Critic Reviews

Friday the 13th is neither tense nor frightening (although, to be fair, it is at times creepy and atmospheric, due in part to budgetary limitations that led to a low-key style).

It's a formula with no pretensions.

The crude technique of director Sean Cunningham borrows whatever sophistication it has from Halloween's precise and elegant point-of-view shots of the killer, though Cunningham often cheats by using the ploy inconsistently. For all its shoddiness, the film manages, just barely, to achieve its ignoble goals--it delivers what it promises.

As the bodies pile up amongst this testy crowd of horny teens, there remains a vacant hole were someone scary should be. In a strange way, this film stands unique amongst all slasher films as one where the killer is nearly intangible.

Gruesome violence, in which throats are slashed and heads are split open in realistic detail, is the sum content of Friday the 13th, a sick and sickening low budget feature that is being released by Paramount. It’s blatant exploitation of the lowest order.

A tame, poorly plotted serving of schlock, less horrific for its ketchup-smeared murders than for the bare-faced fashion in which it tries and fails to rip off Carpenter's Halloween in matters of style and construction.

A woefully bad low-budget slasher flick, complete with a requisitely inept cast (including Kevin Bacon in uncomfortably tight shorts); laborious pacing; and an interminable catfight climax.

Lowbudget in the worst sense – with no apparent talent or intelligence to offset its technical inadequacies – Friday the 13th has nothing to exploit but its title.

When the names of the players flash on the screen in Friday the 13th, it is not so much a list of the cast as a body count. Practically everyone who spends more than five minutes on camera dies horribly -- in close-up. Considering the quality of the acting, most of them deserve no better. [13 May 1980, p.B3]

Judging by Friday the 13th, Sean S. Cunningham is not a great, not a good, not even a barely competent director. He has said that "a filmmaker must be part magician, part gypsy and part huckster." On the basis of this effort, Cunningham has conveniently overlooked the first two components and settled for a complete mastery of the third. [14 May 1980]