We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
Cody has a Friday the 13th double feature with Joe Bob Briggs.
September 13 was a Friday in 1996, so the TNT television network made the wise decision to have legendary drive-in critic and movie host Joe Bob Briggs present a double feature of the original Friday the 13th and its first sequel, the appropriately titled Friday the 13th Part 2, that night on his show Monstervision. 28 years later, the movies are readily available and Joe Bob’s hosting segments are also available, so I decided to celebrate this Friday, September 13th by looking back at that episode of Monstervision and having a double feature of two of my favorite movies, which happen to be part of my favorite franchise.
FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980)
Joe Bob got this edition of Monstervision started off, as he often does, with an off-topic rant. Apparently in 1996 a study had found that there are 100 million sex acts committed daily around the world, and as a result of those acts 910,000 women get pregnant every day. Not only does Joe Bob claim to be upset because there are 100 million sex acts committed daily and he’s not participating in any of them, but he also wants to know details. He wants it broken down into statistics; how many people tried sex but didn’t like it, how many attractive women were with ugly men, etc. There are no answers to be found, Joe Bob is just using the study results as the basis for a comedic rant.
Then he segues into his introduction of director Sean S. Cunningham’s 1980 classic Friday the 13th, the film that represents both the dawn of the 1980s (it was released on May 9, 1980), and the dawn of the modern slasher film. While many consider 1978’s Halloween to the birth of the modern slasher film, Joe Bob disregards that because the movie “had socially redeeming value.” This one, on the other hand, was all about carving meat – and thus, it had a greater impact than another popular horror movie that was released at the same time, The Shining. Joe Bob says Friday the 13th is a great representation of a slasher because we don’t know who the killer is until the end, it’s not who we think it is, the killer has kind of a “lame reason” (I disagree with Joe Bob there) for carrying out the murders, and the average viewer probably doesn’t remember the reason or who the killer is. They may say, “I know who’s killing everybody,” but they may be remembering the movie wrong, because genre icon Jason Voorhees is not the killer in the first one.
Joe Bob credits Friday the 13th with having the greatest ad campaign in modern film history. Everybody saw commercials in 1980, and everybody got it. It was understood what this movie was going to deliver: kids have sex, kids get butchered because they’re having too much sex. It’s a simple equation that made the slasher film what it is today. Joe Bob calls F13 a great movie, which it definitely is, and intends to point out the great horror elements that were defined in this movie as it plays out. Here’s how he describes the plot: “They go into the woods, but they don’t come out of the woods.”
Joe Bob gives the film a perfect 4 star rating, while calling film critic Leonard Maltin a weenie for giving it a bad review. Then begins what I truly believe to be one of the best horror movies ever made. Directed by Cunningham from a screenplay by Victor Miller, the film opens with two counselors getting murdered at Camp Crystal Lake for reasons that will only become clear late in the running time. More than twenty years after the counselors were killed and the camp shut down, a new group of counselors have gathered together in the wilderness to get the place up and running again… but someone doesn’t want them to re-open the camp, and they start murdering the new counselors to make sure it will remain closed. It’s creepy, tells an interesting story, has a great atmosphere, and features some awesome gore effects, courtesy of Tom Savini.
During his hosting segments, Joe Bob complains that not enough people give this movie any respect (it’s true), with one example being that Kevin Bacon, who plays one of the ill-fated counselors, was supposedly telling people back in the day that his first movie was Diner, even though that was made after Friday the 13th. Thankfully, Bacon seems to have embraced his association with the movie more since then.
Joe Bob points out that movies like this are based on old people wisdom coming true, as those who break the rules die. The counselors are doing all the things you’re not supposed to do at camp. There’s a careless jokester in the group who messes around on the archery range, fakes a drowning and disrespects a police officer. Characters play strip Monopoly, smoke grass, drink beer, have sex out of wedlock, and laugh at the doomsayer. But “if the old geek says you’re doomed, you’re doomed.” It’s all about people disregarding what they’ve been told about how they should conduct themselves and paying the price for it. Joe Bob feels every new generation needs to see this movie and understand it.
He also cheers the Tom Savini effects, although he mistakenly says Bacon is killed with a cleaver (it’s an arrow), questions the intelligence of some of the characters, and can’t remember if the game show cast member Betsy Palmer is known for being a panelist on was I’ve Got a Secret or What’s My Line? He also points out that a very important element of a Friday the 13th movie is that “no matter how many people die, nobody finds out anybody’s dead until the last 20 minutes.” I think that’s an important element of most slashers, and that slasher movies too often fail by straying away from that set-up.
FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2 (1981)
Once Friday the 13th has ended, it’s time to go right into the showing of Friday the 13th Part 2 – but before Joe Bob introduces this one, he has Honey the Mail Girl bring out some viewer mail for him to read. The letter he reads in this one came from a female horror fan who said she was writing an autobiography called The Werewolf Witch and believed Clive Barker was her soulmate. This woman says she wants someone who will wear a pig mask to bed with her and says she has pig skulls in her kitchen and wears bone jewelry. While Joe Bob ponders how willing he would be to wearing a pig mask regularly, especially if he was doing it for Honey, he introduces F13 Part 2, the first film in the franchise to have Jason Voorhees doing the killing. Joe Bob feels this sequel is better made than first, as the filmmakers had a bit more money to work with this time around (since the first movie had been such a success). Like its predecessor, it gets a perfect 4 star rating.
After an opening sequence that removes the heroine of the first film from the equation, Friday the 13th Part 2 jumps ahead five years to find that a counselor training center has opened up across the lake from the again-abandoned Camp Crystal Lake. But it’s a bad idea to be that close to the old camp, because there’s a strange man lurking out there in the woods, wearing a sack over his head – that’s Jason; he doesn’t get his iconic hockey mask until the third movie – and he feels that these counselors-in-training have invaded his territory. And they need to pay the price for that. It’s a great sequel, and while the idea of having Jason be the killer is a wild one after everything we learned in the first film, somehow it works perfectly.
During the movie, Joe Bob drools over cast member Kirsten Baker and is shocked that a dog named Muffin and the doomsayer Crazy Ralph both turn up dead, saying that they obviously weren’t thinking about sequels when they killed off Crazy Ralph. They should have brought him back for more movies, but they couldn’t because of what happens to him in this one. He also mistakenly says that Tom Savini returned to do the effects on this one, but Savini only worked on the first and fourth movies. Joe Bob points out that the bar scene where heroine Ginny (Amy Steel) presents her theory about Jason is the closest the films ever got to explaining what Jason is doing and why he’s doing it. He also feels that Amy Steel is one of the better horror heroines and deserved to get more attention than she does, “but that’s what happens when you star in Part 2.” Sequel heroines get overshadowed by their predecessors.
Since Friday the 13th Part 2 was filmed in Connecticut but the first movie was filmed in New Jersey, Joe Bob also feels they should have stayed in New Jersey. But I feel that the look of the two films still go together nicely.
Friday the 13th and Friday the 13th Part 2 are both great films, and it’s a lot of fun to watch them with Joe Bob Briggs in this Monstervision presentation. An awesome way to spend a Friday the 13th.
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