YNTE Horror Night: Friday the 13th (1980)

By Evan On May 13, 2011 · Leave a Comment

I was going to take a bit of a break from the Friday the 13th franchise, but the the 13th of the month actually landed on a Friday and they sucked me back in! So this month, the classic original: 1980′s Friday the 13th.

As always, tons of spoilers ahead. You’ve been warned!

The movie starts in a flashback to Camp Crystal Lake in the year 1958. That year got me thinking, so I paused the movie and did some research. Apparently, Jason Voorhees was born in 1946, which means if he were still out murderin’ today, he’d be 65 years old. Time to retire, dude! Lucky for us, he’s not out murderin’ today, because in 2010, he was cryrogenically frozen and wasn’t thawed out until 2455. We have another 444 years of safety!

But I digress. At this point in the movie, we don’t know who Jason even is yet. We do see two camp counselors sneak off into a boathouse to engage in sexual congress. Then we see them get killed.

Flash forward to “the present”, A.K.A. 1979. A young girl named Annie is hitchhiking to Camp Crystal Lake where she is going to begin her job as a camp counselor. In a nearby town she runs into Crazy Ralph (seen here) who tells her she’s going to die, Camp Blood is cursed, blah blah blah.

A kindly truck driver tells Ralph to shut up, then proceeds to tell Annie every horrible thing that’s ever happened at the camp.

The kindly trucker doesn’t driver her all the way to camp, instead letting her out by a cemetery. She hitches a ride in a jeep to take her the rest of the way. Sadly for her, the driver of the jeep (unseen) kills her. I know I was impressed by the sheer absurdity of the opening of Scream 4, But this movie came out well before the Scream franchise, AND YOU JUST GOT SCREAMED TWICE.

Some of the other counselors show up to camp (including a young Kevin Bacon), and meet the man who will be their boss for the Summer – Steve Christy. Steve thinks that proper attire to wear around nubile female teen counselors is “nothing but short shorts”.

Captain Hotpants drives into town for no explained reason and tells the camp counselors to keep working while he’s gone. Instead of working, of course, they change into swimsuits and frolic about the beach.

I love how Kevin Bacon is just unrepentantly staring at that girl’s ass in that screenshot. Classic.

Main character Alice goes to her cabin and there’s a scary snake there. A bunch of the girls panic until a big strong man comes in and kills the snake for them with a machete.

Anyway, now that the beach party is done, time to buckle down and do some actual work! Oh wait, maybe not:

The cop is there to inform everyone that Crazy Ralph is on the loose. Also that he’s CRAZY! Now I know that this was just a Red Herring and the film is about the Voorhees family, but I would totally watch a movie where Crazy Ralph was the killer.

Finally, the killer starts picking off the camp staff one by one as they start to split up for the night. Two people go off to have sex, a game of strip Monopoly is played. And, predictably, due to their immorality, everybody but Alice gets killed.

As she is trying to escape, Alice runs into a lady claiming to be a friend of Captain Shortyshorts.

It turns out this lady is Pamela Voorhees, mother of Jason, who drowned at the camp years ago when two counselors were fucking instead watching the kids. She’s the one who has been doing all the murders.

The first time I saw this movie, I was shocked. It’s so generally accepted that Jason Voorhees is the killer in Friday the 13th, but really he doesn’t come into the picture until the sequels.

Anyway, more cliche cat and mouse chase between Pamela and Alice, which is to say it’s cliche now. I’m sure it was pretty groundbreaking at the time, and it’s still hella enjoyable to watch, even today, but nothing especially notable happens until the end, when Alice beheads Pamela with a machete.

Then Alice stumbles into a canoe and floats into the middle of the lake and falls asleep. When she wakes up the next morning, birds are chirping peacefully, the sun is shining, triumphant yet tranquil music is playing. Then swamp child Jason jumps out of the water and pulls her into the lake.

She wakes up in the hospital asking about the boy, and the cops and doctors are all confused, claiming they didn’t find any boys. Alice says, “Then he’s still there”, neatly setting up the slew of sequels to come.