"Friday the 13th is Bad...Saturday the 14th is Worse"

Saturday the 14th (1981, Howard R. Cohen)

 

Sometimes it's best not to fuck with nostalgia.  I saw Saturday the 14th at my grandma's house in the mid-80s, when we used to watch the Saturday Afternoon Shockers.  Good times!  Anyway, I haven't seen the movie since that day, when I was too young to understand what "spoof" means.  I remember actually being scared by a few key scenes.  I also recall the TV spot, which went featured a tagline along the lines of "Friday the 13th is bad...Saturday the 14th is worse!"  Oh, never has a movie tagline been more literal!

The plot concerns a couple, Mary and John (Paula Prentiss and Richard Benjamin), who manage to beat out their crazy relatives (referred to throughout the film as The Relatives) for an inheritance.  They're excited to hear they're getting a house, a little bummed when the will explicitly states that the house is cursed.  Still they're happy to move in, even though their kids think it's a bad idea.  Lil' Billy finds an Evil Book that says "No really, don't open this book," opens it, somehow misplaces the book, and soon a variety of monsters is roaming the halls.  Throw in a couple of bickering vampires (Jeffrey Tambor and Nancy Lee Andrews) perched outside, thinking the house should be theirs.  An original enough plot for a movie that's trying to be a spoof, right?

To be a nice guy, I'll start with the wonderful childhood memories that all came back to me while watching this.

1) Animated intro.  It's cheap and cheesy, but oh boy, did I love that as a kid.

2) Spooky exterior shots of the haunted house.

3) Infamous "there's a monster in my room" scene featuring the oblivious dad who twirls just the right way to avoid the misshapen ogre standing behind him in his kid's room.

4) Fin in the tub turns into a giant Gillman.

5) Eyes-in-the-cup gag.

So, yeah, most of these scenes were meant to elicit laughs.  But despite the cheap costumes and effects, they must have had a pretty big effect on me as a kid because watching them almost 25+ years later was comforting in a weird way.

Nostalgic fondness aside, how does the movie stack-up today?  Here's what I didn't remember from childhood.  For a spoof, it's incredibly low on laughs.  It lampoons an array of subgenres--supernatural horror, old dark house, monster movies, Dracula--everything but...the slasher.  I'm guessing New World Pictures churned this out on the cheap'n'quick after the success of the first two Friday the 13th movies, so it's a little strange that the slasher genre survives unscathed.  It's pretty obvious they wanted to keep a PG rating. 

The actors' delivery, Tambor included, is a droning flavor of deadpan that isn't particularly funny.  I'm going to guess that this was likely due to direction and not the talent of the cast (Prentiss and Benjamin are no strangers to comedy, reuniting here after their short-lived but acclaimed 60s sitcom He & She).  That's not to say there isn't funny dialogue:

There's nothing wrong with this house!

Then why is the only thing we get on TV The Twilight Zone!?

It's a VERY popular show!

There's also a bizarre running gag where the Mary and John blame everything wrong with the house on owls.  Hear that awful noise?  Eh, it's just owls.  This ridiculousness climaxes when Mary finds bats in the attic.  Like, a gaggle of creatures that are very obviously bats that flap at her face and bite her all over.  Mary's response?

Oh my god, look at all these OWLS!
Hey...take it easy...
STOP IT, OWLS!!! 

Dumb fun, heavy on the dumb.  There are a few other slightly amusing gags, such as an exterminator named Van Helsing with a hidden agenda and vampires who bare no fangs.  But the majority of the running gags fall flat, even by 80s family-horror standards.  I'll still have fond memories of (somehow) being creeped-out by Saturday the 14th as a kid, but it truly is worse than Friday the 13th parts 1-37.  But kudos for picking a non-holiday to make a holiday horror movie!

My Rating: 4 Fangless Vamps out of 10.