This movie is given way too much slack by people with the mistaken assumption that it's the first of its kind. It postdates "Psycho" and "Halloween," to name just two much better horror/slasher films, but that isn't all. "Friday the 13th" rips off countless other movies with characters and plot points that are all too agonizingly familiar.

There's a place where something dreadful happened years ago, so naturally the residents of the small nearby town become abruptly, uncomfortably silent whenever its name is mentioned. Obviously there's an eerie old character whose job is to pop out of closets and intone ignored warnings like, "It's got a death curse!" and look all spooky. There's a cop in this movie with a brief (irrelevant) scene, too, so obviously he would be unjustifiably gruff towards our playful band of young interchangeable victims. Just in case there's someone out there who actually wants to see this, even after my review, and doesn't already know, I won't reveal who the killer is, but suffice it to say the killer and the killer's motivation have also been featured in dozens of thrillers prior to this movie.

The movie opens, besides with bad acting and dialogue, with a trio of bad impersonations. One of the guys tries to talk like Humphrey Bogart, and I have honestly never heard a worse, more painful impersonation. Later, there's a gratuitous Katharine Hepburn impersonation (why not?) which is not so much bad as purposeless. And then there's the impersonation of Bernard Herrmann's great score to Hitchcock's "Psycho." When the score to "Friday the 13th" is actually sounding melodic, which is rare, it sounds as close to the score to "Psycho" as a score could conceivably get, without actually being plagiarism. Or good. This is pretty interesting as a musical experiment, but I wouldn't have thought any sane person would even consider actually using the result. Then again, maybe it was made similar on purpose, to trigger the association. Well it did, and the ploy backfired: all I was thinking of whenever that music was playing was how much better "Psycho" was.

While on the subject of the music, perhaps now is a good time to interject a comment about the official "Friday the 13th" sound, which goes, to the best of my transliterating ability: "Cheehh heehh heehh, hhha hhha hhha," later tweaked to just "Chhh chhh chhh, hhha hhha hhha." May I now state for the record that this is the most ridiculous signature sound I have ever heard in my life.

Anyway, the killings begin...and continue...and continue. It's not especially gory, for this type of film; there are some gruesome shots, but with the exception of Kevin Bacon's demise, they look too fake to be disturbing. More disturbing was the way the victims stand motionless and scream when they catch sight of a reared knife or axe. They just stand there screaming, without running or throwing up their hands or making any other move to attack or defend, until the killer stabs them right in the prosthetics.

And this is how it goes for the first seventy minutes of the movie. One by one, they get killed. No one figures out anything bad is going on until nearly the end, which begs the question, "What's the point?" Until the last twenty minutes, all this movie is is a series of fake killings. Whoopee. There's not any suspense, because we know they're going to die, and we don't care anything about them anyway, because they're all carbon copies of each other. To the film's credit, it does have atmosphere -- but atmosphere only gets you so far before the story has to take up the slack in the reigns.

The worst part is that things scarcely pick up when the killer is discovered and the last intended victim is permitted to defend herself. The killer attacks. She knocks the killer out. Then she runs away to some other dark part of the camp. Then the killer attacks. She knocks the killer out. Then she runs away to some other dark part of the camp. I'm not sure how many times this happened, but it seemed like an awful lot, because by then I was really anxious for the movie to end. Let me tell you, if I knocked a serial killer out who had been attacking me, I wouldn't be running, I'd be tying the killer up and retrieving anything in the room that could be used as a weapon.

Normally spoilers are assumed on this page, but since this movie is actually one some people inexplicably seem to care about, skip the rest of this paragraph if you don't want to know about the killer's demise. At the end of the movie, when the last intended victim has *finally* stopped running away after knocking the killer out, she has a brief boring fight and cuts off the killer's head, which seems to be the only way to kill a badguy definitively in a cheap horror movie. (Drowning is absolutely the worst way, as this series also demonstrates.) I mention this because it provides the movie's only real bad movie laugh. After the decapitation, the killer remains standing for a moment, hands upraised, feeling for the missing head. It's a ludicrous sight, but actually strangely appropriate. After all, it didn't take a brain to make this movie -- why should it take a brain to make purposeful body movements?

Rating: 1 turkey.

Scene to watch for: The killer's demise, for lack of a suitable alternative.

Best line: "Wind's come up. Shifted a good hundred and eighty degrees."

Things that make you go "Huh?": How this crud could have spawned *eight* sequels, a television series, and counting.