- Directed by Sean S. Cunningham
- Written by Victor Miller, Ron Kurz
- Stars Betsy Palmer, Adrienne King, Jeannine Taylot, Robbi Morgan
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 35 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xqqej9T2gqI
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
It seemed strange revisiting the classic where it all began after all these years. Both Horror Guys saw this when it came out, and at least once or twice since then, but it’s been a while. It still holds up. The pacing is good, the direction is skillful. The acting is okay and the character development is a little weak, but it’s forgivable.
Synopsis
We begin at Camp Crystal Lake in 1958. There is a point-of-view shot of someone walking through a cabin full of sleeping people. A couple of the counselors sneak out to the barn and start kissing. We see the POV camera going upstairs to the barn loft where the couple is having sex. The teens are both brutally murdered. Credits roll.
In the present, Annie, carrying her backpack, walks into the town of Crystal Lake looking for the camp. She goes into a diner and asks; a man offers to drive her there. Ralph the harbinger says the place has a death curse and that she’s never coming back. The other people in the diner ask if they’re reopening the camp, and Annie says they are.
The driver asks Annie if she knows what happened, and he fills her in: “Camp Crystal Lake is jinxed.” Two kids were murdered in 1958; one more drowned in 1957. There have been fires since. The new owner, Steve Christy, has spent a fortune getting the place ready to reopen. He eventually drops her near camp.
Marcie, Jack, and Ned arrive at the camp as well. Alice is already there, and Boss Steve puts them all to work right away. Someone we don’t see picks up Annie and drives her the rest of the way to camp. Except they drive right past the camp entrance and keep on going. Annie jumps out of the car and runs through the woods with the killer in pursuit. Annie winds up dead in the woods with her throat cut.
All the counselors go swimming and Ned drowns; no- it’s just a ruse to get mouth-to-mouth from one of the girls. Annie finds a snake in her cabin, and the group practically destroys the cabin in the hunt for the thing. They finally kill it with a machete.
Officer Dorf, a motorcycle cop comes by to warn them about Crazy Ralph, who’s on a bender. Alice soon finds Ralph hiding in the pantry, and he goes on about the curse again. “God sent me. I got ta warn ya. You’re doomed to stay!”
Later, Jack and Marcie start making out, and Ned looks on with jealousy as he goes off to do his own thing. It starts storming, so Jack and Marcie go into a cabin to continue what they were doing. They don’t see Ned’s bloody body on the upper bunk. Jack dies from an arrow through the throat, and Marcie gets the ax.
Brenda, Bill, and Annie, meanwhile, start to play “Strip Monopoly.”
Steve is stuck in town at the diner talking to Sandy, the waitress there. He finally leaves and drives back to camp. He breaks down, and Sgt. Tierney gives him a ride. Tierney complains about the higher crime rate when it’s Friday the 13th or the full moon. Tierney gets an emergency call and lets Steve out to walk the rest of the way.
Brenda remembers she left her cabin windows open and runs out into the rain without her clothes. She narrowly avoids being killed in the shower house, but eventually makes it back to her cabin. She hears someone crying, “Help me” and goes outside to search in the woods in the storm. She winds up on the archery range and becomes an easy target.
Annie and Bill hear Brenda’s scream, and they both go to check it out. They find a bloody ax, but no body. They break into the office to call the police, but the phones are out– we see the lines have been cut.
Steve finally arrives at the camp sign and he sees someone he knows; someone who kills him.
The power goes off at the camp, and Bill lights a lantern. He goes to check on the generator while Alice sleeps on the couch. She wakes up and eventually goes looking for Bill. She finds him, stuck to the generator building’s door with more arrows.
Alice screams and runs through the woods. She goes into a cabin and barricades the door (she piles a bunch of stuff in front of a door that opens outwards).
She looks out the window and sees Steve’s car drive up. She runs outside, and finds that it’s not Steve, it’s Mrs. Voorhees, an old friend of Steve’s family. Alice tells her all about what happened, but Mrs. Voorhees says she’ll take care of everything.
The two of them go back into the cabin and find Brenda’s body. “What monster could have done this?” the woman asks. “Steve should never have opened this place after all that trouble.” She then talks about how the young boy, Jason, drowned in 1957, because the counselors were making love elsewhere.
We learn that Mrs. Voorhees was Jason’s mother, and today is his birthday. She admits that she killed everyone to make them pay for what happened to little Jason.
Alice whacks the crazy woman and runs out, stumbling across several more bodies on the way. We then see just how crazy Mrs. Voorhees is as she talks to herself using his voice. Not once, not twice, but three times does Alice knock the woman out and run away without finishing her off. There is more running, hunting, and chasing.
Alice smacks the lunatic woman with a frying pan and runs out to the boat docks. Mrs. Voorhees catches up yet again, and there’s another fight, but this time, Alice grabs a machete and hacks the woman’s head right off.
In shock, Alice climbs into a canoe and goes off into the lake to calm down. When she wakes up in the morning, half-rotted Jason jumps up and grabs her…
NO! She wakes up in the hospital and talks to the police. She asks if Jason is dead too. Sgt. Tierney says that didn’t happen, so he doesn’t believe much of her story. “Then he’s still there,” Alice says.
Commentary
“Jack” was one of Kevin Bacon’s earliest major film appearances.
We get the iconic “chee-chee-chee-ha-ha-ha” sound just a minute or two into the story, so it wastes no time. There’s not really much character development here, but at least we can tell all the characters apart before they die.
The end, of course, reveals the killer to be Mrs. Voorhees. She killed the counselors in 1958 and was probably the one who started the fires that were mentioned. The name “Jason” doesn’t even come up until her explanation at the end. And Jason being the killer only comes in the sequels.
I like the pacing here. It never slows down for too much chit-chat, and people start dying right away. It’s no wonder they barely waited a year to make a sequel.