Friday the 13th: Uncut
Uncut Blu-ray Edition
Directed by Sean S. Cunningham
Starring Betsy Palmer, Adrienne King, Jeannine Taylor, Kevin Bacon, Robbi Morgan
Paramount Home Entertainment
Release Date: February 3, 2009

I’ll lay my cards on the table now; this is the first time I’ve seen the original Friday the 13th from beginning to end. Call it a sheltered childhood, call it a lack of interest, call it laziness after a certain point, but even when I could see it, I never bothered until now. I mean, its Friday the 13th. Every genre movie fan has to see this at some point in their life, right? So I jumped at the chance to see this new uncut version of the film. Is it the modern horror classic that I’ve always been told it is? Did it live up to the hype built in my own mind? I can’t say that it did, but I’ll say that this may still be a worth-while purchase for fans of the film, due to the documentaries and other special features included.

Do I really need to explain the plot for Friday the 13th? Honestly, at this point the story is as well known as any fairy tale or bible story. A bunch of kids go to open a summer camp at Camp Crystal Lake, they get up to some sexual shenanigans, they get killed in a series of gruesome ways, and in the end one lone girl confronts the killer. It’s the standard horror film plot that was set down by Halloween, and I can’t help but see the similarities between this film and John Carpenter’s original masterpiece. This is where my distance from the film takes away from my personal enjoyment of it. While I may have never seen this particular film before, I’ve seen the same things a bunch of times before in other films, so it all seems like it’s been done before. But I only get that feeling because I’ve seen the imitators, not the original, so I can’t hold it against this film.