What I Liked: The actors have chemistry which is always important. And what a blessing there aren’t any straight up asshole characters in this crew either. We spend the first half hour mostly hanging out with them so they need to be bearable.
Oh man the score.
Aside from the totally unique and instantly identifiable “chi, chi, chi,
ah, ah, ah” Harry Manfredini (My Boyfriend’s Back, Hanukkah) crafted
some excellent heart pumping music. It
mainly sounds like a take on Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho score but not a
rip off. There are enough differences to
make it its own thing. The music sets great
atmosphere during the suspenseful sequences and appropriately blasts you with
these short bursts of horns and strings when the action ramps up.
Very good special effects that hold up. Master effects wizard Tom Savini (Creepshow,
Day of the Dead) put together excellent gags like an arrow that goes
through the back of the neck and out the throat and the deformed slimy little
Jason Voorhees who’s lurking in the lake.
The pacing is good.
We’re constantly changing locations and having the characters do tasks
to keep the flow going. Even when it’s
something as simple as making a cup of coffee at least they don’t tediously sit
or stand around talking at each other.
Decent shooting. There’s a lot of handheld work without feeling
jittery. This is tricky to get right
because too much movement calls attention to itself. The balance they strike here adds the right
amount of tension in a lot of shots and helps the picture to feel more kinetic.
I can’t imagine I’m spoiling the ending for anyone because
it’s one of the most famous reveals in film history and common knowledge in pop
culture but having the killer be the mother of the boy that drowned twenty
three years earlier is a good twist.
It’s like they took Psycho a lot more literally and this time the
mother really is the one behind the murders.
What I Didn’t Like: This isn’t really a complaint but
I’ll put it in this section anyway. The
movie is such a blatant Halloween knock off that it can be a touch
distracting. There’s the setup that
takes place many years before the film proper begins involving an incident with
a young boy, the killer’s POV shots, an older character who warns others evil
is coming, no adults around, partying teens, etc.
Overall Impressions: I haven’t seen this in a long
time and I gotta say it’s better than I ever gave it credit for. It’s a rock solid slasher movie that does
everything right. They set the stage
properly with a tragedy that occurred in the past and is still haunting people
decades later, the teenagers are pretty likeable which is a rarity and that in
turn gives their deaths more impact, they dispatch the victims in fairly
shocking ways using very nice special effects and they build up the plot to be
more and more dire climaxing with a clever twist ending. What more could you ask for?
I mean this first one is a classic for sure. When the second act kicks into a higher gear
with bodies starting to pile up it’s hard not to get caught up in the
rush. The movie gets better with
subsequent viewings too so if you weren’t impressed when you saw it however
many years ago give it another go. I
don’t think you’ll be disappointed. It’s
just damn good all around.
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