With a Michael Bay-produced remake in the theatres and two months of real Friday the 13ths lined back-to-back, it's an auspicious time for Paramount to reissue "Deluxe Editions" of its first three Friday the 13th flicks. "Kill . . . Kill . . . Kill . . . Uncut," the back of the box to the 'un trumpets, and that really sez it all.
As scriptwriter Victor Miller notes in two separate bonus features, the primary intent behind the first Friday was to "rip off Halloween." Director/producer Sean Cunningham already had prior experience taking better films and turning 'em into durable low-rent fare — his 1972 Last House on the Left, done with a young Wes Craven, was a crassly energetic drive-in remake of Ingmar Bergman's classic art flick The Virgin Spring — though nobody expected Friday to spawn the franchise that would rise from the depths of Crystal Lake. As Porky's was to Animal House, so Friday the 13th was to Halloween: a dumbed-down amalgam of the elements that made the original low-budget sources so successful.
In Friday's case, of course, the formula was simplicity itself: strand a batch of young and randy teenagers away from adult authority and then put them at the mercy of a seemingly omnipresent killer. (The only adult authority we meet before the denouement is a comic-relief cop who acts like he's wandered in from some sixties drive-in hillbilly comedy.) Let the closest-to-virginal — even if she's not averse to a game of Strip Monopoly — teen girl survive for the big face-to-face showdown with the killer. Kill off all the rest. Cunningham even managed to snag the child of Hollywood royalty for a role (Bing's son, Harry Crosby, who gets an arrow in his eye), though the part was not the ticket into a major career that Halloween would be for Jamie Lee Curtis.
.jpg?t=20120527181101)
Article comments