Friday the 13th - Part 1

Friday the 13th is an unimpressive production that nevertheless gets the job done. No one would ever mistake it for high art, yet considering its quite-modest aspirations, it fulfills its obligations more often than not. The name of the game here is scares and gore -- not intelligent plotting and complex characters -- and even when the director, Sean S. Cunningham, has trouble getting in and out of scenes in the latter half and bungles some of the suspense by belaboring the obvious, things play out more smoothly than you have any right to expect from a film that throws subtlety out the window so blatantly as to have a hitchhiking soon-to-be-victim dropped off right outside the gates of a cemetery. Engineered to scare you witless, Friday the 13th (a descendant of Mario Bava's well-regarded Bay of Blood, which I found atrociously made and unwatchable) fails at being the scare-you-witless classic its filmmakers were shooting for; they knew they weren't shooting for the stars, certainly, but neither were they likely intending an overall whole as uneven and clunky as this. Basically, when contextual value and narrative coherence are sacrificed for the good of undemanding entertainment, incorporating an array of ho-hum characters and stilted dialogue around the scares to support them gives them an existing basis but not too much organic clarity -- everything preceding and following them comes off as mere filler material, so the film doesn't really seem grounded in anything. Oh, this isn't such a terrible thing if one is merely expecting blood and T&A, but unless the director is particularly gifted -- which Cunningham is not -- you're stuck with having to toil through a fair amount of undistinguished scenes which should rightfully climax much sooner than they do -- which is, again, a clear-cut case of running-time padding. As a result, Friday the 13th is harmless-enough viewing, but it's not a moment-by-moment unnerving pleasure like, say, A Nightmare on Elm Street and most of the original Halloween. It asks the audience's willingness, their tolerance to help bridge the gap between the creepy-crawly goods and the hopelessly mundane.

The film starts off with a prologue in the year 1958 at a New Jersey-located summer camp called Camp Crystal Lake. The camera starts off with a low shot of the moon at night with clouds passing by and then lowers down to a sight of a moonlit lake below. Subtle. We're then introduced to a group of teenage camp counselors singing along to a corny tune, with two of them sneaking off to a room for a little hanky-panky. Their pre-coital acts are soon interrupted by a person whom we never see (the audience views the startled counselors from the unseen person's point-of-view), who quickly and efficiently slaughters the two with a knife. After the black-screen credits, which Harry Manfredini's uncouth Psycho-like score punctuates like a sledgehammer, we're then transported to present-day 1980, where Camp Crystal Lake, after having been closed down for the last twenty-two years, is set to re-open in two weeks. The new proprietor, Steve Christie (Peter Brouwer), has been prepping the place with the help of counselors Bill (Harry Crosby II), Brenda (Laurie Bartram) and Alice (Adrienne King), whom Christie has been having a strained romance with as of late. The hitchhiking Annie (Robbi Morgan), set to be the camp's cook, is on her way and is warned by the nearest town's "prophet of doom", Ralph (Walt Gorney), that Camp Crystal Lake has a death curse. Rounding out the camp counselors (and most of the entire cast, as well) is Ned (Mark Nelson), and his two friends, Jack (Kevin Bacon) and Marcie (Jeannine Taylor), who are boyfriend/girlfriend. While having been written as fairly limited, these characters are believable, and the fresh-face cast performs with an ingratiating ease that draws us to them -- they're vivid, if not exactly Shakespearean in dimension, which, of course, they're not meant to be. They're simply who we're intended to identify with, so when later episodes require us to be horrified at the horrific goings-on they find themselves in the midst of, we're familiar enough with them to share their apprehension, uncertainty, and fear. (They're not the obnoxious types plaguing the teenager-populated horror films of today -- you don't find yourself cheering for the murderer to put them out of your collective misery.)

For a while, Cunningham shows unexpected patience in laying out the characters and having them go about their chores, with no fussy lighting or erratic editing clobbering us over the head with cinematic artifice. The counselors serve as our ears and eyes, and it's nice to see that a director likes his characters enough to give them their onscreen due and his actors enough to allow them plenty of aesthetic distance to wrangle up some unassuming charm of their own. The characterizations are slight but lived-in; they're not complex, but given the context of things, should they have been? (Aside from Crosby II, who's smug and unresponsive, the cast is quite good, with Bartram and Taylor -- who's very sexy -- the standouts.) What's being presented is done so in a calm and collective nature that winds up meshing nicely with the death of Annie (who's slashed to death before reaching the camp) and a brief sighting by Brenda of a possible figure lurking in the woods while they're swimming and sunbathing; we know the rest of the characters will be subjected to merciless havoc being wreaked upon them somewhere down the line, and until that happens the goings-on between the murders are served up with discretion. This benefits the film because we're caught off-guard more often than not when a murder occurs (like when Jack, after having indulged in a round of sex and currently toking on a post-coital joint, has an arrow thrust through his neck from underneath the bunk bed he's lying on), or we're already made aware of a character's certain doom yet are still brought up short when the actual violent deed takes place (like when Marcie, herself post-coital and wearing only a skimpy t-shirt and panties, is axed through the forehead in a shower room). Unfortunately, after the death of Marcie (which is undoubtedly the highlight -- Tom Savani's f/x work is fantastic considering the low-budget restraints), the filmmakers have painted themselves into a corner by leaving only three camp counselors alive with a good forty minutes left to go in the running time, and this is where director Cunningham's just-average ability deals the film a considerable disadvantage.

Cunningham simply isn't good at sustaining suspense outside of a single internal setting, and he starts relying on overobvious ploys, like false scares, to carry the day. And instead of fastening upon the limited spatial logistics of the camp as an opportunity to point up the sense of isolation, Cunningham just goes from one set to the next without much preciseness, nor even much of a sense of time continuity (when Jack and Marcie kiss and embrace before going into the cabin directly behind them to have sex, it's dawn; yet when they enter it less than a minute later, it's already pitch-black night). Furthermore, he carelessly cuts from the goings-on at the camp to a roadside diner where Steve is making small talk and some unbelievable goo-goo eyes at a waitress so repulsive-looking you'd think he's going to be more of a threat to the counselors later on than the culprit currently knocking them off. Cunningham could argue that once the heroine is in direct mortal danger, the camera stays with her through the duration; but the audience is considerably jarred at being transported to another locale, where there's no danger, from the central one, where the danger has not only been established but the violence resulting from it is currently underway. Sustained suspense is severely dissipated as a result. There's just too much flab in between the murders themselves, which would be somewhat commendable were the moments leading up to them chock-full of nerve-jangling tension; after Marcie's death, they're not, and you could time about five eggs before Brenda meets her untimely demise outside in a rainstorm, where's she gone out to investigate what seem to be cries from a distressed little boy. Things pick up for the better when the identity of the murderer is revealed -- the thespian's manic energy charges things up considerably -- but even then Cunnigham goes the all-thumbs approach by letting the grand confrontation go on far too long (though the head dismemberment ensuing from it is a kicker). Friday the 13th is somewhat of a slasher-film doodle in that the suspense in its latter half (which should be the most effective) is substandard compared to the implied suspense in the former half.

Still, even with all of its flaws, Friday the 13th is still worth a visit. For gore fans, certain isolated bits will satisfy, yet the film isn't nearly as violent as its been reputed to be; the high quality of the gore on display is much more satisfying than if a high quantity of lower-grade gore had been substituted. The efficient camerawork also suffices: for the most part, Cunnighman knows what to look at and how to look at it. He doesn't have much of a visual sense (zoom-ins seem to be his idea of pizzazz), but the plain-Jane look that he and cinematographer Barry Abrams have devised comes off like good wallpaper -- it never draws undue attention unto itself (though it does capture a fairly dandy image: a long shot of Steve, clad in a bright yellow rain slicker, walking hurriedly toward the camera from out of total darkness). It's fun watching these carefree teens lull about, totally oblivious to the validity of the dire warnings of Crazy Ralph; we know perfectly well that their adhering to the standard behavior of victims in horror films -- that of wandering off alone, smoking pot, having premarital sex, and even indulging in a game of Strip Monopoly -- is earmarking them for certain doom. And if Cunningham can't shoot a fight scene to save his life, he can admittedly shoot a sex scene -- the one involving Bacon and Taylor in that bunk bed is erotic stuff (though the T&A factor there is of a lackluster variety: Bacon's butt; Taylor's butt crack, right breast, and a glimpse of pubic hair, with Taylor's previous nipple-pokie action in a skimpy light-maroon t-shirt somewhat compensating). And, of course, there's the fun in seeing a slasher film toe the line in horror-film fashion by having the most sexually promiscuous die in the most gruesome fashion, and having the hero(ine) the one who keeps their duds on (with the one here just about to undo a button before a wind gust blows a door open). Add to this some perfectly eye-rolling dialogue ("If this is a joke, I'm gonna brain 'em."), some howling little flaws (Annie griping about people calling children "kids", when she called them just that a few scenes back), and some noisy lovemaking accompanied by ear-splitting thunder (with a dead body in the overhead bunk, no less!), and you have yourself a watchable slasher classic that's by no means a classic piece of work.