Harefooted Halloween: Friday the 13th

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.

Betsy Palmer (Knots Landing) pops in right at the end to steal the show.  She goes from perfectly pleasant at first meeting to oddly oblivious at the seriousness of being told people are dead to being a little creepy when she tells how her son died to totally insane nutbag when she starts speaking to herself as Jason in a high pitched voice.  A marvelous acting job that makes this seemingly sweet woman feel genuinely threatening.

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?

While this one doesn’t have the same magic spooky atmosphere as Halloween it still has a wonderful score and a substantial step up in gore.  A few of the deaths are particularly grisly like an ax to the face and a throat getting slit but they’re not overly grotesque.  Good technical work like this is where the film shines.

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.