Jason I

This is the first in my series of reviews on the Friday the 13th movies. Since this is the first movie in the series and is considered a classic, I'll keep the movie review brief. But first, my rating system.

The primary objective will be to rank each movie in the series to each other, grouping movies of similar quality. For example, I would rank the Nightmare on Elm Street movies as such: Watchable (3, 1, 7), Awful (2, 4, 5), Completely Unwatchable Piece of Crap (6). None of them where good but 3, 1, and 7 were in a different league than the rest (with 3 the best) and 6 is one of the worst movies ever. There are no redeeming qualities with 6 - in fact, the whole series is rather putrid and ranks as maybe the most overrated movie series of all-time. It should never be mentioned in the same breath as Halloween or even Friday the 13th to a lesser degree.

Onto Friday the 13th. The basic plot is simple - teens go to Camp Crystal Lake to open up a summer camp after years of being shut down due to an unfortunate accident that ended with a kid drowning. The teens get there early and there is drinking and drugs and sex. Along the way, the teens start getting murdered until there's only a girl left. As she's freaking out, a car pulls up with the movie of the drowned kid from years ago. They converse until the mother starts freaking out and starts attacking the girl. Their fight winds up on the lake, where the girl ends up decapitating the mother. There is then a weird ending where she's in a boat on the lake in the morning when a mutated kid leaps out of the water and pulls her in.

I have to admit this is a very satisfying movie. It's very uncomplicated yet suspenseful enough to keep your attention. The deaths happen fast, as the point of a horror movie should be the suspense over the gore. This movie will be rated Horrorific - not in the same class as Halloween (Classic), but definitely in the upper echelon of horror movies.

Now, an aside. Let's take the ending of the movie from the perspective of the police who arrive on the scene. They find a murder scene with mutilated bodies everywhere and presumably a headless woman on the beach. They also find one survivor, who happened to fall in the lake. And they treat her like a survivor!!! Again, she is the only living person at a murder scene with absolutely gruesome murders and they don't suspect her for a minute. And this is before DNA testing was prevalent, though that wouldn't hide the fact her fingerprints are all over the machete that decapitated Mrs Voorhees. This is unrealistic, even for a horror movie. More on this when I get to my review of Friday the 13th Part II.
Friday the 13th links:
* Technorati * Wikipedia * Jason