Thursday, September 25, 2014

Friday the 13th Part 2

FRIDAY THE 13th 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 13th 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 13th 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 13th series are wildly entertaining. Check back before October for reviews of parts 3 and 4.

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

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

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

I'll be taking a look at the first four films in the Friday the 13th 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 13th 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 13th: 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 13th 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 13th 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 13th 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 13th 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 13th 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.