Friday the 13th

(Movie Review)

Believe it or not, this falls into the category of “movies I watched because of the girlfriend.” This is a lot different than the kind of movies Shoko usually makes me watch, which tend to be pretty standard chick flick fare (“In Her Shoes”, “Princess Diaries”).

But it turns out Shoko, like myself (and Brett, and Phil) was forbidden to watch these movies as a child, and as a result developed a great curiosity about them. (The “Friday the 13th” series is pretty famous in Japan and I think it’s more or less solely responsible for bringing the old Western calendar superstition into the Japanese popular consciousness.)

So, when I brought home “Freddy Versus Jason” last week, Shoko actually wanted to watch it with me. It was her first horror movie experience, but she enjoyed it and commented on how good it was for her English studies because the language used in the movie was very simple and clearly enunciated. (Horror movies as a new way to study ESL. Who would have thought?)

As I mentioned previously, even though I wasn’t allowed to watch either growing up, the idea of Freddy always played bigger in my childhood imagination than Jason. The idea of someone killing you in your dreams? That’s scary. Jason was, as far as I could tell, just another slasher. I was never quite sure what distinguished him from say, Michael Myers, or a million other slasher movies.

As such I didn’t have a huge desire to see the original Friday the 13th. Besides, I had heard from a number of people that it wasn’t scary at all, and was in effect a B-movie that, because of the marketing and the numerous sequels, somehow forced its way in as a pop-culture classic.

I also knew, like any child of the 80s, the basic storyline. As I imagine you do. Let’s try a simple test. My guess is that even if you haven’t seen the movie, you already know that:
*Jason’s mother, not Jason himself, is the killer in the first movie
* It takes place on a campground, where Jason’s mother is killing off the camp counselors one by one
* Kevin Bacon has a minor part in this movie before he became famous.
* It has low production values, and is pretty tame by today’s standards

How did I do? And if you already know all that, no reason to sit through the actual movie, right?

But Shoko came home with this movie from the video store the other night, so what could I do? I guess I could have gone into the other room while she was watching it, but she’s certainly sat through a lot of awful movies because I rented them, and what’s more she rented this movie because she thought it would be of mutual interest. So I sat down and watched it with her.

Man, does this movie represent 2 hours of my life that I’ll never get back again, or what? Forget all the moral reasons for or against watching these kind of slasher flicks, you’ve got to have an attention span of steel to even think about getting through this movie. I’d rather be locked in a room with a book of Sylvia Plath Poetry for two hours than have to watch this movie again.

Although this was my first time watching the movie, I did have the feeling of having seen it before. I think that was just because I had seen it spoofed so many times before, or seen clips of it, in other media.

Link of the Day
Via Bethany's Blog:
Top Ten Reasons Why Men Should Not Be Ordained

Friday the 13th: Movie Review (Scripted)