Musings on Mr. Voorhees

If you came of age in the 1980s, the Friday the 13th series was always best experienced like some secret ritual:

You're in a basement, all the lights off. Everyone's candy stashes are stacked and organized and already being devoured. Parental units slumber above, comforted by the assurance that "we're just gonna watch Police Academy 3 again."

Your sleeping bags congregate around a temperamental secondhand RCA like you're expecting it to deliver a message of gore-drenched enlightenment; if you were raised Catholic, this process seems vaguely familiar.

Someone produces a ratty VHS clamshell like it's samizdat, and the VCR briefly threatens to eat the tape before a blurry FBI scolding and then the old blue/white Paramount logo appears, and the festivities commence.

You know the formula like you know the national anthem: Camp counselors party down and assault each other with bad dialogue and 80s fashions, and then it's a jolly hour of sex-scream-slash. The stories are commonly referred to as morality tales, but morality would imply the presence of a system of thought, and that's outside of this series' concerns. It's merely an irresistible package sugar-hyped 8-year-olds thrill to: rudimentary plotting, magic-show makeup effects, and of course, topless women.

You'd do two or three in a row and you'd pass out somewhere around 4am, sugar-crashing onto the basement floor with a camp counselor's screams ringing in your ears. Manfredini's shock chords are a helpful periodic wake-up call, ensuring you miss nary a kill; the nude scenes have already been rewound six or seven dozen times and carefully committed to memory.

And that was how it would go.

These movies stank to high heaven (Part VI, doubly capped above, being a notable exception) and we loved every woodenly-acted, poorly-shot, atrociously-scripted moment of them. It wasn't about story, performance, or nuance; it was a freak show, an illicit experience, the worse, the better. Cheap thrills at their finest.

It seemed sort of wrong to get the flicks on DVD, and it seems even more so to get the original on Blu-Ray; an extra commentary track and 34 whopping seconds of restored footage already viewable in the previous box set isn't much of an incentive.

As for the remake, opening, of course, this Friday the 13th, it will likely be just like Platinum Dunes' other visits to the well: slickly produced, competently scripted and performed, put together with obvious finesse; not bad so much as aggressively forgettable. Everything, essentially, that its predecessors usually were not.

Minus that basement-VCR disreputability, there doesn't seem to be much left to care about.