This was another old classic horror movie that I ended up watching last month at Cineworld. I actually did see it on Friday the 13th, too, which was fitting.
The movie started out as a fairly stereotypical slasher movie, with two camp counselors getting butchered by an unknown assailant at Camp Crystal Lake. Fast forward a year and the camp is being reopened, despite all of the tragedies that have taken place…beginning with the drowning of a little boy.
Despite knowing that this movie was a slasher that would end with most, if not all, of the characters being brutally murdered, I did develop a bit of a soft spot for Annie, especially when she stopped to talk to the dog that was tied up…an action which I can imagine I’d do. So that made me like her quite a bit in this movie…although I wasn’t so emotionally connected with her that I was really sad when she inevitably died.
Obviously, this movie being one of the first slasher movies meant that there were a lot of cliches that later movies (like Scream) have mocked, such as the final girl cliche and the fact that virgins are safer from the killers than those who are more sexually active.
One thing that I will say I really liked about this movie was that the young people came across as really irresponsible and only caring about having a good time. However, the moment they thought someone was actually in danger, they immediately went into action. Perhaps if the camp counselors at the beginning had been more like them, the events of the rest of the movie (and subsequent franchise) wouldn’t have been necessary.
I’ve seen one or two of the more recent Friday the 13th movies, but it was interesting to see the first movie, which didn’t have a supernatural killer as such. However, I think the characters did behave in really stupid ways…and there was very little in the way of fighting back/resistance when the killer was striking. Plus, although there were some elements of foreshadowing throughout the movie as to how the killer was involved, there was no real mystery to solve about who was responsible for the murders.
On the whole, I felt it was worth seeing this movie and how the slasher horror genre has changed over the years. However, I wouldn’t watch it again…and I wouldn’t watch it at the cinema again. Unfortunately, the whole ‘remastering’ ended with a movie that was so ridiculously loud, it ended up hurting my ears before it was even a third of the way through.
Ink of Blood 