Camp Blood

The good news of the situation is that my stomach probably can still hold up to a couple slices of pizza and some whisky; I feared that my age was catching up and this cannot happen. The bad news is that stomach flu was the culprit.

On the mend, but now behind by a couple of days. What I wanted to do this week, in celebration of the nearing of Halloween, was go over a handful of my favorite horror movies.

Caveat 1: My favorites lists tend to switch up on an almost daily basis.

Caveat 2: I’m cheating from the get go as I’m starting out with Friday the 13th, parts 1-4.

Wait! How can you pick 1-4 of a cheesy ass slasher series? Well, because it’s my game. Friday the 13th was nothing more than a way for some guys to make a quick buck; get some young actors in the woods, a small arsenal of sharp garden tools, some latex and fake blood and this sucker writes itself. The rundown (and okay spoiler alert):

Part 1 starts out with the mother of a deformed and drowned young Jason Voorhees taking her revenge on camp counselors at a reopening Camp Crystal lake. Virginal survivor hacks off her head with a machete. Part 2 finds us 5 years later where traumatized survivor is taken out by a mystery man who turns out to be none other than the not dead Jason Voorhees. He makes his way back to Crystal Lake and through a handful of counselors in training. Part 3 (in super 3-D on it’s original release) finds Jason going on strong the following day. He’s no longer necessarily seeking revenge, just inventive ways to slaughter teens who drink, smoke pot and screw. Some nice 3D effects include obligatory bodies thrown through windows and an eyeball being popped out. This also marks where Jason gets his hockey mask to cover his deformed face. Part 4 (named The Final Chapter) again picks up the following day and again shows our man hacking his way through horny teens and a not so great Jason hunter until he is confused by a young make up wiz and whacked on with a machete a number of times. Part 4 is a well directed little number with some impressive effects – one of those effects being Crispin Glover.

No, they’re not great, but I still can feel the unease I had when I thought of these movies as a child. They’re a morality tale people will say – bad people, people who do drugs and have sex get killed. That’s crap. They’re fairy tales and they speak to something primal within us. There’s a monster in the dark woods that we have to face to get out and see another day; an unstoppable monster that will hunt you down and eradicate all kinds of bad 80’s fashion. And much like the old fairy tales, these movies are grisly. They pushed the boundaries of makeup effects and sensor boards. They were a strange roller coaster, a dare to get scared and see if you could watch someone get an axe to the head and not peek through your fingers. Plus you got to see some tame sex scenes, again primal…

After Part 4, things got weird and silly and got away from that basic and effective monster in the woods story. But the first four, bad or good, still hold a place in my young heart as Halloween favorites.


Oh yeah, Rocktober Song of the Day: "Web in Front" by Archers of Loaf.