later adding an 11:00 pm screening to accommodate the crowd milling outside, an event that was covered by WPIX-TV in New York City.
Friday the 13th a Lucky Day for Paramount Pictures
Major studios that passed on Halloween two years earlier now had a bidding war over Friday the 13th, with Paramount Pictures landing the distribution rights for $1.5 million. Released on May 9, 1980 to low-key screenings, and then officially on Friday, June 13, the movie earned $5,816,321 it’s opening weekend, finally tallying at the end of the summer with a total of $39.7 million, long after Paramount stopped advertising the movie. Further advertising wasn’t necessary; the movie’s body count and graphic violence caused considerable controversy, ranging from how the MPAA allowed the movie an “R” rating (they did some slight cutting of death scenes, but overseas the movie remained intact, where it was distributed by Warner Brothers) to an outraged Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert of Sneak Previews publicly lambasting the movie, giving away the ending to try to deter audiences from seeing it, and urging them to write to actress Betsy Palmer and Paramount Pictures to condemn their involvement in it. (Naturally, these tactics boomeranged, and the resulting publicity drove more people into the theatres, making this the second highest grossing movie of 1980, just after The Empire Strikes Back). Variety and Leonard Maltin also panned the movie, though Maltin conceded that Palmer gave a “bravura” performance. The review in the Chicago Reader gave a small show of support; albeit a weak one, Dave Kehr admitted that the movie did deliver the goods that it was supposed to. Three decades later, most fans agree.
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