In honor of the lovely Friday the 13th blogathon over at Final Girl, I am watching "Friday the 13th" for the first time and liveblogging! I do not know how much interest this will hold for anyone, but here we go....
11:00 p.m. "You're an American original." That's for sure.
First ten minutes are pretty super. Snogging, homicide, a death curse, a ponderous silence from suspicious locals... Art Boy's favorite part is the music leading up to the shattering glass behind the title.
Art Boy: "It's like watching a template, isn't it?"
Sex is clearly all Kevin Bacon ever thinks about.
11:02 p.m. Oh my God, the guy chopping wood is a Never-Nude! (Cutoff shorts.)
Alice, the Final Girl, is introduced. (Art Boy has already wrecked the movie for me by showing me the very last scene.) I posit that her Final Girl characteristics are her efficiency and her comparative sexlessness. I compare her high-waisted, form-fitting yet boyish trousers to those of Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween. Mike observes that Jamie's character in The Fog is, like Alice, an artist. Hmmm. Hmmmm.
The counselors are running around in short-shorts getting their foreplay on.
11:09 p.m. Girl running through the woods! Very Evil Dead. Nice Psycho-esque music. Why do girls running in the woods always twist their ankles?
I love the bird sound effects in this movie.
Graphic onscreen death! I like how her expression is that of profound grief, rather than, say, pain... so many years she could have spent with "kids" gone to waste.
11:13 p.m. "What's Vitamin C do?"
"I think it neutralizes the nitrites or something."
Art Boy: "This is just filler until the next death."
This k-k-k-k ha-ha-ha-ha business is very unsettling to the cats.
A symbolic snake is introduced into the Garden of Eden that is Camp Crystal Lake. "I can't sleep with a snake in here!" says sexless Alice. These guys are just hopeless battling this snake.
I like the moment when the snake is macheted and everyone looks horrified, the pillow feathers drifting slowly onto their heads.
Art Boy, rounding up incontinent housecat for trip to the litter box: "You're so easy to catch! You're worse than a camp counselor."
11:16 p.m. "We ain't going to stand for no weirdness out here."
The creepy police officer swings by Camp Crystal Lake on his motorbike, convinced they're all doing drugs. It would be jarring if there were a tone to jar. Art Boy is convinced the creepy deputy from Cabin Fever is a direct reference to this guy.
Oh cool, Ralph is back. "You're doomed. You're all doomed!" Ralph and his little vest and hat are awesome. I want him at all my parties. His work done, Ralph pedals away into the forest. Alice, having thrust out her hip defiantly yet sexlessly, goes back inside.
11:23 p.m. "Gonna tear down that valley like a son of a gun." What does that mean? Kevin Bacon is a poet. But he's not as cool as his blood-dreaming girlfriend.
I love any horror movie set in the woods -- creepy dark trees, moving shadows, old cabins with wood floors really get my horror-geek on. This movie gets an impressive amount of mileage out of the lake, though. Lakes are even scarier to me than forests, but I had never considered lake-horror as a separate genre. Hmm.
Sex scene with crisp white panties!
Guitar by the fire with thunder raging outside. Suddenly, "We're going to play strip Monopoly!" Art Boy: "The moral of this is, learn to play guitar."
Back to sex scene with unconvincing vocal enjoyment on the actors' part. AAAAA! A dead body!
11:29 p.m. "Alice draws first blood." She's a ruthless strip-Monopoly player! This will aid her final survival.
We're trying without success to make out what the book is on Kevin Bacon's bedside table. Maybe we're missing the.... point? Wow. That is a very nice-looking death! You go, Tom Savini!Now the ungallant killer is going after his girlfriend while she's having a wee. I point out the rudeness of this to Art Boy, who tells me we are playing dirty pool. I wish I had as much fun prancing around solitary restrooms in just my panties as she seems to be doing. AAA! Axe!
11:38 p.m. Watching Steve's dinner in the diner. It's interesting to watch this movie make the occasional effort to establish where all its characters are, in case you were wondering if any of them were the killer. There seems to be no real motive for the killings so far, so how anyone could have a theory about the killer at this point is unclear.
Still, just the trappings of the woodsy setting, with the crappy old sinks and flimsy walls and dim lights, are super creepy.
Suddenly, we're in a vampire movie. A counselor is getting into bed with a single candle, wearing a long lacy nightgown, when suddenly she hears a child's voice crying outside in the rain. Brr! It's shameless genre-skipping, but who cares?
11:45 p.m. The sound in this movie is super-nice. I like how the swinging door sounds like a faint scream.
This movie makes me feel like an 11-year-old. I'm not sure if it's having wanted to see it at age 11 and having been thwarted, or the haircuts, or what. Or maybe it's the way it's perfectly designed for talking to your friends while it's going on, then looking up periodically to go "'AAAA! An axe!" or whatever. Its overall creepy mood is lovely but I'm not sure that it would reward close attention the way, say, Halloween does... Time for another beer!
11:54 p.m. OK, I sort of zoned out for a minute. Alice is making a cup of coffee in what Art Boy describes as real time. "This is where I learned how to make coffee," he says. I completely love her old stove. ... it is a classic horror-movie-in-the-woods prop. Her coffee-making goes on and on and on! The tension is unbearable! She can't stand it anymore either and goes out calling for Bill, who has gone searching around in a red poncho. Uh-oh... there's the poncho... where's Bill?AAAA! Bill is dead.
Alice is all that is left! She immediately figures out a smart way to barricade herself into the cabin. This is where, I think, the movie will start to get really interesting. All the death setpieces are fun, but knowing that she's going to have to actually battle whatever's out there, rather than just make a grieving face and die before it, is much more exciting.
AAIIEE! Here comes a body through the kitchen window! I actually just screamed out loud. Art Boy is laughing at me.
12:02 a.m. Mrs. Voorhees has arrived. "It's just this place and the storm, that's why you're upset!" God, I wish I could be surprised by the ending -- that would be quite a twist to feel.Mrs. V. explains herself. Is this story an inverse "Psycho"?
Ack! "Don't let her get away, Mommy!" says Mrs. Voorhees. I've got my hands over my face. Gaaah! I cannot believe this movie is actually scaring me!
12:08 a.m. Fight! Alice and Mrs. V. are bitch-slapping and throwing spools of thread at each other.
I like the visual parallel between the full moon in the upper right and Alice's blouse disappearing into the forest as she runs off.
Art Boy wants to know if he's the only person who can tolerate beer and chocolate together.
Horror movie rule: Never collapse in relief with your back to a door.
12:14 a.m. Alice surprises Mrs. V. with a frying pan. Honestly! Why can girls not fight with axes? Is there some kind of rule about that? Ah, here we go. Mrs. V. will strike a blow for women's lib. Oh my, and she bites too! But she's no match for the head-severing Alice.
And now what you want to do is take a boat onto the lake into the dead of night. Still, this next scene is pretty gorgeous, with the leaves and the water and all.
Art Boy, who is cool and remembers stuff, is describing everyone getting up, waiting for the credits, which are clearly about to roll. The movie is over. AAAIIIEEEEE!!!!
I knew it was going to happen, I'd even seen it, and it still made me scream.
This movie is fabulous.
12:23 a.m. "Hairstyles by Six Feet Under."Very nice! We may watch #2 right away, but I will spare you people the updates. Have a nice evening.
To recap: We've been watching "Friday the Thirteenth," which I had never seen. At a tender age, I got in deep trouble with my mom after planning to go to a friend's house and watch, on video, all the F13 movies that had come out (perhaps five?). Mom found out about it and I wasn't allowed to go... so I have never seen any of these movies. But I love Halloween and Cabin Fever, among others, and today seems like as good a time as any to get caught up on this series with the help of my sardonic yet well informed Art Boy. He will chase away anything that comes to get me in the night, I am sure...
No comments:
Post a Comment