Todd K. Platts
It is no secret that critics loathed the films of the Friday the 13th franchise. For them, the films occupied what scholar Carol Clover termed “the cinematic underbrush” that were “[d]renched in taboo and encroaching vigorously on the pornographic.”[i] What remains a mystery, though, is exactly how reviewers expressed their disdain for the series and how this scorn evolved across the ten films of its initial run. In an attempt to add specificity to this riddle, this vignette will analyze reviews of each Friday the 13th installment from three of the most widely read contemporaneous sources for film coverage, Variety (the leading trade publication in film), the Los Angeles Times (headquartered near the hub of film production), and the New York Times (the newspaper of record), in order to catalog the films’ evolving reception.
In brief, the first two films (1980 and 1981) were written off due to their perceived lack of cinematic craftsmanship and their abundance of plot holes. By Friday the 13th Part III (1982) critics began asking why teenagers would keep returning to a site where so many had been slaughtered before, a theme that was sporadically evoked throughout the run. By Friday the 13th – The Final Chapter (1984), reviewers who were once horrified by the tropes of slasher films (e.g., set-piece deaths, killings after sex, the final girl) began making fun of them, sometimes tongue-in-cheek and sometimes with revulsion. This trend continued through the conclusion of the main series.
Before getting to the reviews, it is important to note that the analysis below turns a blind eye to other high-profile critics – most notably, the crusade against slasher (and violence-against-women) films launched by Chicago critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. By narrowing the scope of reviews and lengthening the period of assessment, however, greater insight can be offered into how critics evaluated one of the most infamous franchises in one of horror’s most disreputable subgenres (the slasher) across a period extending beyond the initial outrage.
Horrible Horror Movies: Critics’ Initial Response
The story of the original Friday the 13th (1980) might have impressed studios enough to spark a bidding war, but rank-and-file film reviewers saw a “silly, boring youth-geared horror movie,”[ii] destined to “be in and out the marketplace quick.”[iii] Critics were unimpressed by all aspects of the film, even its twist ending which reveals Pamela Vorhees (Betsy Palmer), the mother of a boy who drowned at the summer camp years earlier, to be the killer. The Los Angeles Times’ Linda Gross noted that producer/director Sean Cunningham had “no respect for a good murder mystery” before mentioning that “the villain is as much of a surprise as a sunburn after a July 4th beach party.”[iv] Janet Maslin’s review for the New York Times broke protocols by revealing Betsy Palmer as the villain, “Miss Palmer plays the murderer, and by the time she has materialized on screen she has already killed a half dozen nubile young camp counselors, for reasons it would be futile to try to explain.”[v]
Reviews for Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) continued to chide the films for their poor quality, but also included allusions to themes of sadism and violence against women in response to Siskel and Ebert’s late-1980 jeremiad. John Corry’s New York Times review captured both sentiments in one sentence, “[t]he plot is an excuse for joining together horrors, all of the sado-masochistic kind, and the acting is rudimentary at best.”[vi] Variety’s anonymous review took the most umbrage at the sequel’s presumed ineptness, “[a]s the ads say, the terror continues, but unfortunately nowhere near as skillfully as the first time out,” while also mentioning that the film is “not very inventive” and “full of plot holes that make the action look absurd.”[vii] For her part, Los Angeles Times critic Linda Gross called Part 2 a “scary, incredulous and ludicrous movie” that “defies cinematic conventions.”[viii] Corry was most vocal about the film’s problematic themes of violence, stating it “exists for no other purpose than to shock” and “it will be a close-run thing whether it will be fright, nausea or simple distaste that gets to you first.”[ix] The reviews from Gross and Variety were less condemning, choosing to dispassionately document the film’s transgressions. According to Gross, “people aren’t really looking for class in these movies.”[x] Variety was a bit more pointed “seeing yet another group of sexy, teen camp counselors gruesomely executed by yet another unknown (?) assailant” that “has stuck very closely with the successful formula.”[xi]
All critics thought Friday the 13th Part III (1982) was bad, but the real question was whether it was worse than the films that came before it. Linda Gross believed it to be “so terrible that Friday the 13th Part 1 and Friday the 13th Part 2 don’t seem bad.”[xii] Janet Maslin disagreed, only slightly, seeing it as “a little better than Part 1 [and] and Part 2 even without 3-D” while also mentioning its reuse of plot devices: “it simply repeats things.”[xiii] Variety also spotlighted the series’ predictability “[t]o find out what exactly [happens], see parts I and II.”[xiv] Variety also presaged a theme in future reviews by pointing out the absurdity of returning to a camp with so many slaughters: “[w]hy the kids keep going back to this scene of annual mass murder is never explained: why the landlord keeps renting cabins to the kids, considering the mess they leave behind, is never explained either.”[xv]
Predictable Horror Movies: Critics Poking Fun at Slashers
Though critics continued to express disgust with Friday the 13th – The Final Chapter (1984), they also started mocking the major premise of slashers – the systematic and creative murder of fun-loving, wayward youth. Daily Variety’s review, for instance, matter-of-factly surmised the film’s prospects, “followers of this particular mix of teenage sex and disembowelment should make the returns of this third sequel respectable.”[xvi] Los Angeles Times’ Kevin Thomas sarcastically puzzled over The Final Chapter’s appeal—“young people regarded its incessant graphic slaughter as a laugh riot”—before lambasting Jason’s modus operandi: “Jason slaughters them systematically, usually after they’ve had sex; it’s as if they’re being punished in perversely puritanical way.”[xvii] Janet Maslin wryly quipped with reference to the subtitle, “a promise is a promise, or at least it ought to be” and then correctly observed that The Final Chapter actually “shows no signs of being the last in its none-too-illustrious line.”[xviii]
This sarcastic style of teasing continued through the responses to the next six installments of the series: Friday the 13th – A New Beginning (1985), Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives (1986), Friday the 13th Part VII – The New Blood (1988), Friday the 13th Part VIII – Jason Takes Manhattan (1989), Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993), and Jason X (2001). Daily Variety’s review of New Beginning quipped that it “reiterates a chronicle of butcheries with even less variation than its predecessors.”[xix] Kevin Thomas called the new installment “just one more nauseating sick joke” comprised of a “nonstop series of stabbings, slashings, impalings, stranglings and yet other means of killings.”[xx] The most biting sarcasm about the fifth movie was saved for Vincent Canby’s New York Times review, which jokingly observed that the narrative “appears to have been paced by a metronome – a joke followed by a murder followed by a joke followed by murder, until all but one of the featured players have been exterminated,” before explaining that “[i]t’s worth recognizing only as an artefact of our culture.”[xxi]
Jason Lives saw one reviewer throw jabs at the audience of the series. Michael Wilmington of the Los Angeles Times, who also called the film a “sad excuse for a movie,” speculated “[p]erhaps teen-agers will once more swarm like lemmings to the theaters for another rollicking night in the charnel house, giggling and gagging.”[xxii] Caryn James, writing for the New York Times, maintained a negative focus on the storyline, “[t]een-agers with no sense of history, they seem doomed to repeat the victims’ roles in Jason’s cut-’em-up rampage, because repeating history is what the Friday the 13th series is all about.”[xxiii] Meanwhile, Variety’s short, dismissive review conjectured that the declining returns for each new installment could mean that “Jason probably will be buried once and for all.”[xxiv]
By The New Blood, the creative personnel behind the Friday the 13th series tried to throw a new wrinkle into that familiar plotline that critics so abhorred by pitting Jason against a young girl with telekinetic powers. Critics were not impressed. Kevin Thomas called it “Jason Meets Carrie” while also signaling tiredness toward Friday the 13th’s cinematic world, “you’d think that as a summer resort Camp Crystal Lake would be about as popular as Chernobyl.”[xxv] Thomas also made fun of Jason’s puritanical motives, “[e]ach summer the presence of teen-agers making out triggers Jason’s rampages, filling Paramount’s coffers.”[xxvi] Caryn James took a similar tone when referring to the film’s final girl as “a Carrie clone named Tina, whose telekinetic powers should make her Jason’s match.”[xxvii] James further posited that Friday the 13th transformed from a slasher film “into a long-running serial about an oddball but familiar neighborhood.”[xxviii] Variety seemed not to notice the change, saying New Blood contained the “[f]amiliar monster wreaking familiar havoc equals strong initial b.o.” that was “formula in both content and execution.”[xxix]
Whatever patience critics may have had for Friday the 13th, if they ever had any, seemed to run dry with Jason Takes Manhattan, which tried to spice up the franchise by transporting Jason from the summer camp to the inner city. Responding to the change, Chris Willman’s Los Angeles Times review flippantly noted “[t]alk about high concept, dude: Jason takes a road trip!”[xxx] Daily Variety joined Willman’s sentiment “basically the same musty slice-and-dice formula, jazzed up by being moved from Crystal Lake to Gotham’s mean streets.”[xxxi] Caryn James joined the chorus by pointing to the film’s use of the series clichéd formula “he will never change and never die, not while cheap, dull ax-murder movies can yield one witty, misleading, probably lucrative commercial.”[xxxii]
After Jason Takes Manhattan, Paramount would relinquish the series to New Line, the company behind the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. Ultimately, New Line would only produce two films in the main series – Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday and Jason X – which joined Paramount’s outings with their terrible reviews. If anything, the reviews actually became more sarcastic. Speaking of Jason Goes to Hell’s subtitle, Michael Wilmington asked, “Does this mean that the filmmakers are really closing the circle? That the long, bloody and mostly dumb career of Jason, a rampaging hulk in a hockey mask who loves to kill lecherous teenagers in flagrante delicto, is finally over?” He answered his own question: “Don’t bet the cemetery on it.”[xxxiii] Wilmington also taunted other high-profile, if-waning slasher series, “If hell isn’t a series of Friday the 13th movies, repeated into eternity, then Halloween’s Michael Myers is a pacifist and Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger is a Nobel Peace Prize candidate.”[xxxiv] The ninth film’s subtitle also drew a joking comment from Stephen Holden’s New York Times review, who simply stated “[i]t’s about time.”[xxxv] Greg Evans of Daily Variety followed suit, “Jason goes to hell, and not a moment too soon.”[xxxvi]
Jason X drew equally derisive comments. Scott Foundas of Daily Variety captures the less-than-excited sentiment, announcing the new film as “the unfortunate 10th outing in the inexplicably long-running Friday the 13th series.”[xxxvii] Similar feelings were expressed in the New York Times—“[the series was only] revived by the possibility of adapting the new digital special-effects technology to the old formula”[xxxviii]–and the Los Angeles Times–“it exists to show how many extravagant ways there are to eviscerate the human body.”[xxxix]
Nostalgia for the Bad Old Days
For as castigated as the Friday the 13th series was, it is somewhat surprising that the original movies met with some qualified nostalgia in response to the 2009 remake, with at least one critic arguing, “this new Friday the 13th has Jason, all right, but otherwise it’s missing nearly everything that made the original films work.”[xl] Indeed, despite the biting words of two decades of film critics, the Friday the 13th series has proven to be one of the most popular and beloved in all of horror. The characters were never able to kill Jason and neither, it seems, can all the bad reviews.
Notes:
[i] Clover, 187.
[ii] “Friday the 13th.”
[iii] Gross, “Friday the 13th.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Maslin, “Film.”
[vi] Corry.
[vii] “Friday the 13th Part 2.”
[viii] Gross, “Movie Review.”
[ix] Corry.
[x] Gross, “Movie Review.”
[xi] “Friday the 13th Part 2.”
[xii] Gross, “Friday the 13th Part 3.”
[xiii] Maslin, “Movies.”
[xiv] “Friday the 13th – Part 3.”
[xv] Ibid.
[xvi] “Friday the 13th – The Final Chapter.”
[xvii] Thomas, “Movie Review: Bloody Violence.”
[xviii] Maslin, “Screen.”
[xix] “Friday the 13th – A New Beginning.”
[xx] Thomas, “Movie Review: Friday the 13th.”
[xxi] Canby.
[xxii] Wilmington, “Movie Review.”
[xxiii] James, “The Screen.”
[xxiv] “Friday the 13th, Part VI.”
[xxv] Thomas, “New Blood Flows.”
[xxvi] Ibid.
[xxvii] James, “A New Friday the 13th.”
[xxviii] Ibid.
[xxix] “Friday the 13th Part VII.”
[xxx] Willman.
[xxxi] “Friday the 13th Part VIII.”
[xxxii] James, “Another Friday the 13th.”
[xxxiii] Wilmington, “Is It Really.”
[xxxiv] Ibid.
[xxxv] Holden.
[xxxvi] Evans.
[xxxvii] Foundas.
[xxxviii] Kehr.
[xxxix] Seymour.
[xl] Olsen.
Works Cited:
Canby, Vincent. “Film: A New Friday the 13th.” New York Times, 23 March 1985, p. 11.
Clover, Carol J. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” Representations 20 (1987): pp. 187-228.
Corry, John. “The Screen: Friday the 13th Part II.” New York Times, 4 May 1981, p. C12.
Evans, Greg. “Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday.” Variety, 16 August 1993, p. 8.
Foundas, Scott. “Jason X.” Variety, 26 April 2001, p. 12.
“Friday the 13th.” Variety, 9 May 1980, p. 3.
“Friday the 13th Part 2.” Variety, 6 May 1981, p. 21.
“Friday the 13th – Part 3.” Variety, 11 August 1982, p. 22.
“Friday the 13th – The Final Chapter.” Variety, 13 April, 1984, p. 3.
“Friday the 13th – A New Beginning.” Variety, 22 March 1985, p. 3.
“Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives.” Variety, 6 August 1986, p. 15.
“Friday the 13th Part VII – The New Blood.” Variety, 18 May 1988, p. 16.
“Friday the 13th Part VIII – Jason Takes Manhattan.” Daily Variety, 31 July 1989, p. 8.
Gross, Linda. “Friday the 13th: Encamped in Gore.” Los Angeles Times, 15 May 1980, p. I7.
—. “Movie Review: A Grim Friday the 13th Part II.” Los Angeles Times, 4 May 1981, p. H2.
—. “Friday the 13th Part 3 Even Worse.” Los Angeles Times, 16 August 1982, p. G6.
Holden, Stephen. “Jason’s End? You Gotta Have Heart.” New York Times, 14 August 1993, p. 12.
James, Caryn. “The Screen: Jason Lives in Friday the 13th, Part VI.” New York Times, 2 August 1986, p. 9.
—. “A New Friday the 13th.” New York Times, 15 May 1988, p. 56.
—. “Another Friday the 13th Puts Jason in Times Square.” New York Times, 29 July 1989, p. 12.
Kehr, Dave. “Jason X.” New York Times, 26 April 2001, p. E14.
Maslin, Janet. “Film, Friday the 13th, Horror at Middle-Class Summer Camp.” New York Times, 10 May 1980, p. 14.
—. “Movies: Friday the 13th Part III – in 3-D Opens.” New York Times, 13 August 1982, p. C4.
—. “Screen: A Friday the 13th Sequel.” New York Times, 14 April 1984, p. 15.
Olsen, Mark. “MIA: The Bad Old Jason Vorhees.” Los Angeles Times, 13 February 2009, p. E4.
Seymour, Gene. “Future Shock at the Hand of Slasher Icon Jason.” Los Angeles Times, 26 April 2001, p. F12.
Thomas, Kevin. “Movie Review: Bloody Violence Mixed with Sex.” Los Angeles Times, 16 April 1984, p. G5.
—. “Movie Review: Friday the 13th – Again.” Los Angeles Times, 25 March 1985, p. G6.
—. “New Blood Flows Tediously at Crystal Lake.” Los Angeles Times, 17 May 1986, p. H3.
Willman, Chris. “Friday the 13th: A Side Trip to Manhattan.” Los Angeles Times, 31 July 1989, p. D4.
Wilmington, Michael. “Movie Review: Jason Slashes Again in Friday the 13th, Part VI.” Los Angeles Times, 4 August 1986, p. 6.
—. “Is It Really Final Friday for Murderous Jason?” Los Angeles Times, 16 August 1993, p. F5.
