Frankenstein (2004 made-for-TV miniseries)

FRANKENSTEIN (2004 made-for-TV miniseries)

I haven't read Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein in over two decades, so I cannot discuss how Hallmark's miniseries (which runs two hours and fifty-minutes without commercials) fares in terms of being a faithful adaptation of the book (though many reviews on IMDB praise this version's faithfulness to the source material). The tale opens with the crew of the Prometheus (a ship caught in ice) rescuing Viktor Frankenstein (who had been pursuing his bipedal creation on a dog sled) from freezing to death. Viktor tells his life story to the ship's captain, so the bulk of the story is a flashback to the events described by Frankenstein (the narrative returns to the captain and Viktor on the ship several times). The plot moves from Viktor's childhood (when his parents adopted an orphan named Elizabeth) to his time at a university where he immerses himself in absorbing all he can learn about chemistry, physics, and science in general. Viktor develops a hypothesis about how to bring the dead back to life, and he tests his ideas on a dead dog that he manages to momentarily resurrect. Not content to experiment on animals, Viktor assembles a human out of various corpse parts scavenged from the local graveyard. One stormy night, Viktor brings his creature to life. It escapes into the community and takes a coat with Viktor's journal in one pocket. The monster (which is more articulate and intelligent than in most filmed versions of this story) reads the journal and realizes that it is the creation of Viktor Frankenstein. It somehow finds its way to the Frankenstein estate in search of its creator, accidentally kills Viktor's young brother, and frames a servant girl named Justine for the killing. Viktor manages to locate and confront the creature, and it demands that Viktor create a female mate with the promise that the two monsters will exist peacefully outside of civilization if Frankenstein complies. Viktor agrees, but his friend Henry (upon learning of the dreadful experiments) convinces him not to proceed. In the presence of the monster, Viktor burns the not-yet-reanimated body of the mate. The creature vows that it will find Viktor on his wedding night. Viktor inexplicably does not tell his bride-to-be (creepily enough, his stepsister Elizabeth) about the danger they're in. The creature kills Henry, and a grief-stricken Viktor gets on with his life and marries Elizabeth. Viktor's creation does indeed track down the happy couple in their honeymoon suite and kills Elizabeth. Viktor pursues the monster (it leaves a series of cryptic notes for Viktor to find) and ends up on the dog sled from the prologue chasing the creature across an icy landscape. Viktor dies aboard the Prometheus after finishing his tale, and the ship's captain watches as the creature carries its dead maker off into the blizzard.

My main problem with this version of Frankenstein is that the story is supposed to be the events Viktor describes to the captain of the Prometheus, yet there are numerous scenes in which Viktor is not present. How did he know what the monster was up to when it was off on its own? This quibble aside, the Hallmark version of Frankenstein is quite watchable and boasts marvelous production values for a made-for-TV endeavor. Nothing jolted me out of the “reality” of the tale – I noticed no anachronisms in terms of the environments or dialogue, but then I've never been to modern day Europe and certainly have no idea what it was like during the time period in which this yarn takes place, so how would I know if something was dreadfully off-key? With a cast that includes Donald Sutherland (as the Prometheus captain), William Hurt (as Viktor's college mentor), Julie Delpy (Viktor's mother), and Luke Goss (the creature), the 2004 made-for-TV miniseries version of Frankenstein is not wanting for talent. It's not a project that warrants or demands repeat viewings, but it's worthy of a look (especially for fans of the Shelley novel).

The Curse of Frankenstein

THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN

A 1957 project that launched the Hammer Film series of Frankenstein movies, The Curse of Frankenstein opens and closes with scenes of a disheveled Baron Victor Frankenstein imprisoned in a cell where he implores a priest to believe his tale of bringing to life a humanoid creature cobbled together from various corpses. After the prologue, the main plot picks up with Victor as a wealthy child (he's just inherited his family's fortune) hiring a tutor (Paul) to educate him. When Victor has grown into a man, he and Paul remain friends and test their unorthodox scientific theories by bringing a dog back to life. Victor proposes that they next create and reanimate an ideal human specimen, but Paul balks. Victor pushes forward alone and assembles a creature from the parts of assorted dead bodies. Obsessed by his research, Victor spends little time with his fiance (his cousin Elizabeth) or his mistress (a servant woman who works for him). Nearly fifty minutes into the film (which runs eighty-three minutes total), Victor brings his creation to life as lightning flashes through the windows of his laboratory. The monster promptly attempts to strangle its maker to death, but Paul intervenes and saves Victor's life. The men strap the creature down, but it escapes the next day. Out in the countryside, Paul and Victor hunt the abomination with rifles. Paul shoots and kills it, but not before the creature encounters a blind man and a small child (both presumably meet horrible fates, though whatever occurs to them happens off camera). Victor and Paul bury the monster, but Victor secretly reanimates it. The mistress, meanwhile, threatens to expose Victor's secrets and research if he does not marry her. Victor traps her in the lab with the creature, thereby solving that problem. The night before Victor is to marry Elizabeth, the monster gets loose again and ventures up to the roof. Elizabeth (who has been pressing Victor for details about the nature of his research throughout the tale) explores the laboratory and deduces that someone is up on the roof. She heads up there. Paul and Victor, outside, spot the creature atop the abode. Victor races to the roof just as his creation approaches Elizabeth. Victor fires a couple of shots from a pistol and accidentally hits Elizabeth in the shoulder. Victor throws an oil lantern at the monster, which burns and falls through an angled rooftop window into the lab below, where it lands in a vat of acid. An epilogue back in Victor's cell implies that nobody believes Victor's tale (Paul and Elizabeth refuse to corroborate his story). Guards lead Victor out of his cell, and the viewer spots a guillotine through a window.

For its first fifty minutes, The Curse of Frankenstein is slow-paced by modern standards with lots of lengthy shots of characters gushing exposition through dialogue on lavish sets. Once the creature rips the bandages off its face and reveals its gruesome visage, the tale gains momentum and remains engrossing right up to the end when guards escort Victor (presumably to his execution) from his cell. Peter Cushing vanishes into the role of Baron Victor Frankenstein and gives a fine nuanced performance as the obsessed mad scientist. He chews up the scenery, particularly on the set of the way cool laboratory in which chemicals bubble in beakers and strange equipment glows and hums.

The Encyclopedia of Novels Into Films notes that The Curse of Frankenstein “devotes considerable screen time to the actual construction of the monster (an event that [Mary] Shelley's novel glosses over).” This observation keys into my main complaint about this film – the creature only shows up for the last half hour and even then has little screen time. The filmmakers (director Terence Fisher and screenwriter Jimmy Sangster) made a bold choice in crafting a project that focuses more on Victor than his creation. If you're willing to sit through a slow first fifty minutes, you'll enjoy an enthralling denouement with a horrific animated corpse lurching around.

Friday the 13th Parts 3 & 4

^{FRIDAY THE 13th PART 3}

Much more flawed than the first two films in the series but featuring a chilling second half, Friday the 13^th Part 3 opens with a five-minute prologue that recaps the end of Part 2 and then sows further confusion about just how the previous film ended by depicting Jason on the floor of his shack with the machete no longer embedded in his body. Was the “Jason jumps through the window” moment just a nightmare? Apparently, which leaves the question of what happened to Paul at the end of Part 2 (unless the bit where Ginny's loaded into an ambulance is also part of a dream).

Friday the 13^th Part 2 paints Jason as a territorial recluse who only goes after people who enter his turf. Here in Part 3, he's more proactive in terms of seeking out victims. He first goes after a general store owner named Harold and his wife, apparently drawn to their laundry that hangs outside so he can get a change of clothes. Harold's wife watches a newscast that establishes “Crystal Lake” as the name of a community, not just a camp and a lake. Harold snacks on the food in his shop and swills Jack Daniels as he sits on a toilet, continuing the Friday the 13^th tradition of painting many of the locals (like Crazy Ralph) as colorful eccentrics. Jason dispatches Harold by lodging a cleaver in his chest, then kills the missus by jabbing a knitting needle through the back of her neck. The sequence in and around Harold's store runs about eleven minutes, so once again the viewer must wait an inordinate amount of time before meeting the protagonist.

Chris Higgins (a young woman) and a small group of her friends (inexplicably including a marijuana-loving couple who look about ten years older than the others) travel via van to a place called Higgins Haven (a bit of land on which a barn and a two-story house sit near the lake). En route, they encounter a strange older fellow sleeping in the middle of the road. The young adults get out of the van and listen to the man ramble on in a manner that makes it clear he's meant to be the equivalent of “Crazy Ralph” for this film. He shows them a human eyeball, which sends them fleeing back to the van. As they drive away, the eye-toting fellow bellows “I've warned thee!”

Upon arrival at Higgins Haven, Chris goes into the house where her love interest (a guy named Rick) practically assaults her on sight, lunging forward and surprising her with a hug and a kiss. She rightly rebuffs him. Chris looks out a window and notices the barn door moving. She and Rick head outside and shortly thereafter hear a scream from the house. They rush in and find a fellow named Shelly with a small axe apparently embedded in his head, but it's not real; Shelly is the prankster of the group, and he pulls such stunts for attention. He sits up and laughs at his own cleverness, oblivious to how much the others dislike his brand of humor.

Shelly and another one of Chris's friends (Vera) go on a supply run in town, where they get on the wrong side of three bikers (two guys and a woman). The gang shows up at Higgins Haven looking for revenge (Shelly ran over their motorcycles with a car). They siphon gasoline from the van with the intent of using it to burn down the barn. Unfortunately for them, Jason lurks in the barn and picks them all off in quick succession.

Chris and Rick have a heart-to-heart discussion in which Chris reveals her backstory of having been attacked in the nearby woods by a hideous man a couple of years earlier. She's returned to Higgins Haven to conquer her fears. The Jason of Part 2 would never have left her alive, so once again the narrative of Part 3 alters the nature of the antagonist.

The male stoner goes to an outhouse at night, hears something outside, and finds his girlfriend lurking out there.

Vera sits at the end of a dock at the lake, and Shelly (clad in a wetsuit and wearing a hockey mask) grabs her leg and leaps out of the water to scare her. He holds a spear gun. Shelly heads for the barn, and shortly thereafter Jason emerges with the hockey mask hiding his face: the first time the killer sports his iconic look. Jason uses the spear gun to shoot Vera in the eye, killing her.

Two other members of the group (Andy and Debbie) have sex. Debbie then goes to take a shower. Andy walks down the hall on his hands, and Jason (apparently tired of hanging out in and around the barn) appears and slices him in half. Debbie returns to her hammock following her shower, and Jason (hiding below) thrusts a blade up through her back and out the front of her chest.

The male stoner goes to check the fuse box. Meanwhile, Shelly (with his throat slit) stumbles into the kitchen and startles the female stoner, who thinks that he's pulling another prank.

Jason throws the male stoner into the fuse box, electrocuting him.

The female stoner realizes that Shelly's throat actually has been slit, and she panics and races through the house until Jason stabs her in the belly with a hot fireplace poker.

Rick and Chris (who had been out hiking) return to the property and find popcorn burning in the kitchen. They split up and explore in search of the others. After a bit, Chris goes outside and calls for Rick, unable to see that Jason's right around the corner of the house with a hand clamped over Rick's mouth. Jason crushes Rick's head.

Chris finds blood and clothing in the bathtub and realizes something's seriously amiss. She runs outside and approaches the barn and finds a biker's corpse. Chris retreats to the house and locks the doors, but Jason hurtles Rick's corpse through a window to create his own entrance. Chris runs upstairs, hides in a closet, finds Debbie's body, and gives away her location by screaming. Chris pulls the knife out of Debbie and goes on the offensive as Jason chops down the door with an axe. Debbie stabs Jason's hand and leg, and thus the third act begins seventy-seven minutes into the film.

The remaining fifteen minutes of the story are best experienced firsthand, so track down the Blu-ray (which unfortunately does not include the commentary track one can find in the “From Crystal Lake to Manhattan” DVD box set) and enjoy Jason versus Chris in high definition. I won't spoil the final twists and turns of the plot, but I will say that it's a harrowing ride that ends with Jason seemingly dead with an axe stuck in his head on the floor of the barn.

Friday the 13^th Part 3 expands the Crystal Lake mythos but creates some paradoxes and questions. If Chris and her family have inhabited Higgins Haven for some time, why did Jason never slaughter them given that the property seems to be in his territory? Why did Jason leave Chris alive when he attacked her in the woods a couple of years earlier?

Not as focused or as chilling as the first two films in the series, Part 3 nonetheless delivers an entertaining and tense second half saturated with innovative kill scenes. It's the weakest of the first four tales in this franchise, but it's nowhere near as vile and unwatchable as, say, Part 5. A new spin on the Jason Voorhees legend, Friday the 13^th Part 3 delivers the goods that fans of quality slasher films expect. It could've been better, but it ain't bad.

FRIDAY THE 13^th: THE FINAL CHAPTER

The fourth film in the series picks up the night after the end of Part 3 as law enforcement officials and ambulances swarm Higgins Haven and cart away the deceased. Jason (still seemingly dead) heads to a morgue, where fourteen minutes into the tale he stops playing possum and kills a morgue attendant and a nurse.

The next day, a woman known as Mrs. Jarvis jogs through the woods with her daughter Trish. They return home (a house near Crystal Lake) and find Trish's younger brother Tommy playing a video game as he wears a monster mask. The Jarvis family discusses the fact that six young adults have rented the property next door.

The six renters (four guys and two girls) drive toward the property and pass a cemetery in which a prominent headstone marks the resting place of Pamela Voorhees. This is the first time fans of the series learn the first name of Jason's mother. This gravestone is also the source of some controversy among fans, for it lists Pamela's year of death as 1979. Until the release of The Final Chapter, everyone assumed that Part 1 took place in 1980 (its year of release). I stand by the 1980 continuity, for June 13 in 1979 was not a Friday. Perhaps the tombstone engraver made a mistake.

That night, Tommy and Trish greet the six renters as they arrive next door to the Jarvis place. The new neighbors include two single fellows (Jimmy and Ted) and two couples: Sara & Doug and Samantha & Paul.

The next day, the renters go on a hike and cross paths with twins (Terri and Tina). The twins go skinny-dipping with the group (aside from Sara, who heads back to the house).

Tommy and Trish have car trouble on their way home. As Tommy attempts to fix the engine, a fellow named Rob shows up and offers to help. He gets the car running, and Trish offers a ride to Rob (who claims he is hunting bear).

That night, Trish advises Rob to stick to the trails that wend all around the lake.

Next door, the renters party with the twins.

Near the midpoint, Samantha goes for a nude swim alone and climbs into a rubber raft. Jason (who can apparently hold his breath a really long time) leaps out of the water and stabs her from below.

Back at the rented house, Ted smokes a joint while Jimmy goes upstairs with one of the twins.

Paul looks for Samantha and swims out to the rubber raft, where he finds her corpse. Panicked, he heads back to the dock where Jason stabs him in the crotch.

Rob (at his campsite) hears Paul's screams and heads into the woods with a machete.

Back at the party house, Jimmy and Tina get intimate. Their bed breaks.

Ted finds and watches some old nudie films as he smokes dope.

Fifty-one minutes into the plot, a thunderstorm commences. Terri goes to leave without her sister but bumps into Jason outside. She's killed.

Mrs. Jarvis returns to her home to find that the power is out and her kids are not home. She goes outside and is presumably killed (an off-camera death).

Trish and Tommy return home and cannot locate their mother. Trish goes to search the trails outside only to locate Rob.

Jimmy goes downstairs for some post-coital wine. Jason drives the corkscrew through his hand and embeds a cleaver in his face. Jason next appears outside a second-floor window, where he pulls Tina through the glass and sends her toppling to her death.

Out in the woods, Rob explains to Trish that he's actually hunting Jason, not bear, because Jason killed his sister Sandra (see Part 2).

Sara and Doug enjoy each other in the shower while downstairs Jason kills Ted by shoving a knife through the back of his head.

Sara heads back to the bedroom while Doug remains in the shower. Jason kills Doug.

Sara returns to the bathroom, finds Doug's corpse, and runs downstairs. An axe comes through the front door and kills her.

At the Jarvis house, Tommy heads downstairs as Rob and Trish arrive. Jason disables the phone line. Rob and Trish go next door and realize Jason has been there.

The final eighteen minutes of the tale depict the efforts of Rob, Trish, and Tommy to survive as Jason stalks them. This film boasts one hell of a denouement, and I won't spoil the ending here: watch it yourself (ideally on Blu-ray) and enjoy the jolts and scares that lead up to Jason's final moments as a living breathing human being.

Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter (like Part 3 before it) begs certain questions: how has the Jarvis family existed in Jason's territory for so long without having been stalked and killed before? Why would the Jarvis family stick around after hearing news about the slaughter at Higgins Haven (presumably elsewhere on Crystal Lake) when they're aware (via a newspaper that Mrs. Jarvis has) that the killer's “body” is missing?

These flaws aside, The Final Chapter remains one of the strongest entries in the franchise and is on par with the first two films in terms of sheer entertainment value. A major step up in quality from the third film, Part 4 boasts stunning practical special effects and some truly chilling imagery. I recommend the first four Friday the 13^th tales if you're in the mood for a bloody good time this October.

Friday the 13th Part 2

FRIDAY THE 13^th PART 2

Released in 1981 (but set five years after the events of the first movie aside from a twelve-minute prologue that occurs two months after Alice Hardy decapitated Mrs. Voorhees), Friday the 13^th Part 2 does not (as a review in Variety claimed) “employ too many of the same twists and turns used in the original.” The sequel is a unique tale with a new killer and a distinct set of victims. While the setting is similar (the bulk of the movie occurs at a training facility for camp counselors along Crystal Lake near the camp from the first film), the plot unfolds in a wholly different way from the yarn told in part 1. In the lengthy prologue this time around, Alice (the survivor from the original film) has a nightmare about her encounter with Mrs. Voorhees. She awakens, takes a phone call from her mom, and showers. As Alice heats water in a tea pot, a cat startles her by jumping through the window. Alice goes to her fridge to fetch some food for the kitty and therein discovers the severed head of Mrs. Voorhees moments before an unseen assailant drives an ice pick through her temple.

In the twenty minutes that pass before the next kill scene, the audience eventually meets the protagonist (a graduate student named Ginny who studies child psychology). First, the narrative introduces an array of young adults: Sandra and Jeff (a couple) who encounter Crazy Ralph in the town near Crystal Lake, their old friend Ted, a wheelchair-bound counselor-in-training named Mark, and two ladies (Terry and Vickie). All of these doomed individuals gather outside Packanack Lodge to hear an orientation speech from a dude named Paul (the protagonist's love interest) as they gear up for counselor training. Our heroine (Ginny) arrives late in a sputtering unreliable car twenty-one minutes into the story (an awfully late introduction for a main character). That night, the group sits around a campfire as Paul recounts the legend of Jason Voorhees, who allegedly drowned in Crystal Lake back in 1958 but whose body was never recovered. Paul says that certain old-timers in town claim to have seen Jason, who some believe survived and grew up living off the land in the dense local woods. Paul speculates that Jason may have seen his mother decapitated that fateful night in June of 1980 and that he might even now lurk in the forest waiting to exact revenge on any who dare enter his territory. Because there would be no movie otherwise, this legend is totally true (though Paul doesn't believe it).

Later that night, Ginny and Paul kiss in Ginny's cabin while Crazy Ralph lurks outside and spies on them. Jason (still mostly unseen) shows up and quietly murders Ralph. The next day, Jeff and Sandra set off to visit the off-limits grounds of neighboring Camp Crystal Lake. They stumble upon the mangled corpse of a dog moments before a cop busts them for trespassing. After the cop takes the curious couple back to Packanack Lodge, he glimpses Jason vanishing into the woods and sets off in pursuit. The policeman stumbles upon a weathered shack of sorts deep in the forest and explores its interior until Jason sneaks up behind him and embeds the claw of a hammer in the back of his head.

That night, Ginny, Paul, Ted, and many of the background extras (additional trainees who are not named or given much to do in the story) head to a bar in town, thereby leaving a small group of young adults to be picked off at the training facility. A guy named Scott steps into a rope trap that hauls him up by his feet so that he dangles upside down, and Jason shows up to slit his throat with a machete. Terry arrives to cut down Scott, sees that he's dead, and whirls to (presumably) face Jason (her death occurs off-camera). Mark and Vickie flirt in a couple of scenes dense with clever subtext, and Vickie heads off to her cabin to freshen up. In her absence, Jason embeds a machete in Mark's face. Less than two minutes later, Jason drives a spear through the back of Jeff as he sleeps with Sandra, and the spear goes through her as well. Three minutes later, Jason knifes Vickie. Ginny and Paul then arrive back at camp so that the third act can commence.

As Ginny and Paul explore the lodge in search of the people they expect to find there, Ginny senses something amiss and bellows, “Paul, there's someone in this fucking room!” Jason leaps out of the shadows and attacks Paul. Ginny wisely arms herself with a knife. Jason chases her outside, and she kicks him in the crotch. Three minutes later, Ginny goes on the offensive again and attacks Jason with a chainsaw (wounding him but inexplicably opting to not finish him off). Ginny races into the woods and stumbles upon Jason's shack. Therein, she finds a shrine of candles surrounding the severed head of Mrs. Voorhees (whose gray sweater also sits nearby). As Jason pounds on the door, Ginny puts her child psychology skills to good use and dons the sweater. When Jason bursts through the door, Ginny addresses him by name and identifies herself as “mommy.” She talks a confused Jason into kneeling before her and is about to decapitate him with a machete when he spots the head of his real mother behind Ginny and raises a pickaxe to ward off the death blow. Paul shows up (in a deux ex machina moment) and grabs Jason from behind, enabling Ginny to slice the machete deep into Jason's shoulder and neck area. Jason drops, and Paul carries Ginny back to Packanack Lodge.

After a false scare in which Terry's missing dog appears at the door, Jason leaps through a window and grabs Ginny from behind. This is an infamous “money shot” moment in which the viewer gets a good long look at the deformed face of Jason, who had worn a sack over his head throughout the rest of the film. (The iconic hockey mask does not appear until the third film in the series.)

In a brief epilogue, paramedics load Ginny into an ambulance as she calls out for Paul – a slightly confusing ending.

An entertaining and frightening tale from a bygone age (before the existence of cell phones and rectangular television sets), Friday the 13^th Part 2 contains ample spooky imagery (one can never un-see the severed head of Mrs. Voorhees surrounded by candles in Jason's shack after one gazes upon it) to sate hardcore slasher film fans and is laced with humor to balance out the jolts and gore. There's a fair amount of gratuitous nudity and women-in-panties moments also. Ginny is a more dimensional protagonist than most heroines of this horror sub-genre, and (before she actually encounters the killer and realizes that he's more than just a legend) she cooks up a fine psychological profile of what Jason would be like if he existed: “a child trapped in a man's body.”

The first four films in the Friday the 13^th series are wildly entertaining. Check back before October for reviews of parts 3 and 4.

Friday the 13th (1980 version) [unrated edition]

FRIDAY THE 13^th (1980 version) [unrated edition]

I'll be taking a look at the first four films in the Friday the 13^th franchise this autumn. Spoilers abound, so don't read on if you've never seen these slasher gems and want to discover them for yourself.

The original Friday the 13^th follows a young woman named Alice Hardy who is part of a small crew fixing up an isolated summer camp along idyllic Crystal Lake in June of 1980. Alice (an artist who “draw[s] very well” according to her employer) toils alongside other young adults: a vegetarian named Brenda, a prankster known as Ned, another dude called Bill, and a couple (Jack and Marcie). The members of this group paint docks by the lake, nail up sagging rain gutters, and fix up an archery range, all totally unaware that the town's self-proclaimed “messenger of God” (Crazy Ralph) is utterly correct when he intones “You're all doomed.”

In the fifth season of the sitcom Seinfeld, the protagonist's neighbor (an eccentric fellow named Kramer) writes and sells a coffee table book about coffee tables. Some fifteen years earlier, film producer Sean S. Cunningham and screenwriter Victor Miller hatched the brilliant idea of creating a movie set at a summer camp with a plot worthy of being told around campfires. Indeed, the film's first sequel includes a literal campfire scene.

In his book Making Friday the 13^th: The Legend of Camp Blood, David Grove quotes Victor Miller as saying, “I came up with the summer camp idea and it seemed perfect except for the fact that there were lots of kids at summer camp. Where's the terror in that? That's when I thought that it was a summer camp that was just about to open... we had to have these kids who are totally on their own with no one to help them. Total isolation.”

Sean S. Cunningham directed the film from a Victor Miller script that included substantial uncredited rewrites by Ron Kurz (who went on to have sole credit as writer of the film's first sequel). The plot that unfolds in the final product opens with a five-minute prologue set at Camp Crystal Lake in 1958 (a place that a sign indicates was founded in 1935). Two counselors sneak off to an isolated room to sate their carnal needs, but before their romp progresses beyond making out, they're interrupted by an off-camera assailant who kills them both. The narrative then moves to June 13^th in 1980. Nine minutes pass before the protagonist (Alice Hardy) makes her first appearance. Alice's boss (Steve Christy) vanishes from the proceedings for half an hour; he heads into town eighteen minutes into the film and doesn't reappear until the forty-eight minute mark. Thus, Alice and her co-workers have ample time to get into unsupervised trouble.

Jack and Marcie wander around the camp and are outdoors when a thunderstorm commences thirty-six minutes into the tale. Just before the rain falls, Marcie tells Jack about a recurring dream she's had in which “rain turns to blood.” It's a quietly chilling moment and one that has stuck in my craw. Some critics assert that the Friday the 13^th films are nothing more than one gory scene after another, but subtle chills like this one permeate the first movie.

Jack and Marcie sneak into a cabin to have sex during the storm, unaware that the corpse of Ned (whose death scene is not depicted) lays in the upper bunk above them. Meanwhile, Alice plays “strip Monopoly” with Brenda and Bill. Alice smokes a joint and nearly removes her shirt (the game's interrupted before she unbuttons too far), which contradicts the viewpoint voiced by some critics that only goody-goody virginal girls survive slasher films. Marcie leaves Jack alone in the cabin and heads out for some post-coital use of the self-contained washroom building, and in her absence someone hiding beneath Jack's bed shoves an arrow up through the mattress and right on through Jack's throat. Approximately four minutes later, the killer embeds an axe in Marcie's face. Ten minutes later, Brenda dies off-camera at the archery range. Seven minutes after that, boss Steve makes it back to camp only to be knifed in the stomach. Bill is the next to perish, albeit off-camera. Alice (who inexplicably takes a nap shortly after she finds a bloody axe in Brenda's bed) awakens and sets out to locate Bill. When she stumbles upon his corpse, she realizes that she's in mortal peril and barricades herself in the counselors' main headquarters. Headlights appear outside, and Alice (who thinks that Steve has returned) runs outside to be greeted by a woman who identifies herself as “Mrs. Voorhees... an old friend” of the family that owns that camp. Alice attempts to explain that her peers are all dead, but Mrs. Voorhees seems unfazed and heads into the cabin where Alice had been barricaded. In there, she gushes some exposition about how her son Jason drowned at the camp in 1957 while the counselors who were supposed to supervise him were off “making love.” Mrs. Voorhees reveals herself to be the killer when she explains that she could not let Camp Crystal Lake reopen again. She pulls out a hunting knife and lunges at Alice, who fights for her life. Eventually the two women end up on the shore of Crystal Lake, where Alice decapitates Mrs. Voorhees with a machete.

In her book Games of Terror, Vera Dika describes Friday the 13^th as “a film where elaborate characterization and motivation would only get in the way of the rhythmic progression of shocks.” Indeed, most of the characters are thinly-drawn; Brenda has a couple of lines that reveal she is a vegetarian, and Ned goofs around more than Bill and Jack, but the project will never be remembered as a character-centric piece.

Atmospheric and unsettling, Friday the 13^th remains a seminal and prototypical slasher film nearly thirty-five years after its theatrical release. I hadn't looked at any movies from this franchise for over a decade (I used to see the first four films in heavy rotation on cable TV during the mid-to-late 1980s) before I began revisiting them on Blu-ray as part of my annual horror movie festival, and I'm pleasantly surprised to report that the film that spawned the series still retains its crude charm despite a rather slow first act (after the prologue, the viewer spends a long set of scenes following Annie, a young woman who has been hired to be the camp's cook, as she makes her way toward Crystal Lake by hitchhiking). For first-time viewers, there are ample red herrings in terms of suspects who could be the killer (certainly Crazy Ralph and Steve Christy seem creepy and possibly dangerous). For those who have seen the film numerous times before, there are always new details to discover (I noticed a sign that indicates there's a “Lake Tomahawk” thirteen miles beyond Crystal Lake). Often dismissed as a silly gore-filled simple slasher movie, Friday the 13^th is a work of art worthy of serious examination in the eyes of this reviewer. There's a reason the mythos of Camp Crystal Lake resonated with viewers strongly enough to launch a lucrative multi-film franchise. The third act in particular is dense with a sense of dread and suspense. I'm glad I opted to re-examine these stories in the autumn of 2014.