In recognition of this IRL Friday the 13th falling during Spooky Season, tonight I watched Friday the 13th (1980).

I’ve seen this one a couple of times, but always in the context of a Halloween party or something, so this is the first time I actually learned the characters’ names, which was nice. This was the first movie to try and replicate the success of Halloween, and it really kicked off the 80s Slasher boom. There are recognizable elements from prior horror classics as well, Psycho most notably, that make it clear there is more going on under the hood of this film than its reputation might suggest. That said, the plot is paper-thin, only about half the characters have even a single actual personality trait, and there is a recurring theme of casual racism towards native Americans, so it’s not exactly a masterpiece either.

The movie begins on Friday the 13th, 1958, with a bunch of camp counselors hanging out singing christian folk songs to each-other, as teenagers are wont to do any time they are left unsupervised. A pair of somewhat less godbothering members of the group slip off to make whoopie in one of the cabins, only to be brutally slain in a sequence shot from the killer’s perspective, concealing their identity. Until the climax of the film all of the kills will be shot this way, or otherwise obscured in such a way as to preserve the ‘twist’ of the killer’s identity.

Annie (Robbi Morgan), Alice (Adrienne King), Bill (Harry Crosby), Ned (Mark Nelson), Jack (Kevin Bacon, in one of his very first appearances), Brenda (Laurie Bertram), and Marcie (Jeannine Taylor) arrive at the camp years later (in “Present Day” which becomes increasingly hilarious the farther we get from whatever ‘present’ is depicted in a film) as it is being renovated and reopened by Steve, a man who is 30% porn-stache and 60% jorts. The counselors-to-be are warned off by local doom-sayer, Ralph, whose depiction of a Cassandra-like prophetic weirdo inspired a whole horror genre stock character that still gets some mileage these days.

The gore in this movie is fairly inventive, if clearly low-budget. Tom Savini worked on a lot of the effects, and his fingerprints are most obvious in the excellent scene where Kevin Bacon has an arrow shoved through his throat from underneath his bed. Once the identity of the killer is revealed some of the kills feel a little implausibe in hindsight (such as Bill being lifted fully off of the ground and impaled with multiple arrows) but it’s not hard to justify including fun practical effects in every kill when you’re making a Slahser film, no matter how much or little sense it makes.

I like this movie. This and the first sequel codified about a billion 80s horror movie tropes, so they can feel a little over-played when watching them today, but that’s more Seinfeld Effect than a real criticism of the films. My biggest actual gripe with this movie is that the ending is absolutely terrible. There are two places where the film could have cut to credits and been fantastic. When Alice is discovered adrift on the canoe by the police, the morning of the 14th, the film could have ended and been a solid, if not very meaty, horror narrative. The second option would have been to keep the next few seconds and end on Jason pulling Alice into the lake, which mkaes zero sense but is a fantastic shocker ending. Instead, the film does both and then takes us to a hospital scene where it is immediately revealed that Alice is just fine, and maybe she just dreamed Jason, or maybe not, but either way she’s going to be okay. I hate cop-out endings in horror films. You’ve already brutally murdered 80% of the cast, you don’t need to give us a happily-ever-after (even if Alice is concerned that Jason may still be alive).

I’m going to give this one a 3.5/5. I considered bumping it up to 4/5 considering the legacy this film has, but I try to only give stars based on an individual film’s merits, and this one is just okay. It is occasionally quite good, and then for long stretches it’s kind of boring. The reveal that the killer is a little old lady who may or may not share her head with her dead son is genuinely great and surprising, and it would have been completely sufficiently scary without throwing all the logic out the window at the very end, but even that doesn’t completely spoil what is an extremely ‘okay’ film in my final evaluation.