CATCH-22 @ 55

It's World War II and Yossarian the bombardier wants out. He asks the squadron doctor to ground him but learns the paradoxical clause of the title. If someone was insane they would not be permitted to fly more missions but only sane people would ask to be relieved of the duty so they are fit to fly more missions. The doctor can't ground Yossarian without compromising his own position. The limit on missions before relief keeps growing, well past the initial twenty-five limit. Meanwhile, the supply officer, Lieutenant Minderbinder is doing deals on goods between the air base and anyone else who'll trade. As a sticky web of rorts and absurdist situations grows the military life looks both like a lark and a huge deadly nightmare.

It was 1970 and any military-based movie that wasn't an old school gung-ho shouter was anti-war and, whatever war it was superficially referring to, always led back to the one the U.S.A. was losing in Vietnam. The conflict that was revealing to Americans through its own tv screens, the wasting decay of old heroism and the way of the good guys, was linked inextricably to anything on screen in a uniform. Claims like destroying a village in order to save it and the atrocity at Mi Lai had rewritten the order and the culture was ready for cynicism and a slap in the face to authority. They were ready, in other words, for Catch-22 and M.A.S.H.

Mike Nicholls who had made a name on TV not only with directorial efforts but as part of a satirical improv act with the great Elaine May (this is worth YouTubeing) but more recently had impressed with his transposition of the Albee stage nerve-fest Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf with the world's celebrity divorcees Burton and Taylor and then the middle class shock comedy of The Graduate. Joseph Heller, author of the source novel, knew Nicholls was right after rejecting the redoubtable Richard Brooks and Richard Quine. Nicholls worked with black comedy stalwart Buck Henry for two years on the screeenplay and, though it diverted from the novel, got the author's full approval. 

Nicholl's cast was of the massive kind touted for major event movies but on a more varied scale: Orson Welles, Martin Balsam, Anthony Perkins, Alan Arkin, John Voigt, Richard Benjamin, Paula Prentiss, Bob Newhart, Charles Grodin. Add pop star Art Garfunkel and you have a castlist that doesn't play fair. Is it a send-up or serious? Nicholls' wrangling of this herd alone should earn him kudos but that he manages to allow someone like Newhart his comedic hysteria but Perkins his restrained explosion and so on, while giving Orson any damn thing he pleased, makes this potentially cutesy comedy a multi-textured tour de force.

This is before you get to astounding sequences in which actors have to deliver layered dialogue against the sights and sounds of massive explosions and a Mitchell bomber crash landing behind them. The aircraft management is, of course, done without a frame of anything but cameras and lighting (but that does include some rear projection): when you see planes, you are really looking at planes. One shot of a downed bomber's tail section in the sea as a distant intact one flies closer to the horizon while dialogue continues will inform or remind you that they really just can't make 'em like this anymore.

But none of this visual dazzle suggests the depth of the satire and how it mounts to epic scale toward the third act. Yossarian (an explosive and hilarious Alan Arkin) with his highly localised mission to escape the military and the war might be rendered insignificant by Milo's rampaging and stinkingly corrupt capitalism, but its essential humanity is never lost to us. By the time Milo is marshalling the streets in control of the local sex work, he has secured control of the war itself on the local scale, resembling both a carnival barker and a fascist dictator. Even more, we want Yossarian out of there.

My memory of this film is one of hearing it from behind the wall of the front seat of my father's Humber on a family outing to the drive-in. After Snowden's guts pour out of his life jacket in Yossarian's motif memory, that's how I "watched the rest of hte film. My brother exaggerated the grisliness of the scene and for years I dared not watch the movie. I had seen the bisection of Hungry joe by McWatt in the light plane and thought that was bad. Then again, I was eight or nine (parents, what were you thinking?) It turned up on Brisbane TV in 1980 and I did watch it. The guts scene was edited and the film played fine without it. Two decades later, on DVD, I was ready for it after a bout half a decade of catching up with horror movies I'd missed from the '80s onwards.

Catch-22 was beaten at the box office both by Robert Altman's M.A.S.H. and Franklin Schaffner's Patton, two very different films, but its reputation has since lifted. It has also aged much better than both. The male-gaze leering that feels juvenile and icky in M.A.S.H. is more diegetic here; the bomber crews' lust is offered as comic but is also saddening. Nurse Duckett gives way better than she gets from Yossarian with a double knee to the groin in a scene that calls for both. The sex workers in Rome are given more economic understanding that Fellini gave them two years later. The film has more compassion than a satire's ethical mudget usually gets. Against its example the swathe of late '60s and early '70s knockabout examples seldom come close to matching it for its underlying gravity.

But that's it, the dark undercurrent's energy saves it the way it saved the following year's Harold and Maude from ever straying into the cultural safety of M.A.S.H. (for all its frat boy jibes) or the still queasy unease of Patton. It's Catch-22 that reaches from the past as a response to an exhausting era. When the time came to take a similar look at the first Gulf War in Three Kings, this was the example that led it. 

DEEP RED @ 50

Mark, a young jazz maestro in Rome, witnesses the murder of a co-tenant of his building but is powerless to stop it. As the killer progresses through everyone who gets close to making an identification, Mark is drawn into an investigation of his own as he, too, is now under threat. This takes him on an intriguing journey through darkness.

The Giallo genre, a series of crime films popular in Italy from the '60s to the '70s, was on the wane in its native country. Dario Argento had made his start as a film maker with one only five years before (The Bird With the Crystal Plumage) and had contributed two more, neat and deadly entries. Whether he was wanting to revive the flagging genre or finish it off with a cinematic mountain, what he achieved was one of the most articulate and ranging examples of it with sumptuous sets, eyepopping kills, arresting music and solid central performances.

David Hemmings is paired with Daria Nicolodi (co-writer of the later Suspiria and future spouse of Argento) and they have a ball colliding with each other until the sparks turn into arc lighting. The closest Hemmings had come to the slapstick antics on screen here was the mime scene in Blow-Up. In Deep Red his character endures frequent indignities at the hands of the impossible new-feminist Gianna, her difficult car with the glove-box filled with airline booze bottles and whose power at arm wrestling leads to some hilarious embarrassment. 

This plays against a frequently grim series of murders. No one in Gialli ever seems to get shot. They get decapitated, pierced by shards, knifed, sliced by sliding doors, alright, but I can only think of one case where a gun is used for a kill in the decades of the genre. The medium at the start is despatched by knife and then finished off with the glass of a broken window. There is death by boiling water, death by impact with a marble fireplace and a range of others as this high strung movie gets on with it.

Goblin's score tread a fine line between insistent electronic motive and outright prog rock. Both fit perfectly. There is also the eerie lullaby that plays over the mid credit sequence that pits the sharp violence against its disarming major/minor tonality. The motif was a direct influence on John Carpenter's theme for Halloween with its pressing grind and pealing piano figures.

As to plot, Gialli never boasted particularly tight examples, preferring to mix cultural shock value of "deviant" sexuality and decadence. Argento writes a coherent story and (you'll see this on a repeat viewing) plays fair by matching an early, easily missed detail, with a later revelation.

Now, all this gush aside, it should be noted that by current standards, Deep Red is a snail of a thriller. Personal investigation stories will, by necessity, have stretches in the middle act where everyone has to stop and take stock of the mystery and its dangers before racing to the finish but the Italian genre liked to ask its audiences in for a coffee or a drink, a red herring on toast and then a big finish followed by a coda no one saw coming. Deep Red's middle act is a lot of chemical bickering between the leads as the kill setups get more elaborate. This makes for a fascinating atmosphere but it doesn't hurry. 

What it does do is widen the style, growing increasingly baroque in detail. The location of an old murder case that might be pertient is found through horticulture. A victim is distracted by the sight of one of the ghastliest walking puppets you are ever likely to see. He is a target because he discovers something hidden on a bathroom wall. When Mark discovers the child's horror drawing of the historical murder behind the plaster of an old house, he is led back to the scene to investigate a detail he missed only to discover an even more horrific scene. 

All of this actually does add up. If his next film (Suspiria) threw narrative cogency out the window in favour of heavy violence and even more style, Deep Red plays like the highest that Giallo ever got as a rational film genre. I'm leaving out the treatment of the character Marco's gayness as it deserves more attention than I can give it, here. I will say that, along with other LGBTQ depictions in Argento's films, it is far too easy to characterise him as othering these characters in order to execute a Hollywood style punishment. It's not advocacy but it is live and let live. It wasn't all Fellini.

It is, as the saw goes, a pleasure to live at the beginning and end of an era. You could do worse, assuming you can find them (probably only on physical media now) than Deep Red be paired on a film night with Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace. Both are strikingly visual and bracingly violent crime thrillers with aesthetic sensibilities more attuned to the realm of old master painters and Jacobean revenge playwrights than 20th century filmmakers. If that sounds good to you, track these down. You will be holding on to them, if you do.

Viewing notes: I watched Arrow Video's stunning 4K presentation of Deep Red in its extended cut. I could have chosen a 5.1 audio track in Italian of the cobbled English/Italian hybrid. This is a splicing of elements discovered long after the first edits were released, a reassembly that meant that a number of scenes suddenly go into an Italian dub. I have always found this easy to get used to and highlights David Hemmings' full performance (he dubbed his own part at the time). It's only offered in 2 channel but it's worth it.

AMERICAN PSYCHO @ 25

In an early scene, Patrick Bateman takes us through his morning skin routine, a complex series of named products and tasks, that allows his privileged youth to remain vibrant and beautiful. He is also warning us of the implication of the title, ending with, "I simply am not there." As we follow his progress through the culture of 1% Manhattanites, with its multitude of micro-aggressions and abstracted savagery, we see how he responds to this rarefied stress with acts of extreme violence. If Patrick is driven to atrocity by such means what happens when they get too much for him?

Brett Easton Ellis' dark satire on yuppiedom in the '80s was considered unfilmable for the intensity of its graphically described violence. Screenplays, including one by Easton Ellis, came and went until almost a decade after its publication, this adaptation was released. So how did it go?

I recall a conversation in the '90s where a friend proposed Oliver Stone as director and the still young enough Robert Downey Jr as Bateman. It was a thrilling idea, the kind that can take a conversation from fat chewing to the corners of inspiration. We imagined scenes from the book we'd read in annihilating colour on screen. The novel was a must read at the time, a book deemed taboo here but bold there. 

The original cover art gave us a Bateman in a suit. His face was either a mask with darkened eyeholes or his face crowned with a film of bloody red. Out of context, you'd take it as a tribute to Francis Bacon. It looked fearsome. Then, when I read it, I found it to be wincingly violent but also constantly humorous in the same way as his debut novel Less Than Zero. The violence, though, is flavour and emphasis, not purpose. That is what Mary Harron understood.

Easton Ellis' uber privileged are shown as shark-like competitors in bespoke clothing, suggesting that Bateman is only enacting what his friends and colleagues only dream of doing if they weren't already performing an abstracted expression of it in their business dealings. In one of the few passages addressing his childhood in the novel, Bateman is afflicted by rage. We don't need that here and a lot of that has to do with the casting of Christian Bale.

Bale at twenty-six presented an unblemished beauty strengthened by near constant exercise. His blankness is perfected rather than undermined by his narration and has Bateman perform his smile which is free of any genuine joy. If you've ever known someone who engages in conversation in order to pounce on points and finish their ridicule with a weird blurting AI laugh, you will know this characterisation: a life-draining continuous antagonism. When we see him prepare to attack, we don't need to see the results. If anything they would detract from the effect of Bateman's remove (even from his own actions). Harron continues the mystery of the scene with the coathanger from the novel in that neither explains what he used it for, only suggesting its gravity through the results, knowing that we who read and see and fill in blanks are going to supply the worst we can. And when we do, we are, however temporarily, kin to Bateman.

The rest of the cast are also astutely chosen to give us an elite New York that is intimidatingly urbane and dangerous to approach with the likes of Jared Leto, Justin Theroux and Reese Witherspoon. Chloe Sevigny also impresses as the timid but observant Jean. Willem Dafoe turns up in a role that shows he really can do restraint, as the quietly canny detective who understands more than he reveals. I can't finish this without mentioning the work of cinematographer Andrzej Sekula whose compositions go from sumptuous lifestyle brochure perfection to the ugly over lighted moments at venues that are rinsed with discomfort.

American Psycho is the kind of literary adaption that comprehends its source material. The book that might have got its author cancelled if it appeared more recently and the film based on it both prove both funnier and less extreme than feared. The thread of wavering identity, the rupture between a fantasised wish fulfilment and diegetic reality is nauseously blurry. It recalls another supposedly unfilmable novel made a few years before. David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch threw the issues with forming a literal report of Burroughs' eyepopping satirical epic by creating a companion to it. More recently Luca Guardaningno's take on the much shorter Queer managed to overstretch the source and make an unsatisfying thing of it. Guardangnino is currently at work on a remake of American Psycho. I won't be in line for that one, though, as Mary Harron has already made this one.

THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE @ 55

Sam, an American in Rome, walks past a gallery on the way home one night to witness a masked figure attacking a woman inside. He runs to her aid, getting into the glassed off antechamber, inadvertently locking him self between two glass walls and watches powerlessly as the attack proceeds. Getting a passing stranger to call the cops, he pounds at the glass ineffectively. The assassin leaps away at the sound of the siren but the woman is on the floor with an abdominal wound.

Sam was about to decamp to New York with his Brit girlfriend but the detective who interviews him takes his passport. The case is so baffling that anyone could be involved. Sam has to clear his name but also is intrigued to play detective, himself, haunted by the notion that he saw something that the excitement erased. The killer is picking off women around the city. Sam is about to enter a labyrinth of intrigue, danger and after dark puzzles. Does he have the key?

The Giallo genre was about a decade old when Dario Argento entered the scene with this film. Argento had already been a film critic and had made a good start at screen writing, collaborating with the likes of Bertolucci and Leone (the tense opening of Once Upon a Time in the West has his stamp all over it). Italy had already shown its endless appetite for the violence and engaging mysteries of Giallo as dished up by the great Mario Bava among many others. These were shot for international markets and, as with all Italian film production at the time, made with the intention of dubbing the dialogue. Argento wrote his own adaptation of the novel The Screaming Mimi for his debut.

While the gallery attack scene is not the very opening it's the way the film is recalled opening, with a situation straight out of Hitchcock as a would be hero is prevented from helping and must watch an act of violence from a trap. It's a nightmare situation and won't be the last one this movie offers.

Actually, that's a point: Bird is so stuffed to the gills with Giallo quirks that it would be considered a postmodern parody if it had been made now. the cross-dressing lineup guy giving better than he gets, the Breughel style naive painting of the sexual assault, the ugly but funny comedy scene with the artist, the too-urbane detective, right down to the hit man in the bright yellow leather jacket (Giallo is Italian for yellow, Argento even made a later movie with that as the title) which has one of the best comic relief transitions before getting scary again. Argento isn't trying to send anything up, though, he is gleefully picking genre tropes off the shelf and setting them off as perfect plot bombs. Hitchcock himself dismissed the plot drivers of his films with the joke about the McGuffin (Google it) he much preferred the visual puns, social commentary and mechanics of suspense. See also everyone who made a Giallo except that Argento even more, outdoing the great Bava himself.

So, if anything, The Bird With the Crystal Plumage pays nothing but service to the genre it declares. That said, it is not a series of ticks on a checklist. Argento warms everything up with real humour and builds a nocturnal Rome that feels of its time but also darkly medieval. On board as cinematographer is Vittorio Storaro  who also lensed The Conformist, The Godfather and Apocalypse Now among many others, having a deadly sense of the effects of colour on the psyche. Bird still looks like a zillion dollars. And while we're talking collaborators, let's throw in the great Ennio Morricone who provides a score that mixes cute girl pop with avant orchestral noise motifs and electronica. This movie sounds scared.

As a sub-genre of crime fiction The Bird With the Crystal Plumage still delivers and in a much more insistent manner than most of them. Argento perfected the traditional Giallo with his next string of films, adding more peculiar style each time until Deep Red a few years on which all but rendered the genre impossible to top. After some extraordinary horror outings he then returned but to decreasing effect as some of the later entries could not outgrow the limitations of the Giallo's heyday. There are always exceptions (Opera, The Stendhal Syndrome) but the more recent films have felt like the first ones never did: routine. Before that, back in 1970, he climbed to the peak of his adopted genre on his first go. If you can find this, watch it.

Viewing notes: We watched Arrow's 4K presentation of this and it is stellar. In the convivium and sipping of bubbly stuff we all got a little lost. As these movies were never shot with direct sound and intended to be dubbed even in their native Italian it's not a big deal unless you really want ot hear actor's own voices (E.g. David Hemmings in Deep Red). The subtitles might prove a boon, here. I can't find it for purchase or rent on any streamer. If you are feeling adventurous you can get a physical copy from a few boutique labels. Maybe Shudder or Tubi in the future.

Review: 28 YEARS LATER

Decades after the initial outbreak of the rage virus Britain is a quarrantined area. Survivors band in various ways but the ones we follow have found an Island protected by a causeway that the tide renders impassable. Island life is primitive but homely. Young Spike is being prepared to accompany his father across to the mainland to join him in scavenging for the settlement. While Spike initially nails a few of the infected his fear and nerves during skirmishes see him making mistakes and he carries guilt back with him to the island. 

When his initiation party gets under way, his concerns make him follow his father who has himself followed a young woman out to where the shadows are private. Betrayed at the sight, Spike goes back home and chats to his grandfather about what happened and a curious distant fire he saw on the mainland. Grandad suggests that the flame was maintained by one of the few trained doctors in reach. Spike thinks of his bedridden mother upstairs whose erratic, hallucinatory behaviour is probably just something that needs medicine. He has a lot to prove and a chance to do something really good. He takes his mum across the causeway.

When I saw 28 Days Later as a new film I and my companion were treated to a very ill fellow cinephile who kept sneezing ballistically while watching the instantly transferrable bug lay the land waste with hoards of angry zombies. That wasn't entirely why I didn't love the movie. I did like about two thirds, though, the first act and build were wonderful but then it fell into over-contrivance with pat dialogue and what felt like a rushed conclusion. Along with other titles of its vintage (hello to The Descent and Eden Lake), it gained in cult adoration what it didn't in box office returns and largely left me cold. I had no interest in the sequel 28 Weeks Later. 

So why go to this one? It was deemed different.

Well, so it is, mostly. It plays like an old rustic tale like Kes or Whistle Down the Wind but with Zombies and adult themes. Spike leaves the safety of his small society, let down by his father and needing to make his mother better, and wanders the dangerlands, meeting fellow travellers also pursuing survival. The memento mori of the herds of infected, whether obese and crawling like outsized reptiles or knotty limbed and voracious, preventing all but the most fleeting senses of the kind of reset the land needs.

Danny Boyle was one of the '90s wunderkinder, a flashy auteur bursting with pop culture and an eye for irony that often broke into the screamingly cynical. His Shallow Grave and Trainspotting remain durable highlights but his output after them put him in the patchy file. The embarrassing Coens rip A Life Less Ordinary and the meh The Beach left him nowhere to go until 2002's 28 Days Later in which he reinvented zombies to a decent return. The problem for me with that one is that he didn't leave his smartarsed observations at the door and tried to shoehorn the kind of toughness of Trainspotting in. It meant that the resulting tonal tension made it feel more like cable tv than cinema. And then we get the ending. I won't spoil it but it reminded me of nothing else but the kind of rugpull cliffhangers that The Walking Dead would end its seasons with. 

That said, this one does feel like cinema. There is a theme of anger and a quest for betterment from Spike which works but perhaps works toward the already announced sequel. Alfie Williams is outstanding as Spike. The ever dependable Jodie Comer, Ralph Fiennes and Aaron Taylor Johnson provide the screen with solid presence. All of this works but I was still left waiting for the next season.

Viewing Notes. The timing of the session had me getting an overpriced ticket to one of Hoyts' Lux cinemas with the reclinas. These days I'm fine with these as they can be easily adjusted for comfort. We were also treated to a free popcorn and softdrink which was a pleasant surprise. Currently on general release.

Review: WARFARE

Do you remember Eric Prydz's 2000s hit Call On Me? No? Well, if you ever slunk home after a long Saturday night and chucked Rage on, you'll remember the video. A group of beautiful and fit young women compete for the attention of the hunky gym trainer. Gyrations and pelvic thrusts and Californian perfection in the hair, faces and bodies. All the reward is directed at the male who is standing in for those playing at home. Well, that's how this movie about military violence begins. After enough of the Prydz clip the reverse shot is of a wall of soldiers in action gear grinning and leering and cheering: bonding. You will remember this moment as the film continues. You will need to.

This film has a progress rather than an act structure. It is based on the collected memories of the soldiers who participated in the operation and, while an arc does become clear, what we are watching is military procedure without context beyond that of warfare itself. Ok, got it, roll credits.

Well, the rest of the film is a steady build from the crew establishing their base to starting operations to defending themselves against an elusive enemy. The point of their presence and commandeering the house becomes clear as they identify armed suspects appearing in the neighbouring buildings, the soldiers are drawing them out. When a grenade is tossed in through a window the operation changes from a clean-up job to a siege with increasingly traumatic and brutally violent effects on the men.

A multinational cast of young, intense performers gives us a thickening tension and at frequent intervals, we go back to that bonding sleazy pop video. When we're looking into the body of a soldier halved by an explosion with his internal organs exposed or another's legs hacked by weaponry, we recall the doof doof techno rhythm and the beautiful young things grinding around erotically and wish we were back there when the worst thing was what the men no so secretly wanted to do with those dancers. If that bonded the characters, it now bonds the audience to the movie.

The insistence on depicting the real time events highlights the apparent futility of the operation. What does it mean when a single act of aggression renders the soldiers into automatic motion drilled in by training? And where are we looking when we understand that almost all of what we are seeing is the force and equipment of an invading army? When they are threatened our empathy defaults to them. A poignant single shot before the end credits puts this into perspective.

I am gladdened that this wasn't a found footage movie as the real-time feature suggested. The presentation is the cleanest digital video and multiple setups every scene. About half way through I began to wonder when the point was due to arrive but as that mark drove by it became clear that this was the point: noise, danger, life and non life. While I was happy to emote-along the characters closest to my field of vision, I kept thinking of why they were there. I did not support the war in Iraq. This coloured everything I saw between the two credit sequences and I kept thinking of the ever darkening sleaze of the Eric Prydz video and feeling sick that the erotica and the ultraviolence became indistinguishable. A strong piece that yet must beg for indulgence lest its audience should wise up and walk out.

Viewing notes: I saw this as part of my subscription to Prime. It was a robust 4K presentation. It's available for rent at other sources.

FRIDAY THE 13th @ 45 (Spoliers!)

A young woman hitchhikes her way to her job as a cook at a summer camp. After being weirded out by a local preaching doom, warned off going to her destination because of murders that took place there, and then given the ick by the driver of her ride, she gets out and is pursued into the woods to her violent death. Meanwhile, the other young things assemble at Camp Crystal Lake to setup for the advent of the kids. They notice the persistent absence of the new cook (we already met her) and then they, too, start suffering the slings and arrows ... and javelins. Cinema has entered the 1980s.

Sean Cunningham's 1980 teen slasher from a screenplay by Victor Miller was intended as a cash-in after the success of John Carpenter's seminal Halloween from two years before. This is how the film is often dismissed but that really is a disservice. While the parent group is similarly absent, leaving the nascent adults to fend for themselves, the threat of the suburban jungle is replaced with the wilder environment of the forest at night. 

These teens, also, have cleared school, having even less anchor points to the social order. This is illustrated early with the snake. Anyone who has never seen this film needs the warning that it depicts the onscreen killing of a snake by a machete-wielding kid. It happens as part of a panic among the group which is solved by violence. I cannot apologise for it but I can see how it establishes a pragmatism that puts the young adults into preparedness. In the realm of the movie, it's a small crisis brought to a head. It might well haunt more recent views beyond the running time.

For all I prefer in Halloween, I have to admit that the internal politics are given more depth in Friday the 13th. Along with the effective Tom Savini gore of the kills, this cultural aspect is brought to the fore, providing the monster with the kind of grounding absent in Carpenter's shape. In this first outing of the franchise, we don't even catch sight of the killer until the last. At this point we also get the motivation and its twisted ugliness.

A 1950s-set prologue has already given us a kind of standard setter and appears to speak for the film itself by punishing pre-marital sex. This, and a careful misreading of the ensuing movie bears out the common misconception that teen slashers are puritanical thunderbolts, warning the too-young away from the sins of the flesh. This falls apart immediately when you consider the target audiences were the same horny teens on screen who didn't once consider their desires to be preludes to murder. More centrally, it's the deranged monster with the machete that's doing this. As Alex West of The Faculty of Horror podcast once perfectly phrased it: the movie's rad, the killer's conservative.

A glimpse into the future will show how the F13 franchise developed this. The first four display an offroad freedom to the young adults' choices and, while sex is a generic given, they're also adventurous outside of that one. For now, back in 1980, the adults in the form of ludicrous cops and uptight veteran youth counsellors, and crazy Ralph the doomsayer, offer only a kind of dead skin as faces of authority. The result isn't an instant Lord of the Flies but an incursion by the big bad world lashing out from the dark.

It's taken me a while but I've come to appreciate Friday the 13th. When I first saw it during schoolies week in 1980 it was a tearing thrill ride before an eerie walk home though canal-ville on the Gold Coast to the flat I was staying at with other demographically threatened late teens. In a strangely prescient co-incidence, there was a serial criminal known first as the balaclava rapist and then balaclava killer on the loose along the Gold Coast. We were aware of that as we tried to navigate the then forbidding urban landscape of the strip.

This film also carries a surprise for anyone aware of the franchise iconography. It is not Jason who does the killing but his vengeful mother. Her dispatch with a machete to the neck appears to give a second birth to her wronged son whose grisly mutated form polarises out of the lake water and attacks the final girl in what might or might not be a dream. Than he's still out there? she asks the cops from her hospital bed. Yes he was, growing, getting nastier and uglier. But he was also developing and distinguishing himself from a decade of slasher clones who preferred F13's flamboyant gore over Halloween's suspense. And, of course, the Halloween sequels lay down and copied the copy. Jason got his hockey mask on the third go and its assumption was a comment on the society of his victims. Yes, of course, it's fun rather than philosophy but it's fun that got that tiny bit closer.

Viewing notes: I saw this on my birthday of Friday the 13th on Paramount's superb 4K transfer which enhances the always unexpected beauty of the cinematography. It was a birthday celebration and the viewing was ruled by peanut-gallery commentary, but we did take it in in spirit. It has been available as part of a boxset of the Paramount-owned franchise, and Stan used to stream it. Otherwise it's rentable online from a few outlets.