The random home video observations of author and critic TIM LUCAS.

Friday, September 13, 2013

FRIDAY THE 13TH - WHY?


I never understood what shot FRIDAY THE 13TH into the stratosphere. Back in 1980, I saw it opening day with a friend in a cattleplex with only one other person in attendance. There were some very talented people associated with the production (like Adrienne King, pictured, and Kevin Bacon, who is not), but even then, at the outset of their careers, though grateful for the work, they must have felt they were slumming; it was nothing the world had never seen before, done better. All of Tom Savini's superbly devised gore effects faded to white before you could appreciate what went into them -- imagine having to do that with all the funny stuff in a comedy!

I wrote a grumpy, sarcastic review for CINEFANTASTIQUE but the world paid no heed. The movie, though robbed of all its gunpowder by the MPAA, somehow wowed eager-to-be-scared youngsters with fake IDs and went on to become a hit, a franchise, a phenomenon. Some people have written books about it, others have made documentaries about it, like it somehow fried their brain and changed their lives. I'm glad they had some kind of seismic encounter with art, if that's as close as they got, but I sure wish someone with the goods (like George Romero) had caught half the breaks Sean Cunningham did. But he refused to work with the majors (like Paramount), knowing his white lightning would have to kneel and be homogenized.

Anyway, Happy Friday the 13th. If you're looking for a good movie to celebrate with, there is always the wickedly clever seed that inspired this leaden but fruitful franchise: Mario Bava's 1971 thriller BAY OF BLOOD -- now out on Kino Lorber Blu-ray and DVD, with my audio commentary and, for the first time in this country, the alternate Italian cut with different dialogue scenes.


Postscript: Script supervisor Martin Kitrosser (who now works with Quentin Tarantino) told me himself that the "original" FRIDAY THE 13TH was made in direct response to the Bava film; he even proposed dedicating the film to him but that idea was shot down by Sean Cunningham. The Bava film was not perceived at that time as esoteric or even Italian; it played under a variety of titles (like CARNAGE and TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE) under the stars in every other drive-in theater in the country, and it ran in first-run and in support of other grisly features for years and years. You probably could have found it playing somewhere just a few years before FRIDAY THE 13TH opened... but a few years is a lifetime's distance to those people attending indoor showings of FRIDAY THE 13TH when they were 12 or even 17 years old. Those people had likely not seen the Bava film, of course; what matters is that the filmmakers had. Clearly what happened is that some kind of generational leap took place, positioning a new generational wave and F13 at the same cultural Ground Zero; it was the first movie that a large number of young people saw that showed them more than they were used to seeing in terms of violence and sexual candor. Mind you, this was right on the cusp of home video being introduced into people's homes. Had FRIDAY THE 13TH been made a few years earlier and released to drive-ins by a minor distributor, it would have been indistinguishable from any number of other pictures. By the same token, had it opened later in the 1980s, by then, the young people who made it a hit would have seen so much more at home that they would have grown inured to its expurgated charms. However, because FRIDAY THE 13TH was released by a major distributor, because it got a wide release in indoor theaters, and perhaps too because its censorship left some things to fertile young imaginations, FRIDAY THE 13TH had an impact on a lot of impressionable minds. Which may indicate that, in any lucky juncture of the right thing at the right place and the right time, the thing can sit back and let the place and time do most of the heavy lifting.  

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