Avidavr: Media Reviews

Tag: horror movie reflections

  • Day 8: Friday the 13th (1980)

    Goal: Find a horror classic I have no interest in, just to cross it off my list.

    What I know about it:
    I’ve seen bits and pieces of several Friday the 13th sequels. Every October, there’s usually a marathon, and I’ll turn it on for as long as I can stand. This isn’t much. I’ve definitely seen parts of 2, 3, 5, 7, and 8, and probably 4 and 6, though I couldn’t tell you which is which.

    My favorite was Part II—the one where Jason still had a sack over his head because the hockey mask hadn’t been invented yet. I caught the last forty minutes of it once, and it was shocky but exciting, almost like John Carpenter’s Halloween. I thought maybe I was missing something by not watching these all the way through. Then Part III came on and I laughed at how bored I was. Dull. In 3D.

    Still, there’s a weird pleasure in trying to tell the sequels apart. Turn on the Friday the 13th channel on Pluto TV and make everyone guess which entry it is. Sure, they’re all bad, but what kind of bad? Cheesy bad? Slow bad? Dialogue-from-another-planet bad? You’ll never remember the characters or even the kills, but the flavor of badness is always distinct.

    Despite all that, I’d never actually seen the original Friday the 13th. Cable marathons always started with Part II. I figured maybe the first one was too rough or too different. I’d heard The New Blood was the most entertaining, but ten minutes in, I realized there were better ways to spend an evening.

    So: my first Friday the 13th, start to finish.

    —

    After the movie

    That was… disappointing. Not because I hated it, but because I liked it at first. The first 45 minutes are immensely watchable: great introductions, fun little scenes, an effective sense of menace. At their best, Friday the 13th movies aren’t about bad dialogue—they’re about realistic bad dialogue. These kids actually sound like kids.

    Case in point: the Strip Monopoly scene. Everyone played Monopoly in 1980. Everyone had heard of stripping games. Combine the two and you get, well, this.

    > Brenda: “OK, you’re the banker. Remember what the penalty is for losing.”
    Bill: “What’s the penalty?”
    Brenda: “You lose a piece of clothing every time you lose money.”

    Girl, are you sure that makes sense? You lose money every turn in Monopoly. Are you wearing a hundred articles of clothing? Do you even own pants?

    No one ever seems to put their clothes back on, and, in true Monopoly fashion, they quit before the game even begins. One girl runs back to her cabin barefoot. They’ll finish in the morning, I guess. (Where are the camp’s kids?)

    The first half hour works because it forgets to be scary. It’s just a slice-of-life portrait of bored teenagers in 1980—hiking, joking, killing time. Honestly, if the whole movie had been that, I might’ve loved it on principle. It feels more like an art-house hangout movie than a slasher.

    Then the ideas dry up. The film turns into a faceless murder mystery where you never see the killer, just the aftermath. The deaths get bigger, the suspense smaller. The movie stops being about anything.

    The sequels fixed what didn’t work—mask, mythology, pacing—but broke what little it tried to do right. In time, Friday the 13th became the franchise that perfected its own mediocrity. Critics hated the original for being a ripoff of Halloween; Gene Siskel even spoiled it by naming the killer in his review out of spite. It has a 22 on Metacritic. But time has been kind: now it sits comfortably above 60% on Rotten Tomatoes, the horror fan’s version of “we were wrong.”

    I think people admire it now the way musicians admire the rough early versions of their genre. Fred Durst once said he liked the Beastie Boys because “it’s nice to see an early example of our style of music done right.” Friday the 13th is like that—an imperfect template everyone else copied to death. It didn’t invent the superstition, the killer, or the kids, but it invented the business model.

    In 1979, producer Sean S. Cunningham took out a full-page Variety ad for a movie that didn’t exist.

    > “FROM THE PRODUCERS OF LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT — FRIDAY THE 13TH — the most terrifying film ever made.”

    No script, no plot, just a title. He saw that Halloween proved a scary date could sell, so he picked the unluckiest one on the calendar. The ad worked, and within months he had to start filming. Victor Miller wrote a quick script about camp counselors, a drowned boy, and his vengeful mother.

    It’s not a great movie. But it is a great idea for one, or at least a great title they were determined to turn into *something* everyone would want to see eventually. It is the series that perpetually almost had an idea that really, really worked.

    *Oh well. We’ll market it anyway. *

    Maybe the purest example of a movie that exists because it sounded like one.

    5/10

  • Day 7: Heretic (2024)

    Goal: Find the most notable current sleeper horror hit.

    —

    What I know about it:

    Next to nothing. It’s got a 90% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 71 on Metacritic. For this week’s theme, I wanted a movie that feels big but that I somehow know literally nothing about.

    It has Hugh Grant and it seems to be about Mormons. He’s some kind of weird loner with a torture house. It seems like the movie everyone will still be talking about in five years. Just a hunch. Let’s see if I’m right.

    —

    After the movie:

    Do you remember when Bend It Like Beckham came out, and at first you wondered how they got Kate Winslet to seem 18 years old? Then you realized it wasn’t Kate Winslet but her strange, skinny doppelgänger named Keira Knightley? She ended up going pretty far, mostly because a lot of screenwriters had been writing parts for Kate Winslet five years earlier — and Winslet would’ve turned them down anyway. Keira Knightley turned out to be great. But she was no Kate Winslet.

    Sophie Thatcher is the new Keira Knightley. She’s not getting cast in parts written for Kate Winslet — she looks and sounds exactly like Emma Stone. I’d wager Sophie Thatcher is actually a more natural actress. She’s great in Heretic, and even better in 2025’s sleeper hit Companion, which I actually recommend even more for this week’s theme: “the sleeper horror hit.”

    Sophie Thatcher feels so much like Emma Stone that there’s a bit of a “new Coke” imitation effect going on. In Companion, that worked perfectly because she was supposed to feel like an imitation of the real thing. But in Heretic, there’s a little whiplash when she starts talking. How did this extremely smart, modern girl get cast as a Mormon missionary?

    If this movie had been made twelve years ago, Emma Stone would’ve been perfect. She had that “smart but innocent” quality — the thing that peaked with Poor Things. Sophie feels like Emma’s 12-years-younger little sister who also decided to act. Seeing this modern, post-ironic type trying to convert unsuspecting Christians to this quirky, folksy little underdog religion… I just wanted to say, “Shouldn’t you be in Brooklyn? Go home.”

    I’m stalling. What was the movie and what did I think of it? It was small and imteresting. Honestly, it feels like it could’ve been a play — maybe one converted to film at the last second. This is a horror movie tailor-made to play at sorority movie nights at Brigham Young University. Modern girls who freely explore the world, who’ve seen South Park and homemade internet porn, yet firmly believe in their mission: to tell the world about their faith. They’re believable. Exactly as good as young people who’ve never had a reason to question what they believe.

    On the other side of that coin is Hugh Grant as Mr. Reed, the titular “heretic” — every Mormon missionary’s worst nightmare. The poster has him smiling, staring at a game board with the two sisters as miniature chess pieces. Mr. Reed plays with them like a cat tossing a mouse, keeping himself amused before the kill. “You still believe that my wife is in the other room baking blueberry pie, despite all the evidence to the contrary.”

    Heretic has a handful of great ideas, and kind of a boatload of padding. Case in point: in addition to religion, Mr. Reed is obsessed with copyright disputes. He brings up two examples — Monopoly and “Creep” by Radiohead — as evidence that remakes and copies are more successful than originals.

    He’s got a point with Monopoly. I’m a board game hobbyist, and even I’d never heard of The Landlord’s Game, the 1904 prototype Monopoly ripped off almost entirely. Looking it up online made me respect it even more. One of its “Chance Cube” outcomes said, “5: Caught robbing a hen-roost: Go to jail. 10: Caught robbing the public. Take $200 from the board. The players will now call you Senator.” You can’t copyright board-game mechanics — or religious texts, for that matter. Mr. Reed makes that point too: religions are all just cover versions of each other.

    Where he loses me is with his deep affection for The Hollies’ “The Air That I Breathe.” Yes, the guitar progression is the same as “Creep,” and Thom Yorke’s phrasing is similar. But “The Air That I Breathe” has no hook. It’s a song no one under 70 cares about. The Hollies were basically the Thomas Edison of 1970s pop — taking half-forgotten ideas and dressing them up without subtlety. I’d have been way more impressed if Mr. Reed compared Joseph Smith to The Hollies directly, and left Radiohead out of it.

    Screenwriter, I see what you’re doing. But no one likes that song.

    But that last shot? Very good — it should be studied. It’s nice when little moments call back and actually have purpose. There’s a famous movie that ends with a man believing he survived a horror, cutting into a birthday cake… and we realize he’s still trapped, imagining a happy ending. Heretic’s ending is like that — but more artful. It’s not trying to scare you with a hand bursting from the ground next to a gravestone. It’s believable — truthful about what happens to the mind when coping with an actual human tragedy. A perfect little movie moment.

    Still, this is a decent movie. It feels like a filmed play — one that’s not really worth seeking out unless you’re curious. It doesn’t have much going for it other than novelty and a few twists, almost all in the first 40 minutes.

    If you see it, maybe you’ll agree.

    (That’s not a spoiler.)

    6.5/10