Paramount's new DVD and Blu-Ray reissues of Friday the 13th Uncut reportedly restore ten seconds of footage to the film, though it's difficult to detect where these once-excised seconds are in the uncut version. Presumably, they're a part of makeup maven Tom Savini's crowd-pleasing kill effects, but I couldn't state this for certain. Though most viewers recall the big onscreen fx — the full-on throat slashing of Robbi Morgan's hitchhiker victim, the arrow-through-the-throat demise of a young and studly Kevin Bacon, the decapitation of Betsy Palmer's mad Momma Voorhees — the fact is that a majority of the movie's bloody demises occur off-camera. And while the trailer attempts to give the impression that thirteen different people buy it in the flick (they even repeat surviving plucky heroine Adrienne King twice in the trailer's phony body count), Friday's actual death count proves significantly lower.
The point of it all, of course, is plain ol' Barnum-esque sideshow exploitation. Much of the fun behind the Savini-orchestrated death scenes is in getting the audience to go, "Whoa, how'd they do that?" It's a "magic show," director Cunningham notes during one of the set's bonus interviews, one that current CGI-generated horror flicks can't match since everybody knows the big visual moments have been created in some techie's computer.
As a movie, Friday the 13th is economical and fairly artless, though Miller and Cunningham (who'd gotten his start directing "educational" skin flicks like The Art of Marriage) do a decent job setting up the mechanics of their big kills. A sequence with the movie's camp counselors attempting to corral a snake in their cabin, for instance, helps establish the space beneath the bunks that will make the death of Kevin Bacon's Jack possible as well as the presence of a machete that'll prove Missus Voorhees' undoing. At times, the movie's low-budget restrictions even work in its favor. Where later entries in the series, for instance, used composer Harry Manfredini's Bernard Herrman swipes as stingers for a batch of false scares, the first flick's more parsimonious use of movie music adds to its effectiveness and results in some surprisingly effective moments.
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