Live Life Team
‘Friday the 13th’ is the grand-daddy of the modern horror/slasher films, and it has all the usual ingredients. There are the teenage victims, the no name cast and the graphic scenes of death. However, the film is notable for the fact that Kevin Bacon plays one of the camp counsellors.
As a little background, many years ago, a boy drowned in the lake next to a summer camp – Camp Crystal Lake, and that was followed by the murder of two counsellors. Now, the camp is being re-opened, and the new counsellors are setting it up. Of course, they’re all young and attractive. Of course, they always go off alone to investigate something or other: a noise, the generators, the cars, the lights. Of course, they are brutally murdered, and no one else hears a thing, or wonders where they are, until it’s too late.
Of course, the phone lines are cut, and the cars don’t work; so there’s no escape for any of them. After the slaughter is pretty much done, Alice (Adrienne King) runs into Mrs. Voorhees (Betsy Palmer), and learns that she’s the killer. Turns out, she’s the mother of the boy who drowned all those years ago, and she blames the counsellors. Two of them were having sex while he drowned. This gives rise to the slasher movie rule: if you have sex, you die!
Another weakness to the film is that Alice seems to defeat Mrs. Voorhees an awful lot, yet she returns again and again. It gets a bit tiresome. Still, in terms of teen-oriented entertainment, this is considered a classic and almost a rite of passage.
