Friday the 13th Reviews

One of the most influential horror films of the 1980s, Sean S. Cunningham's variation on the classic giallo TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE (1972) established the template for the stalk-and-slash genre and was a huge surprise hit that launched an apparently unstoppable franchise. The stripped-down plot revolves around a group of teenaged camp counselors hired to staff the newly re-opened Camp Crystal Lake, shuttered since the unsolved 1958 murder of two employees. One youg woman, Annie (Robbi Morgan), never even makes it to Crystal Lake: She's murdered in the surrounding woods. The other summer hires — Alice (Adrienne King), Bill (Harry Crosby), Brenda (Laurie Bartram), Ned (Mark Nelson), Marcie (Jeannine Taylor) and Jack (Kevin Bacon) — are already there, cleaning, making repairs and painting. They get a scare when local religious fanatic Crazy Ralph (Walt Gorney), who's been hiding in the pantry, warns that there's a death curse on the place. But they laugh it off and settle in for the night. As a thunderstorm rages, a killer begins to pick off the teenagers in various bloody ways, until only Alice — the archetypal "final girl" — is left. Cunningham notoriously pre-sold the title and then, with screenwriter Victor Miller, came up with a film to go with it; Tom Savini's inventive special makeup effects set a new standard for gore sequences in horror films. The film's twist ending created a serious problem when its success made a sequel inevitable, and Cunningham argued that the illogical solution cooked up by FRIDAY THE 13TH PART ii screenwriter Ron Kurz would never work. But it did, and established hulking, unkillable murder machine Jason Voorhees as a horror icon on a par with Dracula and Frankenstein's Monster.