Gene Siskel was one of the first people to learn that there was no killing Jason Voorhees or the Friday the 13th franchise.
In 1980, the famous film critic was so revolted by the original Friday the 13th movie that he openly and repeatedly tried to sabotage its success in multiple ways.
Inspired by the success of John Carpenter’s 1978 horror classic Halloween, producer and director Sean S. Cunningham quickly set to work on a similarly themed low-budget slasher movie, this time set at a lakeside summer camp.
After seeing the results of Cunnighman’s efforts, Siskel not only trashed the movie in his zero-stars review, but took the unusual step of spoiling its twist ending in an attempt to convince people to stay home. “It has been suggested to me that a great way to keep people from seeing a truly awful movie is to tell them the ending,” he wrote in the Chicago Tribune, before doing exactly that in the next two paragraphs.
He next moves onto a direct attack on Cunningham: “Now there – I hope I’ve ruined Friday the 13th, which is the latest film by one of the. most despicable creatures ever to infest the movie business, Sean S. Cunningham.”
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“There is nothing to Friday the 13th other than its sickening attack scenes,” Siskel’s review concludes. “Remove them and you’re left with an empty movie.” He then prints the name and address of the parent company for Paramount films, which distributed the movie in the United States, suggesting his readers write to complain about the film.
He also has some unkind words for the Motion Picture Association of America, accusing them of letting Friday the 13th off the hook with an R rating because Paramount pays part of their salaries: “if any film should be X-rated on the basis of violence, this is it.”
Siskel and his onscreen partner Roger Ebert heaped more scorn on the movie on their popular syndicated TV show, then known as Sneak Previews. “That’s why they call these things exploitation films, these rotten ones,” Siskel said of what he deemed the movie’s gratuitous nudity and violence, “because they exploit one element and make it kind of sick.”
The ‘Friday the 13th’ Series Succeeded Despite Being Hated by Movie Critics
Siskel was far from the only critic who was vocal about their displeasure with Friday the 13th. Variety called it “low budget in the worst sense – with no apparent talent or intelligence,” while the Hollywood Reporter called it “blatant exploitation of the lowest order.”
Their collective attempts to warn ticket buyers away from the movie were completely unsuccessful, and may have even helped elevate its profile. Filmed on an estimated budget of just $550,000, the original Friday the 13th went on to gross $59.8 million at the box office. The 11 sequels, crossovers or reboots that followed over the next three decades have to date earned the series to an estimated total of over $468 million in ticket sales.
Watch Siskel and Ebert Review 1980’s ‘Friday the 13th’
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