Publication Date: 10-25-2025

Friday the 13th (1980) review

Dir. Sean S. Cunningham

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★★

Allow me to use this opportunity to praise The Last Picture House in Davenport, IA — a gorgeous, boutique theater cofounded by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, the men behind A Quiet Place and Heretic. The Quad Cities natives wanted not only to preserve the theatrical moviegoing experience, but enhance it for a market that typically doesn’t get theaters of this magnitude. The last two Fridays, my girlfriend, Catherine, and I have ventured down to Davenport (roughly an hour drive from where we live) and caught screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and the original Friday the 13th on their incredible rooftop lounge.

To make matters even better, not only do they have custom cocktails and mocktails, but on the bar sits a 13” TV/VCR combo player. You have a plethora of options for tapes you can play while you sip your drinks and indulge in light-bites. During our hour-long interlude following our screening of Friday the 13th and the start of Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, of course I elected to pop in a VHS of Bio-Dome. My college-aged self would’ve loved to see me now: drink in hand, pretty girl by my side, guzzling libations and watching one of my guiltiest pleasures in a state-of-the-art theater owned by two tremendously talented writer/directors.

Back to Friday the 13th, what I’m ultimately here to re-review following my mediocre write-up published back in 2012. Many people chiefly believe that the first movie in a series is the best, for sequels more-often-than-not prove the law of diminishing returns is always accurate. For many franchises, that’s ultimately the case. Friday the 13th is the exception. There are at least three sequels in my mind that surpass the original in quality and effectiveness as a work of the slasher genre: Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, and the eminently controversial Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan.

To quote the late, great Charles Bukowski, “it began as a mistake.” Motivated by the success of John Carpenter’s Halloween, director Sean S. Cunningham took out an ad in Variety in 1979 to help sell the film before Victor Miller had even penned a screenplay. Not a great deal of money (or a very good script) was ultimately needed, and production was fast-tracked and the end result ignited a bidding war for distribution rights.

Friday the 13th follows a group of six camp counselors — Alice (Adrienne King), Marcie (Jeannine Taylor), Brenda (Laurie Bartram), Jack (Kevin Bacon), Bill (Harry Crosby), and Ned (Mark Nelson) — at Camp Crystal Lake in New Jersey. It’s a camp referred to as “Camp Blood” by some locals due to its unsavory history, but Steve Christy (Peter Brouwer), the camp’s new owner, is hellbent on revitalizing it. When night falls, sex ensues. Jack and Marcie explore one another’s bodies in a cabin; Alice, Brenda, and Bill play “Strip Monopoly;” and Ned wanders the campground alone. All ill-advised decisions that will render most of them slashed by a knife by an unseen individual lurking the grounds of Camp Crystal Lake.

Jason Voorhees, who would become the iconic fixture of the film, is mostly absent, weaseled into the premise by way of a dream sequence and the iconic closing scene. The ultimate reveal of the killer, involving legendary Broadway actress Betsy Palmer, becomes an unexpectedly glorious piece of camp and unpredictability.

The effort to get there, however, can reasonably be seen as plodding. Friday the 13th doesn’t have a great deal of dialog, and even less motivation to let us get to know these counselors as characters. They’re lambs to slaughter, and the kills themselves are remarkably rudimentary, yet attractive to horror/gore-hounds thanks to the copious bloodshed. My favorite remains Kevin Bacon’s untimely death, made even worse due to him smoking a cigarette and believing, if only for a half second, it’s the cigarette that’s making him cough and not the knife closing in on his neck.

It’s also worth mentioning that Adrienne King — in only her fifth film appearance — as Alice stands out as a resourceful “final girl,” as the contemporarily popular term is known. She’s quiet and mindful with her decision-making, and also holds her own in the climax, of course underscored by a final shot that delivers one last jump-scare before the credits begin.

As I opined in my original review, Friday the 13th remains an unintentional classic: a film conceptualized to cash-in on the early slasher boom that turned small budgets into large returns. Ten sequels, one reboot, a line of merchandise, and a villain etched into the fabric of the American horror genre, and I’d say the returns were copious and then some. If you can catch this on the big screen, in a setting half as good as The Last Picture House, its success proves heightened with a large, involved crowd.

Starring: Adrienne King, Harry Crosby, Laurie Bartram, Mark Nelson, Kevin Bacon, Jeannine Taylor, Robbi Morgan, Peter Brouwer, and Betsy Palmer. Directed by: Sean S. Cunningham.