Friday the 13th (1980)★★★☆☆

Would you believe I’d never seen this movie before today? I’ve seen clips of it several times, and I’m familiar with the character of Jason Voorhees, but I’d never gotten around to watching this from start to finish before.

And I’m a little disappointed. I figured with Kevin Bacon in it, it had to be good! But it was just okay. Not bad, but not as good as, say, A Nightmare on Elm Street (then again, few things are). And no, I don’t plan on seeing Freddy vs. Jason any time soon. Unless I run out of other movies to watch first.

Anyway, I don’t have too much to say about this one. I felt like the pacing was off for a slasher film, I suppose. There were way too many drawn out sequences with lots of talking and no murdering. The action happened sporadically enough throughout the film that it was hard to be scared.

And I’m sure it didn’t help that I already knew the big plot twist for this film. In fact, I’m also sure that’s been a major contributing factor to my failure to watch this before now. I already knew the whole plot and didn’t have high hopes that the movie would be so good that I’d get immersed in the storytelling (as opposed to just the story) anyway. As such, no hopes were dashed when I didn’t.

But this isn’t a bad one and it’s probably a horror classic in some schools of thought, so I wouldn’t try to stop you from watching it if you wanted to.