So I finally got around to watching Friday the 13th over the weekend. Yeah, I know it’s been out for forty years. Yeah, I understand it’s become something of a pop cultural touchstone. Yeah, I know I’m lame. In fact, the missus could hardly believe it.
“Wait,” she said, confusion furrowing her brow. “When you guys got together in high school and rented movies, what did you watch?”
Mostly Monty Python, it turns out, which I recognize makes me sound even lamer.
The thing is, Friday the 13th just…didn’t interest fourteen-year-old me. The entire horror genre was something I shrugged off, probably because my annoying older sister was so into it. (She had terrible taste in music, so I just assumed that translated to film.) The one exception was An American Werewolf in London—which I saw in the theater and love to this day—but for some reason, I never thought of it as horror.
Anyway.
Friday the 13th is…okay, I guess. The setting isn’t all that creepy and the characters are so one-dimensional I was actually looking forward to each one’s (hopefully) gruesome demise. But I gotta say, I wasn’t expecting the ending. That was a shocker.
The other thing I wasn’t expecting? Bill—the guy pinned to the door of the generator shed near the end of the movie—was played by Harry Crosby, son of Bing. Sure, it’s tenuous, but there’s a Spokane connection to one of the foundational films of the slasher genre.
Go figure.
