Halloween 2021: September 22nd

Friday the 13th (1980)

The “Friday the 13th” series has such a rabid fan base, its iconography so totally absorbed into the pop culture unconsciousness, that you forget its humble roots. The original was just a simple exploitation movie, made for 550,000 dollars by a guy who got his start in porn and spent his entire career chasing trends. Sean S. Cunningham was replicating proven formulas here too, as “Friday the 13th” obviously stands in “Halloween's” shadow. This is what the many critics who still dismiss these movies say. Maybe Cunningham was just in the right place at the right time. That he got lucky when Paramount distributed his little movie and gave it a major advertising push, kicking off a multi-million dollar franchise. It's easy to imagine an alternate universe where one of the other cheap slasher movies that came out in 1980 got scooped up instead. Where kids all over the world wear the motorcycle helmet from “Night School” on October 31st, instead of Jason's hockey mask. Yet no movie becomes this beloved on luck alone. As I watch through the “Friday the 13th” franchise this Horror-fest season, let me try and argue for this series' status as art.

The critics are definitely right about one thing though: “Friday the 13th” is derivative. Screenwriter Victor Miller has admitted that he was instructed to rip-off “Halloween.” Both movies begin with a crime in the past, feature a title based off a calendar event, contain teenagers humping, and have a tomboyish heroine facing the killer alone in the last third. The camera taking the point of view of the murderer was also likely stolen from “Halloween's” opening scene. (Though some has suggested that Italian giallo might've influenced this choice.) You can even make the case that Crazy Ralph acts as a Dr. Loomis figure, shouting grave warnings about the evil that is too come. Having Alice fight off the killer alone, and not having Ralph or another male authority figure come to her rescue, is about the only meaningful way “Friday the 13th” deviates from the “Halloween” blueprint. Famously, that's not the only better movie this one rips off either. The shock ending, Jason's grand entrance into horror movie history, is obviously stolen from “Carrie.” And it doesn't even make sense within the reality that the film has established up to that point.

The characters are archetypal, at best. Marcie and Jack are defined solely by their horniness for each other. Ned is the obnoxious prankster character. Brenda is Alice's bolder friend while Bill is just some bland guy. Yet, oddly, I don't find the first act of “Friday the 13th” – the Twenty Minutes with Jerks portion of the film – tedious. We are watching a group of young people go about their summer together. They go swimming and goof off in the water. They sneak off to make-out with their boyfriends, tell stupid jokes among themselves, or perform menial tasks around the camp. (Far more of this original film is devoted to the councilors actually doing their job than I recalled.) The most exciting thing that happens is a snake gets into the girls' cabin and someone suggests a game of strip Monopoly. There's something, dare I say, almost naturalistic about these scenes. The characters are not well-defined and the cast is not especially distinguished. But they all bring a lived-in quality to their roles. These are normal people in mundane situations.

What also surprised me, re-watching this film for the first time in years after seeing it regularly as a teenager, is how genuinely creepy I found it. And not during the moments I expected either. Save for an occasional image like an axe shadow cast on the wall, cinematographer Barry Abrams does not do especially notable work. (This is one of only seven credits for him.) Yet the lingering image of a canoe rocking gently on the lake, as a storm starts blow in, is softly unnerving. The councilors' summer of youthful fun is about to come to an abrupt end, that image seems to say. Later, before she knows that all of her friends are already dead, Alice makes coffee inside a darkened cabin. The only real sound is the crickets and animals of the woods. I get a similar feeling of forested isolation when Brenda is preparing for bed in her cabin. “Friday the 13th” is quieter than I remembered. It gives a good idea of how truly unprotected these kids are out in the woods, how vulnerable their innocence really is.

A lot of “Friday the 13th" is quiet but not all of it. Henry Manfredini's score, save for those iconic “ki-ki-ma-mas,” is blatantly derivative of “Psycho's” score, so there's another classic this movie rips off. The music blares frantically throughout the last third. Yet the suspense never quite generates because there's so little for us to latch onto with these characters. Watching them goof-off is more compelling than thinking about whether they'll live or die. Obviously, most of them are going to die. The movie does it best to deliver shocks. Tom Savini has bright red blood spurt from Kevin Bacon's neck or pins a body to a cabin door. (Though far more of the bloodshed is off-screen in this first one then most would admit.) As much as the movie hammers the shrieking music or bold gore, “Friday the 13th” really isn't scary.

This is most clear during the last act, where Alice being pursued by Mrs. Voorhees starts to feel like its going on too long. (This was an obvious attempt to replicate the long section of “Halloween,” where its just Laurie Strode and the Shape.) The twist ending that Mrs. Voorhees is the killer is, of course, complete bullshit. We've never met this character before this moment, so we can't be surprised that she's the murderer. Pamela ranting off her murderous motivation, mere seconds after meeting Alice, is contrived at best. The only moment that really works here is Alice's slow realization that her apparent savior is actually the deranged lunatic she's been running from. Adrienne King's wide eyes convey that quite well.

And yet... There is something compelling about Jason's origin story here. “Friday the 13th” gently, probably unintentionally, invokes the image of carefree youth suddenly ending for seemingly no reason. Jason was also a silly kid without a care in the world once. His life senselessly came to an end too. Pamela Voorhees, so trapped in her anguish, recreates that tragedy over and over again on any youngster that crosses her path. Her boy was denied a life and so will everyone else's child. Betsy Palmer's performance is certainly hammy yet there's something to be said for her sweaty, unhinged proclamations of doom. Of her giving her dead child, very much still alive inside her mind, a (squeaky, goofy) voice again. 

If “Halloween” is a midwest urban legend, “Friday the 13th” is a distinctively East Coast campfire story. The first film is explicitly set in New Jersey, right across the Hudson Bay from the Cropsey Maniac's stomping grounds. The unpretentious, unglamorous, hairy, scrawny cast makes this working class feel all the more obvious. As nonsensical as the final jump-scare is, as meaningless and nakedly commercial as it is for Jason to leap from the waters, it's the moment in the movie that makes you feel the most like its characters are living inside a ghost story. As dopey and crass as the original “Friday the 13th" is, it can paint a surprisingly compelling vision of normal life interrupted at times. Its charms are sweaty but they still work, even when separated from the billion dollar franchise it spawned. [8/10]

Face of the Screaming Werewolf (1964)

Somehow, this is the thirteenth year I've been doing the Halloween Horror-fest Blog-a-thon and I've never had a reason before to talk about Jerry Warren. Warren was a Hollywood day-player before he started to direct, write, and produce his own bottom-of-the-barrel Z-grade horror flicks like “Man Beast” or “The Incredible Petrified World.” It wasn't until Warren started buying up the rights to foreign-language monster movies and hastily re-editing them into “new” movies that his infamy would really grow. Warren was especially fond of taking multiple movies and awkwardly cutting them together, sometimes with some brief new footage providing the weakest of links between the unrelated scenes. Warren would pull this trick again with 1964's “Face of the Screaming Werewolf,” a movie that is notable only because it's technically the last time Lon Chaney Jr. would ever don the Wolfman make-up.

“Face of the Screaming Werewolf” is hobbled together from two Mexican monster movies. The first of which is “The Aztec Mummy,” about the titular corpse seeking the gold and the girl stolen from its tomb. The second is “La Casa del Terror,” about a mad scientist operating out of a wax museum. He steals a newly uncovered mummy which is then revived and revealed to also be a werewolf. (That's when Lon Chaney Jr. enters the picture.) Warren's incredibly awkward attempt to link these two unrelated films involve an expedition to Ecudor uncovering two mummies. Both are taken back to Mexico, where monster movie shenanigans ensue and a pair of crusty American cops try to uncover the truth. 

Years later, Jerry Warren would admit in an interview that he had no higher aspirations towards art. He was an exploitation filmmaker in the truest sense of the word, out to make a buck as quickly and cheaply as possible. He admitted that little time and skill was taken with assembling his motion pictures. This is very obvious in “Face of the Screaming Werewolf.” Very little dubbing of the original footage was done. You get the impression Warren was attempting to hide that the original footage is Mexican in origin. As many scenes of people talking as possible were removed. Dialogue is dubbed in either via voice-over or when the actors' backs are turned. The little bit of new footage Warren shot for the movie – largely devoted to detective poking into things – has a totally different film grain and score from the rest of the movie. Scene transitions are blunt and disorientating, cutting in the middle of shots and with little regard for time and place. 

As for trying to make heads or tails of this hatchet job, that's simply impossible. The movie is a hilariously incoherent patchwork of unrelated footage. Very little attempt is made to fuse the two movies' plots. The mummy stuff occupies the first half-hour of the movie and is never really resolved. (This is not even the first movie Warren would edit from “The Aztec Mummy.”) Warren then moves on to the werewolf scenes, never explaining what happened to the first mummy or how it connects to the second mummy/werewolf that appears in the story. The closest “Face of the Screaming Werewolf” comes to incorporating the two unrelated plots is when brief scenes of gangsters talking, from “Casa del Terror,” are inserted among the “Aztec Mummy” footage. Otherwise, this might as well be an anthology movie made up of two stand-alone stories. The results are frequently hilarious. The final scene Warren inserts, of his detectives obviously from a totally different time and place dryly commenting on footage from another movie, is as dismissive and surreal a conclusion as you can imagine.

What do we make of the glimpses we get at the source movies? The Mexican Aztec Mummy movies have defenders and you can see a certain creaky atmosphere to those scenes. The extensive flashback scenes aren't without a certain vim and vigor either. As for the werewolf footage, it's much sillier. That's probably because “Casa del Terror” was, in actuality, a comedy. Scenes of the wolfman lifting a woman over his shoulders, carrying her to another location, laying her down, and grabbing a different woman are very goofy. So is a scene where a random guy – the hero in the original film – survives a fall off a building by landing on an awning. Mostly, these scenes make me feel bad for Lon Chaney Jr., who was clearly not in good health. Seeing the iconic actor leap around a jail cell and limply re-enact his monster movie glory days is just depressing. (It's clearly not Chaney in the werewolf make-up through most of the movie and I don't even know if it's meant to be the same character in the original film.)

What entertainment value “Face of the Screaming Werewolf” has is mostly as unintentional comedy. Getting confused by the bashed-together plots and Warren's inept technical skills results in laughter in most cases. One imagines that the Mexican monster movies are interesting, as another culture's interpretation of American legends. The original footage occasionally gives us a hint of some shadowy atmosphere, which is intriguing. Perhaps I'll watch the unaltered films some day and gleam something deeper from them. Until then, I'll say this: Warren's desecration of these earlier movies, along with watching Lon Chaney Jr. drunkenly warble through his glory days, is valuable only as a source of camp. [4/10]

Creepshow: The Right Snuff / Sibling Rivalry

“Creepshow's” goes to space and beyond and then comes back down to Earth in this episode. In “The Right Snuff,” two astronauts are on a deep space mission. Major Ted Lockwood has invented gravitational technology that will change the world. This inflames the deep-seated jealousy inside Captain Alex Toomey. When Toomey learns that they will become the first humans to contact alien life, he takes extreme measures to insure he goes down in history. In “Sibling Rivalry,” verbose teenage girl Lola tells her high school councilor that her brother is trying to kill her. Upon returning home, Lola learns a far more startling truth: She's a vampire and her brother is trying to avenge their parents. But it's also more complicated than that.

“The Right Snuff” pairs a cool idea with a chilly execution until its messy ending. Alex's father was the first man to walk on Mars but also a huge asshole. This has left Alex with issues, that manifest as his father's voice berating him. (Director Joe Lynch, smartly, portrays this as the man's shadow on the wall.) This creates a slow-building tension, where we wait for Alex – played by a tightly wound Ryan Kwanten – to snap. Lynch is clearly influenced by “The Shining,” which is evident in the space station's red walls and a shot peering up at Kwanten's face. The eventual act of violence is brutally depicted. Sadly, “Creepshow's” insistence on including E.C. Comics-style poetic justice and a rubber monster leads to an ending that is heavy on exposition and dramatic reveals. If this had simply been a story of space madness and deep-rooted mental resentment, it would've been a lot better.

“Sibling Rivalry” starts with manic humor, as Lola recounts a number of anecdotes on the way to telling her counselor the point. The episode depicts these asides with exaggerated humor. That same wacky energy is deployed when Lola's vampiric tendencies kick in, via sudden and graphic gore. There probably should've been more focused on the bound between siblings, as that takes focus in the second half. However, the interaction between Maddie Nichols as Lola and Andrew Brodeur, as her brother, make it work. The way they spring back and forth between grave statements and childish joking is cute. The details behind how Lola became a vampire aren't as compelling and I wish Molly Ringwald, as the school councilor, was given more to do. Yet this is still an amusingly peppy and gory segment. [The Right Snuff: 6/10] [Sibling Rivalry: 7/10]

Godzilla Singular Point: Tigerish

The previous episode of "Singular Point" ended with a patch of sea turning red and a flock of Rodan emerging from it. This episode starts with the flying kaiju, more aggressive than the previous specimens seen, descending on Nigashio City. They are attracted to radio waves and begin to wreck havoc. Yun and Kato have a plan to lure the Rodans away from the city, with radio transmitters on their bike, but get trapped along the road with a teenage girl archery team. Meanwhile, Mei and Pero-2 – trapped on a train – hack into a maintenance robot and use it to fight off the dinosaurs and save Yun's life. Like before, the Rodans die suddenly but more trouble is to come.

"Tigerish" – no, I don't know what's up with these titles either – is the first episode of "Godzilla Singular Point" that feels like it fits in with a Halloween marathon. The sequence of the characters hiding from the Rodans, who are doing everything they can to break in and kill them, is properly intense. This show is doing a good job of putting a human perspective on the kaiju invasion premise. There's also some humor here, in the adorable sequence devoted to sardonic Satomi kindly letting the hacked robot out of the garage. I also continue to like the montages, following after every monster attack it seems, devoted to the media speculating about what the hell is exactly happening.

It's a strong episode but "Singular Point" still can't help but pile on the technobabble. There's a lot of talk about theoretical molecules. The moment where Yun has the A.I. on his phone design whistling arrows, that perfectly replicate Rodan's cry, pushes disbelief a little too far. I do like the relationship that is forming between Yun and Mei, where the two are communicating and helping each other out without ever meeting face-to-face. I'm intrigued to see where that'll go. "Tigerish" ends by teasing Godzilla's appearance again, which I feel like is going to be a chronic habit. Nevertheless, I'm starting to dig this program, even if its attempts to ground it's ridiculous premise in theoretical science is a little too much. [7/10]