In 1980, Friday the 13th opened in theaters and immediately became a success despite opening the same day as Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. This was another movie that I had watched as a kid but it wasn't until around '89 that i actually got to watch it and pay attention to it. I even bought the Nintendo game of Friday the 13th. In my opinion this original is the best in the series.
The movie starts off 20 years earlier when a small boy mysteriously drowns and a couple of the camp's counselors were murdered. Flash forward 20 years later... Steve Christy has decided to reopen the infamous "Camp Blood". He and his newly hired counselors get together to fix up the place and prepare it for the kiddies. The counselors consist of: Alice (Adrienne King), Marcie, her boyfriend Jack (Kevin Bacon!), Bill, Ned, Brenda, and the cook Annie. Well it seems that someone doesn't want the camp to open and begins to pick the counselor off one by one through the night. First of all I love all the acting in the film because the teens don't seem like their acting, they just seem like a bunch of kids havin fun and bein slaughtered. Probably the most memorable things about the film are the creative death sequences done by FX GOD Tom Savini early in his career. But these scenes, along with the movie, would be incomplete without the great musical score by Harry Manfredini and the intense and beautiful directing by Sean Cunningham who uniquely fades to white after each death scene. All these things added together make for an entertaining and excellent horror movie.
5 stars outta 5.
