1980, 1980s, C+, Grade, Horror, mystery, Past, Review, review-movie, slasher, Thriller, Year

Film Review: Friday the 13th – 1980

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SPOILER DISCUSSION

Someone is watching Marcie (Jeannine Taylor ) and Jack (Kevin Bacon) holding hands.
The person turns out to be Ned (Mark Nelson)
Ned (Mark Nelson) goes into a cabin.
Marcie (Jeannine Taylor) tells Jack (Kevin Bacon) about her dreams regarding bloody rain.
Marcie (Jeannine Taylor ) and Jack (Kevin Bacon) begin to have sex.
Alice and company play strip Monopoly inside the cabin. The red curtains cast their color on the rain.
The camera reveals Ned’s (Mark Nelson) dead body above his friends.
Jack (Kevin Bacon) is sliced through the bed.
Marcie (Jeannine Taylor) takes an axe to the head.
Marcie, Jack, and Ned’s death sequence is my favorite in the movie. It starts with the POV camera shot which is meant to trick the viewer into thinking the killer has honed in on the couple, but the camera pulls back to reveal that this is Ned’s perspective. He’s heartbroken over the couples affection so he goes to a cabin in the back. It’s at this point where Marcie sets the motif of the red rains, prompting the appearance of a storm which doesn’t dissipate till the story’s end. As Marcie and Ned seek refuge in a cabin and begin to make love, Alice and company play strip Monopoly back in the main cabin – the groups tied through the removal of clothes. The red curtains from the main cabin colors the rain red before the camera reveals Ned’s dead body above Marcie and Jack’s bed. After Marcie leaves, the red rain makes another appearance in the form of Ned’s blood dripping onto Jack. Before he can act on the sign, he’s pulled down and impaled in the throat by Pamela, who goes on to axe Marcie soon faster.

1.My favorite set of events has to be Ned(Mark Nelson), Marcie(Jeannine Taylor ), and Jack’s(Kevin Bacon) death collective death scene. It opens on a POV shot of both Marcie and Ned walking, which makes us think the killer is watching and getting ready to kill the two. However, as the camera comes back, it turns out that instead, we’ve been watching Ned’s point-of-view the whole time. He’s clearly upset by the couple and walks off to the cabin nearby after sensing a presence there.

Then the film cuts back to Marcie and Jack talking. Marcie brings up Ned but Jack ignores her concerns. She talks about her dream about it raining blood in the movie’s most poetic scene, one I wish was more thoroughly expanded and referenced, before going off with Jack to the same cabin Ned had wandered off to. As the two take off their clothes, the story cuts back to Alice (Adrienne King) and co. who also take off their clothes, albeit in a less intimate fashion, signifying how the two group’s ultimate fates are connected. The red color of the window curtains illuminate the rain as it falls – red rain might as well be bloody. It’s at this point that Marcie and Jack finally have sex and the camera reveals Ned’s body above them. It turns out that the POV shot earlier wasn’t just of Ned watching Marcie and Jack; it was also of Pamela watching the three of them together. Quite a fantastic pivot.

After Marcie leaves the room, Ned’s blood falls down onto Jack’s face like drops of water and Pamela stabs Jack through his throat in graphic fashion. It’s both an uncomfortable scene to watch and an even more heinous scene to imagine. While the couple made love, the murderous mother laid underneath and witnessed the whole event while their friend laid above them, deceased. It’s truly a nightmare scenario. Cue a bit of stalking and misdirection and Marcie is butchered via an axe to the face. Her nightmare has now fully come true. The film cuts back to Alice’s cabin where Marcie’s storm of bloody rain blows the door open, scatters the group, and marks the end of all camp time merriment. Slaughter time is here.

2. As much as love the above scene, it also demonstrates one of Friday’s key issues: it’s inability to build up its characters. While the movie takes the time to demonstrate that Ned is upset about the couple and has him leave in response to their affectations, it doesn’t build upon that idea in significant fashion. With a bit more work, the movie could have built on how his humor was a defense mechanism to help him be more intimate, with Marcie in particular, and thus give his decision to vacate the scene upon seeing her with someone else additional emotional heft.

Imagine if the story spent a bit more time on the dynamic between the three, demonstrated a friendship between them, and then proceeded with the scene. Not only would Ned walking away from heartbreak into death be more tragic, the film could then even play up the tragedy by having Jack discover his friend, the one he brushed off earlier, before then being killed himself. Instead, the movie treats each death as a simple set-up for the next one and moves the plot along mechanically from kill to kill .

3.In a similar vein, Annie(Robbi Morgan) literally tells Pamela that she loves children and wants to take care of them. Instead of having her get offed immediately, the film could have had Annie play both her character and Brenda’s(Laurie Bartram) character. The latter is baited out by Pamela with the guise of a child’s voice. If Brenda was replaced with Annie, Annie’s decision to go out to save the child would be established by her previous conversation. Then when Pamela kills her it could be played off as a response to Annie “taking too long” to save the child/Jason. It would give Pamela’s delusion of the counselors intentionally ignoring her child more credence and her ending monologue more of a sick twist.

4.Part of me wishes that Miller and Cunningham leaned harder into building up the mythos of Camp Crystal lake. Having the townspeople mention some supernatural occurences on top of the incidents of murder would help increase the ambiance of the setting. This would also give the movie a chance to tie both Marcie’s dreams and Alice’s drawings to the unsettling feeling of the place. If the former mentioned the ambiance of the place making her think of her dreams and Alice drew something a bit darker and connected it to the locale, it would help push forward some of the motifs the movie already tries to establish via the moon and the discussion of how a full moon gets people more excitable.

Furthermore, the spectral angle would help add to the mystery of the killer. Instead of being a person, it could be a spirit instead which would add to the sense of tension. It would also help serve as an explanation for why Pamela is as deranged and powerful as she is (she literally throws a body throw a window with seeming ease) and give credence to Jason’s resurrection scene near the end to either being real or a hallucination of sorts. The trappings are already there, but if the movie leaned into them harder, every element of it would end up being better.

5.Knowing Pamela was responsible for the murder of the counselors at the start makes her motivations all the sadder. She goes through the children’s cabin because she’s “searching” for Jason and can’t find him. In other words, she’s replaying a variation of the event in order to build herself up to killing the counselors who are responsible for him being missing. This would make sense given that it’s her first set of murders, at least according to the townspeople, so she has to build up the parameters of the fantasy to get “off”, so to speak.

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