Review: Friday the 13th

Yes, it's twenty-five years late, but I finally watched Friday the 13th. It was a hard sit. I usually don't watch movies on television because of the commercials. In this case, the commercials were something to look forward to.

Friday th 13th is kind of like a Hamlet where all the characters are replaced by Rosencrantz and Gildenstern. Everyone's sole purpose in the movie is to die messily. (Unlike Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, however, we are supposed to see these people either nude or near nude before they die. See, if Shakespeare had added that element, Hamlet could have finished behind The Empire Strikes Back at the box office in 1980, and then he really would have been a player, baby.)The most shocking thing about this movie is that it is a screaming bore. Each character's fate is a foregone conclusion, so most of the movie involves waiting...and waiting...and waiting for the poor little teenager to die. Even the climatic battle between Alice and Mrs. Voorhees is loaded with padding, largely because Alice keeps dropping weapons and passing up oppotunities to kill the miserable old bat when she has the chance. She manages to fumble away a baseball bat and a rifle, and she refuses to pick up Mrs. Voorhees's machete when the besweatered harridan loses consciousness and is, presumably, at Alice's mercy.

The way they leave room for the sequel in this movie is pathetic. The movie suggests that Jason Voorhees is "still out there", which radically shifts the movie's tone from a psycho-mother slasher picture to a more supernatural horror story in the final five minutes. If the real story was Jason Voorhees's return from the grave, what the hell was the rest of the story for? And why does he rise from the grave anyway? Did his mother have something to do with it, or did he just wake up or...oh, for fuck's sake, why am I bothering with these questions? You'd be better off looking at blank screen than watching this movie, although, as dark as the picture is, you'd be doing a lot of that if you did watch this moive.