On "Friday The 13th"

A while back, a friend of mine and I talked about the "Friday The 13th" films while driving across town to a video store. Those are two things that most people never do, and we were doing them at the same time, which should tell you plenty about us both. In any case, we talked about a number of points regarding the aforementioned franchise (which was one when franchises still happened organically) at length.

More recently, I have been re-watching a lot of the films in rapid-fire fashion. Doing so has been thought-provoking. As a boy, I watched most of those films on the USA Network whenever the calendar actually hit Friday the 13th. The films were heavily censored, but it was enough for me. Another consequence of seeing the films that way was that Gilbert Gottfried and Rhonda Shear (who hosted those nights, because that was something TV still did back then) were as much a part of the films as the stars.

In any case, the way I've watched those movies more recently was perhaps more objective than when I was fourteen. At the time, they showed the later films in the series most often, and so those were the ones I liked. Today, those ones are clearly the worst, having long left behind any tiny shred of reality that might have been present in the earlier ones. Of course those too weren't very realistic, but they sure didn't have the supernatural elements of entries like Part 7 (telekinesis) or Part 9 (mystical daggers).

The earlier films also didn't desperately chase after whatever they thought was hip for teens that year as the later ones did. The characters are less ridiculous in entries such as the original or Part 2. They didn't establish the characters so that you cared about them any better (that was John Carpenter's forte), but the early characters are at least not dated jokes. I appreciate that more now. At the time it was the kills and the sexual content that mattered, which is funny, considering how eviscerated those scenes were on USA.

I still have fondness in my heart for Friday The 13, especially by comparison with the most recent films which pair him with Freddy Krueger (and the standalone remake, of course). Even so, I must admit to myself now that the films were nearly unwatchable for longer than they were good or even so-so. It makes me sad to face that, but knowing so now has allowed me to appreciate first-hand all the films that Friday the 13th imperfectly aped, and so there is the silver lining.