‘Friday the 13th’ as a franchise has, over the years, more than established itself as a cornerstone of the ‘Slasher’ genre. The series has been parodied, riffed, ripped off, copied and homaged more times than I could care to mention. And as any horror afficionado worth their salt knows, the opening entry in the series is quite different to anything that would follow on from it.

Its a bit of a guilty admission here, but while I love the rest of the series, the first ‘Friday’ movie just never quite sat right with me. It’s one I always really struggled to get into for a number of reasons. The chief issue among others being that its rewatch value after the first couple of viewings (unless you have a deep nostalgia for it) is through the floor.

While this film did help solidify the ‘Slasher’ genre’s rules and boundaries, the actual plot is a kind of ‘whodunnit’ but a really really slowburn and slightly dull one that…once you know who the killer is, it immediately creates issues.

So; the film follows a group of fresh faced camp councillors as an attempt is made to reopen ‘Camp Crystal Lake’ some 20ish years after a string of grizzly murders, only for someone to start cutting down the councillors one by one, leading to a grand reveal and final fight.

The problem is (and mild spoilers here) …The killer isnt actually shown at any point on screen until the final 10 minutes, most of their ‘kill’ scenes are shot POV style and the couple of times we do get to see them fleetingly, it’s clearly not them once you know who IS the killer.

It creates a situation where the only hint this film gives you as to who the killer is, is a passing line from one of the cast in the opening 10 minutes. a line that doesnt even DIRECTLY tell you who the killer might be. You have to take that line, and go two steps removed from it to figure it out.

And once you know who the killer is, and you go back and rewatch the film and realise that theres literally almost NO WAY you could have predicted that on the first viewing because the film purposfully tries to mislead you, it all becomes a bit stupid, dull and pointless to me.

Thats not to mention the fact that, for a good half of this movie…NOTHING happens. we literally just follow a group of teen and 20 something campers running around Crystal lake causing mischief. thats all. theres a couple of fake out moments for kills, and a couple of semi nude scenes that are crammed in pretty needlessly, but otherwise all this thing seems to have to trade on is a real attempt at atmosphere and Tom Savinis fantastic visual effects.

The script feels overly long, its plodding, takes ages to progress from scene to scene, tonally its kind of all over the place, uncertain as to whether it wants to be a comedy or a straight horror. the blatent attempts by the film makers to mislead us as to the killer makes it feel like i’m being cheated out of working the film out for myself and while this thing does have a cleanish 3 act structure. the total lack of anything really happening in this thing till the second half of the 2nd act, meant that…by the time the film actually DID get into gear plot wise, it’d already kind of lost me.

While I will say the last 15 minutes or so are easily the best part of this movie, and do hold not only some of the better written sections of the film but also, easily the most interesting visual elements of the film. It all seems to come too little, too late.

I cant fault the direction and cine. This is a studio picture, at its worst it was going to be ‘to standard’ and this does go further than that delivering a stylish and competent production that looks good and is very visually appealing.

I caught the ‘uncut’ version of this release, and I feel like while the cine is sharp, coherent, visually interesting and engaging, the sequencing and editing for this is a little too slack for my taste. I could have easly lost 20-30 minutes off this thing and only had nicer things to say about it…Did I need to see an extended sex scene? the strip monopoly scene? the sequence of the campers having a swim that went on for far too long? probably not. But they decided to keep it in anyway.

I will say the cast are all largely decent, they’re all playing things pretty naturalistically for teens being let loose at a summer camp, and I think they pull off what they’re trying to do quite nicely with a decent enough range. Though, it is a little dissapointing that, because they’re all trying to play it fairly naturally, theres no real ham or standout performance (other than Betsy Palmer, who absolutely steals the show as ‘Mrs. Vorhees’) It all just kind of feels a bit milquetoast honestly.

The scores nice though…especially the closing track…that thing hits hard.

I dunno…The first time I watched this, I was genuinely kind of impressed by the twists and turns, then I watched it back and realised the film purposfully misled its audience by making it impossible for the killer to be who they said it was…and then every viewing after thats just felt like diminishing returns to me. This time around I was interested in the opening 15 minutes, and the closing 15 minutes…everything between those points just felt like filler.

Had it not been for Tom Savinis effects, some decent direction and cine and a cast giving decent performances that just about met the mark, this thing would have been rated MUCH lower than i’ve rated it. As it stands, Its not one I’ll likely return to in a hurry, its just…SO drawn out and boring.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/friday-the-13th/