For the past decade or so, there’s been a visible decline in the overall quality of the horror genre. Most horror films made since 2000 have been remakes, re-hashes, and gag-inducing sequels. The once-promising genre seems to be dying a slow and painful death, and a lot of people look back on the ‘glory days’ of horror, back in the 70’s and 80’s, as a time when the genre had some merit. However, movies like Friday the 13th should make people remember that even back then, the genre was crap. Sure, there have always been some outstanding additions to the horror film canon, but those are most certainly outliers. As a rule, horror movies are bad. And this is one genre where if something’s bad... it’s REALLY bad.
Friday the 13th is a perfect example of this. Supposedly a ‘slasher classic’ (as if there were such a thing), this monotonous, repetitive, and boring movie tries and fails on multiple levels to grip the audience, but can’t muster so much as a decent scare or good line of dialogue. Few movies are actually inept on every level, but this certainly takes the prize-- it has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. It features the classic horror plot (which at this point deserves to be called ‘recycled’)-- a group of young twentysomethings go out to a cabin in the middle of nowhere, and are subsequently attacked by a mysterious killer. How original.
The movie was clearly made for shock value and nothing else, seeing as no effort was put into the characters or plot. But even the deaths are lame. Horror movies are made to be scary, but I wasn’t scared once throughout this entire movie. There wasn’t even a decent jump scare, for God’s sake. And that’s not something that’s hard to do. Usually, when horror directors aren’t very good, they ratchet up the suspense not through consistent, palpable terror, but by utilizing sudden noises and unexpected deaths to make the audience members jump out of their seats. But Friday the 13th couldn’t even accomplish that. Pathetic.
Seeing as this so-called “horror” movie doesn’t have any actual “horror” in it, that should really speak volumes about how inept the rest of it is. Normally when a movie is bad, you can tell that all the effort went straight into one aspect of it, while the filmmakers neglected the rest of it. Michael Bay pays a ridiculous amount of attention to explosions, and none to the characters. Nicolas Winding Refn spends all his time getting intricate lighting and camerawork, but forgets to actually write a script. Meanwhile, Friday the 13th director Sean S. Cunningham spent absolutely no time on every aspect of the movie’s creation. The gore is unrealistic, the scares are nonexistent, the dialogue is atrocious, the plot is repetitive, and the acting absolutely REEKS. “If you were a flavor of ice cream, what flavor would you be?” Holy good God! Did the writers actually think that real people in REAL LIFE TALK LIKE THAT? I hope not. It’s like pod people trying to emulate human small-talk, but coming off as robotic and generic. It’s inexcusable.
I could overlook a few minor flaws in plot points when it comes to the horror genre, because everything we see nowadays in horror has been done to the death (no pun intended). But when a movie hits every trope, idiom, and lackluster scene that makes the genre the laughingstock of cinema, it’s hard to ignore it. This movie is so generic it hurts. From the crazy old coot who warns the group about a “death curse” to a retarded twist ending that will have people slapping their heads over the idiocy of a reverse Psycho rip-off, this movie is truly the ultimate grab-bag of lame horror cliches. I want to cut it some slack because most horror buffs call it a ‘classic,’ but when the scariest moment in your horror film is a snake, I see no reason to.
Final Score for Friday the 13th: 1/10 stars. This is not only the anus of horror movies, it’s the anus of cinema in general. It has horrible acting, reprehensible dialogue, and takes a good forty minutes to even ATTEMPT to deliver a good scare. The horror genre has a lot of potential, and I wish that better horror films were made nowadays... but movies like this not only make me lose hope for the genre, they actually give me a newfound respect for horror of today-- Even Resident Evil 5. Because even though most horror films today recycle old ideas, at least they’re original enough to stand alone. If only the same could be said for Friday the 13th.
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