This Halloween classic is better left on the shelf this year

Twenty nine years ago, Friday the 13th was released by director Sean S. Cunningham ‒ sparking a legacy of countless reboots and sequels, unrated versions, and directors cuts which nobody asked for. The film is a Halloween classic known for creating modern horror movie cliches: cheesy acting, high pitched screams, and gore that more closely resembles ketchup. A total of 11 movies make up the franchise with the original 1980 film starting off with a $700,000 budget and pulling $59.8 million in the box office. Known as a Halloween movie marathon staple, the movie fails to live up to the nostalgia-driven hype.

The movie opens to a young camp counselor eagerly hitchhiking to get to Camp Crystal Lake, or more commonly known as Camp Blood to locals. After she is gruesomely shanked after hitching the wrong ride, we are soon acquainted to the other camp counselors. Forgettable characters like Alice (Adrienne King), Jack (Kevin Bacon), and Bill (Harry Crosby) make the predictably wrong decisions of people starring in a horror movie: entering creepy rooms with their guard down when a killer in on the loose, naively making out while their friends get hacked to death by Jason Vorhees, and walking around outside in their underwear on a dark and stormy night.

One of the saving graces of this movie is the hilarious ways the writer Victor Miller and special effects makeup artist Tom Savini decided to kill their wayward, immature characters. From an axe to the face to being impaled through the trachea from under a bed, these camp counselors could not catch a break. Personally, the gore produced more laughs than gasps or screams.

Overall, this movie was disappointing. If one is hoping for a good spook rather than a slight discomfort with gratuitous (and frankly unnecessary) sex scenes and unrealistic blood, skip Friday the 13th this time around.