Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

As Good As It Gets

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

'Friday The 13th (1980)' has an inherent, scrappy charm to it that's enhanced precisely because it is a little rough around the edges, coming off the coveted coat-tails of low-budget horror-thrillers like Halloween (1978). Yet, the feature does fall victim to the usual faults that plague this genre and actually creates some new problems for itself, all of which stem from the fact that much of the run-time is dedicated to hiding the killer that's on the loose. Despite the sometimes lacklustre acting - though here it's actually considerably better than it could have been - and restrictive camera-work, the movie manages to maintain a persistent level of engagement by including a number of grisly killings, made all the more believable by Tom Savini's impressive prosthetic work, and relying upon a central conceit that's rather interesting considering what it sets up and subsequently subverts, even if it is handled somewhat poorly in the end-product. 6/10

'Friday the 13th' may have been panned by critics when first released but since then it is one of the most famous and influential horror films, the franchise containing one of horror's most iconic villains. The film is popular enough to become a franchise and spawn several sequels of varying quality and generally inferior to the one that started it all of. Is 'Friday the 13th' an original film in terms of overall story? No, having been, and still is, compared to 'Halloween' (released two years earlier). One can see why somewhat, it is derivative in a way but to me it didn't come over as a direct rip off. 'Friday the 13th' is far from the best when it comes to acting, excepting Betsy Palmer (very good) and Adrienne King (charming). The others are average at best, though it was interesting to see Kevin Bacon in an early role pre-stardom.Nor is it the best when it comes to dialogue. Much of it is very crude and cheesy. Or character development, while the characters are actually still easy to sympathise with to some extent they are stereotypes that we don't know an awful lot about generally. However, while it may not be a "great" film, 'Friday the 13th' is great guilty pleasure fun and it is very easy to understand its popularity and influence. It's very gory and gruesome, though not pointlessly so, but it is also very frightening and suspenseful. This is apparent in the deaths, which couldn't have been more creative or shocking, and the hauntingly eerie music score. 'Friday the 13th' is assuredly directed and moves along at a lively pace. The late reveal is for the better and works very well. The climax is a long way from a petering out one, instead the film goes out on a very strong bang, right up to the unexpected and freaky final jolt clearly inspired by 'Carrie'. Overall, good fun and very scary even if not exactly classified as great. 7/10 Bethany Cox

Friday the 13th is my favorite horror movie ever (im only 11). I may be 11 but doesn't mean i haven't seen a horror movie and this ones my favorite. but anyway lets get into the movie!!!!so we start our film in 1958 were 2 counselor's are killed by mystery person. we then skip to 1979 June 13th. here we meet Annie who gets killed in the first half an hour....so once weave met all our friends for the next hour we have some time till poor old Ned walks into a cabin and dies. so then a huge storm comes and begins the night of Friday the 13th... so at this point is when we see the teens get killed off one by one.so when Alice is the only one left a fun jeep appears with a fun face!! the films middle aged woman Mrs Voorhees who brags on and on about what happened to her boy Jason (warning major spoiler ahead don't continue if you don't want it spoiled)so then we find out shes the killer and she is going to kill Alice so for the next 15 Min's we see Alice run away until Alice has had it and chops Mrs voorhees head off...so then she goes out on a boat on the lake but a boy called Jason pops out and pulls her under. but this is only a dream (or is it) but in fact she wakes in a hospital bed and boom the end!now i love this movie as much as a nightmare on elm street and Halloween but for me this ones my favorite but we have many sequels to come hehehehe but for one final conclusion i love this movie to bits!

To call the characters paper thin will be an understatement. They are just meant to be in the film to get killed off one by one. I could go crazy with my interpretive brain and propose that film is trying to explore the friction between the conflicting ideologies of conservatism and the sexual liberation movement that gained strength during the 1960s and 1970s. But in reality, the film just isn't deep enough to be thought of along those lines. In reality, there is no subtext. The ultimate revelation is abrupt which ruins the credibility of everything that happens before, and the final combat scenes are downright laughable. One can easily feel that both the director Sean S. Cunningham and screenwriter Victor Miller were huge Hitchcock fans. In terms of writing, the ultimate revelation owes a heavy debt to 'Psycho'. The only thing that I genuinely liked about the film was Cunningham's visual style which again owes a heavy debt to Hitchcock. The camera acts as a voyeur. There are some scenes in which it almost feels like we are watching everything from an anonymous individual's POV. I especially liked the way Cunningham used extended long takes in certain scenes to build up tension. He constantly delays the prospect of any character confronting a dead body in the film. But when it does happen, it is done with a really well executed setup and I found that whole sequence impressive. Talking about Hitchcock, the score that accompanies the scenes of terror and murder in 'Friday the 13th' is basically a rip-off of Bernard Herrmann's 'The Murder' score from 'Psycho'.'Friday the 13th' is not deep nor is it trying to be. The characters are a bunch of nobodies. The ultimate revelation and combat scene is laughable. But I'll be lying if I say I didn't somewhat like the direction and the use of camera movements in the film.