Friday the 13th -- 1980 -- R

As a movie lover, watching this film was simply a requirement. It spawned the second longest running movie series of all time with ten sequels (so far; the first being James Bond with twenty sequels), gave us a horror icon with Jason Voorhees (though he ironically does not appear in the first film), and still makes us scratch our heads in trying to figure out how it did so well.

The premise is simple and ancient. Get a bunch of kids to an isolated location and kill them off one by one. The killer remained a complete mystery until revealed, and ended up with a perfectly plausible reason for killing everyone and an equally creepy trait in doing it.

To back up a little bit, we have a Camp Crystal Lake that was closed out in 1958 because two counselors were killed. The year before that, a boy drowned in the lake itself. The camp had been wrought with problems and delays for years anytime it tried to open, and now we're trying again. While we're given a series of red herrings to follow in regards to the whodunit, none of them make a lot of sense and it looks like the film is in continuity error hell until the big reveal which sets it all straight.

So once everyone is in place, people start dropping like flies. The director knows suspense, though, which is rarer and rarer in a film like this. We know the killer is out there, but we watch as the characters cluelessly carry on with their completely logical routines. They don't know there's a problem; only we do, which adds to the suspense of each death. This is consistently done well throughout, and the characters don't make any choices that are illogical, which is another plus. After all, they are counselors who need to know the camp inside and out. If they see something, it stands to reason that they'd check it out. They are also a bunch of late teens who like having fun, so the presumption that someone is playing with one of them is also not illogical. After all, they don't know anything is wrong.

We can fault the film in the character area, but for what it is, it does fairly well. Most of the characters are just cardboard cut outs, and there's not much to relate to in them. This makes their deaths kind of anticlimactic, since only the suspense gives the deaths any meaning or feeling. We do get some snippets of the characters' lives, but just not enough. However, since we're also dealing with a large number of characters whose fate it is to die, it's hard to go very deep in a ninety minute film.

The final issue here when it comes to the fear factor is that the film has no real staying power. Halloween takes place in a neighborhood. I live in a neighborhood. A Nightmare on Elm Street happens in dreams. I have dreams. Friday the 13th happens at a camp. I never go to a camp. If I ever do, I will probably be creeped out, but as I sit here, the party is over. I'm not invading the camp, so the killer isn't out to get me.

Oh yes, and the score does seem to pay a tad bit of homage to Bernard Herrmann's main titles to Psycho. That's the main titles, not the famous "violin screech" accompanying Marion Crane's demise in the shower.

I rank this film as being very good for its genre, and delivering a solid amount of suspense. It doesn't really deliver in the scare department because I never really felt any fear during the movie, but I was locked in on the suspense, because it did that very well. If you like movies, you gotta view it. As for the sequels...well, they're on my list, so I'll let you know.