Directed By: Sean S. Cunningham
"Halloween is making a ton of money. Let's rip it off."
Those words from Cunningham to screenwriter Victor Miller was the less-than-stellar beginning to the film that would kick off the 1980's slasher explosion in earnest, and begin a journey for a franchise that is set to have yet another installment an astonishing 35 years after it's first. Meant only to make a small amount of money for it's creators while they figured out what to do next, it ended up being the only notable thing most of the people involved ever did, with the glaring exception of one Kevin Bacon.
As I'm sure you know, this one attempts to be a suspense-thriller instead of a straight-ahead slasher movie like the sequels ended up being. While it has its moments, there's not enough attention to detail to keep everything logical. Example: in an early scene Alice asks Bill whether he needs more paint. The camera movement and the presence of music (which was supposed to only be used when the killer is present) suggests that *OMG SPOILER ALERT* Mrs. Voorhees is there, hiding behind a tree. Only there are two big problems with that: 1.) Alice walks right past where she would have been standing, and could not have missed her location and 2.) moments later Mrs. Voorhees is on the road in her van so she can kill Annie. Logical errors like this plague the movie, and would sadly be commonplace throughout the series. The movie also makes no attempt to play fair with it's mystery, after throwing a few red herrings (namely "Crazy Ralph"), Mrs. Voorhees simply pops up at the end, with all but a "KILLER" sign hanging around her neck.
Who would EVER suspect this sweet old lady?
Speaking of the Annie kill, that and the ending perfectly illustrate that, despite Halloween being the impetus behind the movie being made, then bigger influence on Miller as he wrote the screenplay was clearly Psycho, with the "potential heroine die early" kill and the Mrs. Voorhees/Jason relationship being the direct inverse of the Norman/Norma relationship in Psycho.
This movie was made with almost no money, so the cast is the usual kind you get in that situation: inexperienced and largely untalented, chosen mostly for their looks and real personalities that can be translated onto the screen the easiest. The direction is flat with zero sense of style, which is no surprise at all given Cunningham's lack of both artistic ambition (he has been open with his feelings of movies being simply a business proposition and having no artistic sensibilities) and talent. It's no coincidence that despite the success of this movie, he never had any other successes as a director, and this movie aside, the only success he ever had as a producer was working with better directors, whether it be Wes Craven or the much-less-heralded Steve Miner.
The only person besides Bacon that had much of a career either before or after this is Vietnam War photographer turned special effects wizard Tom Savini, whose creations more-than-likely saved this from being stuck in a film canister in Sean Cunningham's basement.
What I personally find more interesting than anything involving the movie, is how it made an impact on the cultural landscape, and what impact it made. Really, the biggest innovation that came from Friday the 13th was not the movie itself, but Paramount's marketing of it. This was the first time a low-budget, no stars movie of its type was treated as a huge studio release, a gamble that paid off when the movie opened and removed The Empire Strikes Back from the #1 spot. This move by the studio, independent of anything involving the movie itself, is what I would argue to be the biggest cultural impact from it. Paramount striking it big with the blitz they gave this movie convinced filmmakers and the people that gave them money that all you needed to make a profitable hit were young, attractive actors, a spooky setting, and good special effects. There were an assload of movies made immediately following the release of Friday the 13th that aimed to copy it's formula, but from what I can tell, most of those movies misread what little Friday was actually trying to say.
Somehow, despite Michael Myers & Pamela Voorhees quite obviously representing sexual repression, the formula became "sex equals death", without any thought as to why that was. Future slasher movies, and they still do this, give audiences supposed "reasons" that characters "have" to die because of the conventions of the genre, and discussion about victims in these kinds of movies almost always includes the macabre idea that actions taken by characters in movies that would result in minor or no consequences in real life are somehow enough to make their gruesome deaths somewhat justified. If you think about it, did Kevin Bacon REALLY deserve to get an arrow through his neck, simply because he smoked a joint and banged his girlfriend?
By slasher movie "rules", this is a justifiable homicide.
Slasher movies almost always include characters that are obnoxious, dumb, or straight-up assholes in an attempt to get the audience to root for the killer. Why? Probably because it's a lot easier to follow the Sean Cunningham "roller coaster ride" theory of horror, than make a movie that is actually scary and stays with you longer than two minutes after you leave the theatre. Much like wrestling promotions will debut more characters as heels than babyfaces, because it is much more difficult to make audiences react positively to a character than negatively. A "good guy" has to strike a very precarious balance to keep the audience with them, as one fatal flaw, intentional or not, can cause the audience to turn against them. This is probably way most slasher movies are stocked with milquetoast, throwaway victims that are only introduced to be dispatched later and up the body count, rather than fleshed-out characters.Also, hack filmmakers in any genre will unthinkingly stick to the established formula, rather than try to do anything new.
As for the oft-heralded gore, I'm sure this movie's reputation amongst the generations that came after it's release (basically anyone born in the 90s or later) has suffered because of the graphic nature of what came after Friday opened the floodgates, or if you showed someone my age (30) who has heard about, but has never seen this movie before, but has seen episodes of CSI, The Walking Dead, or Hannibal, they would probably turn to you and ask "that's it?". *Insert Bart Simpson quote here.* What this movie offered during its time does not hold up at all, while it's betters, which offered much more in terms of story, character, style, and atmosphere, still do (I'm thinking of Psycho, Halloween, & A Nightmare on Elm Street here). That, sadly, is the one lesson that horror filmmakers should have learned, but in most cases did not.
Friday the 13th, much like the first WrestleMania, is memorable not for anything it offers on its own, but for setting the table for what came after. That's something, at least.
RATING: **1/2 out of 5.
No comments:
Post a Comment