Saw the classic Friday the 13th. The archetypical slasher flick, with attractive college-aged kids playing high-school-aged kids, gallivanting about in their little jogging shorts and bathing suits and being killed off one by one. The film is a little tame by today's standards, but then it blazed the trail I guess (though in ways I am sadly unfamiliar with.) There's a lot of staples of the slasher genre: crazy old dude who warns the teens of impending doom, frustrating inability of people to understand scared women, fake-out "no I was just joshing!" non-death scene. The film has a moralistic way of killing off the teens just after some necking in the woods. Also, there's a deeply creepy way the film quickly dispatches the males but lingers in slow motion and close-up on the female deaths. Then again I don't know if there's a non-creepy way to present death as entertainment, so I'm perhaps getting too high up in my ivory tower.
Overall I found the film fairly humdrum. I have the advantage over the film though, having grown up with the parodies and refinements of the film. It's sort of spoiled by its success. Without its legacy, this would be a fun and creepy film. With it, it's just... eh. It also knows it's kind of campy, by the way. It embraces and acknowledges the thinness of the premise (attractive guys and girls run around and get killed, the end) by not taking itself too seriously. It never takes a stab at profundity and good for it. The most serious it ever gets is when we're delving into the killer's motivation. So, not a serious or terrifically entertaining film, but not a bad one and worth name-checking.
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