Having just seen A Nightmare on Elm Street for the first time as well, I was obviously comparing it to this movie as I watched. Friday the 13th came out only four years earlier but feels like it’s from a different era. Alice is no Nancy, and the movie as a whole has nothing about it that felt creative or nightmarish to me.

The murders unfold at a predictable, plodding pace, and the parts in between don’t feel suspenseful and aren’t used to give any color or texture to the characters or the setting. It’s just sex, murder, strip Monopoly, murder. One of my notes reads, “Bill lights two lanterns very slowly while nothing happens.” There’s even some cheating: the movie gets us used to a creeping POV shot from the killer’s perspective and then uses it in scenes where the reverse shot reveals that no one is there. No fair!

I will say the twist, if it is a twist, worked on me, because I knew the name Jason Voorhees going in and genuinely had no idea that the killer in this first film at least is his mother. It’s a fairly cool idea, and I’m glad there was some kind of motivation given, however thin, for why a murderer would target counselors at a specific camp.

Once Mrs. Voorhees shows up, there’s at least some consistent action, even if Alice’s choices frustrated me over and over again. I hereby promise that if I’m ever battling a slasher, and I bean them with a blunt object and they go down for a minute, I will continue bludgeoning and not just half-run away to hide in a different part of the camp.

So I didn’t care for this one. 

Stray observations:

• What made the cops show up at the end?