Crystal Lake review: "Meandering and mostly scare-free Friday the 13th prequel"

The thing about the Friday the 13th movies are they're not very good. Nightmare on Elm Street has innovative effects, Halloween pivots off the expert tension of director John Carpenter. But the first entry in the Friday the 13th franchise is mostly inert. It isn’t until later entries that it amps up the thrills and chills, realizing that the hockey-masked Jason is a ridiculous immortal slasher/wrestler in a funny way, rather than a scary way.

So, if you’re a high-end studio like A24, how do you build an entire eight-episode season of television as a prequel? You focus on the one element of the original movie that totally works: Betsy Palmer’s bonkers turn as Mrs. Pamela Voorhees. And thankfully, they found the perfect modern actress to play the iconic killer lunch-lady in Linda Cardellini.

Unfortunately, like the movie that came before it, that’s pretty much all that works about the meandering, mostly scare-free Friday the 13th prequel, which debuts after an extremely long and messy development and production process. Fans tuning in to see the lurid sex and violence of the best of Friday the 13th (it’s a sleepover/drive-in classic for a reason) will mostly be frustrated at the lack of the former (there’s almost no nudity, and relatively chaste soap opera-level sex), and put off by the latter, which relies heavily on digital trickery and the same sort of faces getting torn off in gruesome ways, episode after episode.

Even worse, some big swings that completely change the mythology and continuity of the film series seem entirely misguided. Adding a Stranger Things-style conspiracy element to the show isn’t going to bring in new fans, and it’s just going to annoy the older ones.

Mask off

We pick up with Pamela living with her son, Jason (Callum Vinson), who knows he's different from the other kids, but is very sweet and beloved by his mother. One day at Camp Crystal Lake, where she works as the lunch lady, Jason drowns thanks in part to the negligence of the counselors, though that doesn’t become a factor until much later in the season. A year later, the camp is about to reopen, and Pamela is still bereft, believing Jason is out there somewhere since they never found a body. And aside from going a little nuts at a town potluck, she’s pretty reasonable in her grief, calmed by the town’s kindly sheriff/romantic interest Levon Brooks (William Catlett). That is until she’s attacked at home by two armed thugs who have been tracking her – and Jason – for mysterious purposes.

There’s a burst of violence from Pamela, and more to come, as well as potentially other killers lurking in the wings. But other than walking us through Pamela’s increasingly brazen acts of brutality that she all but commits in the town square with no real interest from either the police, or Levon’s news reporter sister, Briana (Devin Kessler), who is investigating the overall conspiracy, there’s no "why" here. Is this about diving into the depths of madness to see where it comes from? Maybe – that certainly seems to be where the show lands in the final scenes – though a classic late-season flashback episode posits another, much dumber theory we won’t spoil here.

It’s also, unfortunately, not particularly funny. Or fun. Or scary. Everyone is playing this material dead seriously, from a weird little girl Pamela becomes obsessed with who seems to be a refugee from showrunner Brad Caleb Kane’s other horror prequel, IT: Welcome To Derry, to a group of hippies who seem like they wandered straight out of a high school production of Hair.

Horror – particularly slasher horror – needs the giddy laugh release of gruesome kills once the tension has been revved to unbearable levels. The rambling plot has none of that; the release isn’t necessary because mostly everyone seems confused about what they’re doing next, and why. Most of the deaths are perfunctory, and only one featuring a skinned body gets close to the proper level of gore for something like this, so it’s unfortunate it happens to a character who has been barely built up.

Mommie dearest

At least Cardellini commits 100% to the material, pulling from the other dark turns in her filmography that on paper make this role make sense. But coming on the heels of her Emmy-winning role in HBO’s oddball DTF St. Louis, Crystal Lake is a significant step down that isn’t worthy of her talents; she’s much, much better than this show. And while she elevates the proceedings, it’s also hard not to think what Cardellini would have done, and what could have been done with Cardellini, if original showrunner Bryan Fuller had been allowed to continue with his likely singular vision.

Alternately, what could someone like Ti West, or any of the A24 slate of directors who know how to channel grindhouse and shlock have done with this material, instead of the Lifetime with slightly more blood version we get here? There are attempts to ape the gritty, indie nature of the original movie (one shot mirrors an iconic kill in the original beat for beat in a later episode), but mostly it looks visually bland, rather than ripped out of ‘70s or ‘80s cinema.

But that’s what could have been, not what is. Instead, we’ve got an eight-hour-long prequel in place of the 90-minute kill-fest that Friday the 13th made its name on, full of perfectly fine performances and okay murders. Cardellini, like Palmer before her, is great in the role of Pamela Voorhees, making a solid argument that the series should have continued with her, not Jason. But even Cardellini can’t save Crystal Lake from drowning.

Crystal Lake releases on October 15 in the US, and on October 19 in the UK. Look ahead with our guides to most exciting upcoming horror movies and new TV shows heading your way.