Chasin'Jason

The film is as simple and brutal and bloody and beautiful as an old campfire tale: in 1964 a couple of camp counselors are killed at a summer camp, Camp Crystal Lake. Flash forward to 1980, and some hitchhiking hippie chick fresh out of 1978 catches a ride with a local guy at a diner, after being warned by an Ancient Mariner (i.e. a crazy old coot) about staying away from Camp Crystal Lake, that it has an honest-to-badness curse on it, and people...die. Later, she hitches a ride up there, going to her new position as a camp counselor cum slasher movie cannon fodder with an unseen driver in a jeep. The driver stalks and slashes, but the POV is the audience, which makes THEM, or rather, US, the killer, drawing us into the ritual of blood.

That is the original Friday the Thirteenth (1980). Brutal, simple, bloody, anonymous...none of the characters are memorable. None of the actors here, except Kevin Bacon, went on to be stars (and everyone who watches it will only remember his character because "Hey look, it's Kevin Bacon, back before he became a world-renowned star!"), and they are all dispatched in singularly bloody ways, and THAT is the most memorable aspect of their parts in this picture.

But let's get into it. Alice and a bunch of young twenty-somethings and some pervy older guy with a mustache who has a terrible physique and chops wood with his shirt off, and comes on in a creepy way to Alice, are at Camp Crystal Lake to open it back up and get it ready for the kiddies. Bad move. As the truck driver at the beginning explains, "Place is jinxed..." He goes on to relate a litany of tragedy that includes fires and bad water, and a murder or two, I reckon.

An annoying young guy with a Native American fixation shoots an arrow almost into the belly of one fellow counselor. He later appears dressed in a diaper, while a cop pulls up and harrases everyone like any cop in a B or Z picture about Ralph, the "Ancient Mariner," who pedals away on a bike through the woods after warning Alice again about the "death curse" of Camp Crystal Lake. Alice and another girl and some dude play strip Monopoly during the rain storm. The killings commence.

They commence as Kevin Bacon is about to get it on, and they keep on going by the unseen assailant. Spear through the throat. Axe in the forehead. Arrow through the neck, and hung up on a door. Young people are bad. They are full of sex and sin, and a silent mother is creeping around, some avenger FROM BEYOND perhaps, doing a little bloodletting as His or Her own personal Rite of Spring. There's something significantly primal, and pagan, about slasher epics.

And this one is an urban legend par excellence. No hockey mask. No skulking behemoth unable to articulate a single word. The ending is a kind of inversion of Hitchcock's Psycho. Along the way, the performances are on par with an episode of "Saved by the Bell." None of the characters are memorable or likable, and the only interesting scenario besides the return of "Ralph the Guy Warning of the Curse," is the decapitation of a snake.

I can't remember anyone's name here, except Alice's, and it doesn't matter. The fact that they are all stock characters from a bad TV crime show recreation makes it all the more effective. It's a brutal urban legend, swift and bloody and powerful, a campfire tale of revenge, told to you by "a friend of a friend."

In the end, Alice awakes in the hospital after floating all night on the lake, and she knows the "boy, Jason" was never found by the policeman, which is just another stock character. Or was that all just a dream?

"Then, he's still out there," she whispers to herself.

Yes. HE is. The Legend never dies. He goes on and on in the hearts and minds and subconscious fears of the viewer, who absorbs his archetypical hulking menace into the vast, inexplicable pit of the neural net we call our darkest and most primal subconscious fears.

Borne of terror, and death, and the night.

Excelsior!

Produced and directed by Sean S. Cunningham, who produced the seminal Wes Craven picture Last House on the Left (1973), but hit paydirt with this one. Starring Betsy Palmer as Mrs. Voorhees, Adrienne King as Alice, Walt Gorney as Crazy Ralph, and the aforementioned KEVIN BACON as "Jack." Written by Victor Miller, although, according to Wikipedia, they didn't even have a completed script when Cunningham took at an ad for the upcoming film in Variety.

I don't have to tell you the film was a box-office blockbuster. You already know.