Friday the 13th: The Series -- Season 1 Episode 26 (Bottle of Dreams)

So, I actually made it all the way through the first season of Friday the 13th: the Series.  And how do they thank me?  With a clip episode.  I hate clip episodes.  I see it as an easy way to knock out an episode.  This entry into the history of clip episodes is no different.  Usually, it’s to save money, as clip episodes don’t often involve new sets.  Any new footage is filmed on existing, permanent sets and relies on segments of previous episodes for filler.

In this case, a mysterious man brings an urn by the shop while Jack, Ryan and Micki are celebrating.  Jack swears that the urn wasn’t in the registry of cursed items before, but it‘s there now.  Jack realizes that it’s a trick too late; Micki and Ryan are trapped in the vault, condemned to relive clips from six previous episodes.  These aren’t ordinary clips, though.  They‘re overly long and most of them appear towards the end of the episode, when the team got a cursed item back.

Jack calls Rashid, an old friend that might be able to help.  Fortunately, Rashid is in town.  He comes right over and tells Jack that the situation is dire.  Given information about the urn, Rashid informs Jack that Micki and Ryan are in a dream world .  The urn will use memories to scare Micki and Ryan to death if Jack and Rashid don’t intervene.  After a few failed attempts, Jack makes it through only to have roadblocks thrown up.  He makes it through to Ryan and Micki, saving them both.  With the threat over, they can go back to retrieving cursed items.

So, did I mention that I hate clip episodes?  I mean, it’s bad enough when you have a decent series.  Stargate SG-1 would do one every season, it would seem, and they were at least passable.  Most of the episodes feature in this clip episode weren’t that memorable.  That brings me to my next point:  There’s only one season to choose from.  It’s kind of early to do a clip episode.  One might be forgiven for pretending the first season had only 25 episodes.

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Friday the 13th: The Series -- Season 1 Episode 25 (What a Mother Wouldn't Do)

Friday the 13th: The Series had an interesting premise.  There are hundreds of cursed items out in the world, due to Lewis Vendredi making a deal with the devil.  When Lewis realized his mistake, his soul was claimed and the antique shop passed to his niece and nephew, Micki and Ryan, who are now trying to retrieve as many of the items as possible, with the help of Lewis‘s former business partner, Jack.   Many episodes were cheesy, but a few were fairly decent.

Take, for instance, What a Mother Wouldn’t Do.  Martin and Leslie Kent find out that their baby probably won’t survive and poses a significant risk to Leslie, should she decide to carry the baby to term.  The doctor’s advice is to abort the pregnancy, but she won’t hear any of that kind of talk.

While wandering around town, she pops into an antique store.  She’s greeted by none other than Mr. Vendredi, who notices her looking at a cradle.  She can’t afford it, but Lewis assures her that things have a way of working out.  Sure enough, some of Leslie’s friends buy the cradle and give it to her as a present.  At some point, Leslie finds out that the cradle has a very specific curse.

It was brought over on the Titanic.  While the ship was sinking, a mother tried to bring her child and the cradle onto a life boat.  When the other seven occupants refused, they all died, leaving the baby unharmed.  Thus, if the mother or a sick child were to kill seven people, a baby left in the cradle would be given perfect health.  The catch is that all seven victims have to die in a manner that involves water, such as drowning.

This puts a sick twist on the trolley problem.  Instead of killing one stranger to save three strangers, Leslie and Martin have to kill seven strangers to save a loved one.  Martin is distraught about it, but Leslie seems rather eager.  Given the opportunity to save a sick child, how could any mother just ignore it?

Many episodes end with the people using the cursed objects dying by the cursed objects, and this episode is no different.  Leslie kills Martin by knocking him into a fish tank before throwing herself into a fountain down below.  The baby is saved, but Micki, Ryan and Jack notice that  the baby is now missing.  They can only hope that the baby is safe.  After all, how would you report something like that?  Both of the parents are dead and a sick child is missing, although there’s no rush, as the baby is no well if she’s even alive at all.  (The child is shown to be safe and well, by the way.)

Overall, it’s a relatively good entry into the series.  It is a little bit fast and loose with the rules sometimes.  (It would seem that the death has to involve water, even if peripherally.)  We also have a few people who would seem to have died, only to come back.  I mean, if someone’s on to you, make sure they’re dead.  Don’t just dump them in a lake and assume they’re not coming back.  It’s your baby’s life at stake, after all.

I’m almost through the first season.  Given the varying quality of the episodes, I’m not sure about season two.  I may have to take a break before continuing.

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Friday the 13th: The Series -- Season 1 Episode 5 (Hellowe'en)

It would seem inevitable that a show like Friday the 13th would do a Halloween episode.  The show is about two cousins, Micki and Ryan, who inherit an antique shop.  With the help of their late uncle’s business partner, they hunt down the cursed antiques that were sold through the shop.  Because the late Lewis Vendredi was known for selling cursed items, the shop gained a certain notoriety.

Jack, the former business partner, decides to throw a Halloween party to put everyone at ease and show that any bad vibes have since dissipated.  All goes well until two of the guests find a do-not-enter sign on the vault.  Being that this is all that’s stopping them from entering, they go in.  Rules are for chumps.  Right?  Inside, they find a fuse box and a crystal ball.  They use the fuse box to blow the lights, thereby scaring the other guests.  They use the crystal ball to summon something from the other side.  What eventually comes through is one Lewis Vendredi.

The guests leave the shop in a hurry, as one might expect.  Jack, Micki and Ryan do find the crystal ball, although Uncle Lewis hasn’t come through yet.  Jack goes outside and finds a little girl who needs help getting home.  This leaves Ryan and Micki to deal with Lewis on their own.  Lewis tricks them into getting him an amulet sot that he can become solid again.

It turns out that the girl Jack is helping is actually a demon sent to lead Jack away from the shop, where he might stop Lewis.  He’s trapped behind bars way too easily and makes no attempt to climb over the bars.  Granted, the bars don’t really lend themselves to being climbed over, but Jack makes no attempt to escape until two guys allow themselves to be suckered into helping Jack escape.

Meanwhile, Lewis has trapped Micki and Ryan so that he might find a body to inhabit permanently.  Micki realizes that he has until sunrise.  They surmise that he might have gone to a funeral home to find a body that died peacefully.  Ryan and Micki run off to the nearest location, phonebook page in hand, hoping that’s the one that Lewis went to.  They leave a note for Jack.

Jack gets back to the shop and finds the note.  He manages to run to the nearest funeral home, which I’m not sure is a mistake.  It seems odd, given that Ryan took the page from the phonebook, although it’s entirely possible that Jack would know where to go, given his background.  Jack, Ryan and Micki manage to stop Lewis at the last minute.  Well, they technically stop him after the last minute, but the point is that they stop him.

This episode does show some promise for the series.  It’s weak, but it does manage to fill the whole hour with very little filler.  We don’t get too many scenes with Jack pacing around.  Micki and Ryan are able to get out of their trap quickly, too.  What strikes me as odd is that any of them were tricked at all.  I know that Lewis is family, but Micki and Ryan know what Lewis is capable of.  It’s the entire reason we have a series and they just trust him.

Also, I find it odd that Jack wandered off without leaving a note.  In 1987, they didn’t have cell phones.  I think pagers were still not in common use.  You think he’d maybe invite the girl in and see about calling her home.  Jack just goes off on a little adventure.

One thing I will say is that I liked that sunrise was used as a deadline.  I’ve often found it odd that a plot would rely on midnight, as it’s really just an arbitrary marker of time.  There’s no reason that a curse that was made hundreds of years ago would be bound by our modern conception of time.  Something like sunrise or sunset would make more sense, as they’re natural phenomena.

Another positive is that someone did seem to look at a calendar.  At the end of the episode, Jack points out that Friday the 13th is two weeks away.  November 13 did, in fact, fall on a Friday in 1987.  I kind of like it when people get these things right.

I’ve noted that one measure of how good a movie is tends to be how many other projects the actors have been in.  John D. Lemay (Ryan) and Chris Wiggins (Jack) both seem to have a lot of credits on their IMDb pages.  Even Louise Robey (Micki) seems to have a few entries.  Many of the guest actors seem to have one or two acting entries on their respective pages.

I haven’t taken a look at other episodes, and it’s not always the kiss of death.  The series did get three seasons.  However, the episodes so far have been mediocre at best.   I do remember having seen better episodes.  I don’t know if that the show got better, as many series do, or if I’m just remembering them more fondly than they deserve.  I think I will be sticking with it at least until the end of the first season.

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Friday the 13th: The Series -- Season 1 Episode 1 (The Inheritance)

It’s amazing the difference a few decades can make.  There are video games that came out 20 years ago that seemed state of the art when they came out.  To play them now, they look like something out of the stone ages.  The same goes for other media, like movies and television.  Certain shows seemed like high art back when they first aired, but don‘t really hold up to what came out more recently.  I don’t know if this is because we’ve become spoiled by better CGI and HD television or if there‘s some technical limitation in the storage medium.

I remember watching Friday the 13th: The Series years ago.  In terms of quality, it was nothing spectacular, even back then.  It was about three people having to retrieve cursed items.  Each week was a new item and some corresponding story.  It was somewhere between The Twilight Zone and Warehouse 13.  It’s not available streaming, but you can get it on DVD.  When I saw the fist-season set at the library, I decided to get the first disc.

The pilot episode deals with the basic setup of the show and gives us the first item to be retrieved.  The story starts with Lewis Vendredi at the antique store where most of the cursed items originate.  We see hoof marks appearing on the floor.  Lewis dies when the floor disappears, revealing a fiery passageway going down.

After several months of probate, the store and its contents are left to Ryan Dallion and Micki Foster, his nephew and niece.  Ryan takes a liking to the idea of running a business, but Micki has a life elsewhere.  She wants to sell and be done with it, so they start selling off the items.

Enter Jack Marshak, former business partner of Lewis.  Jack procured the items for Lewis, not really knowing what was going on.  After talking to Ryan and Micki, Jack realizes that Lewis had made a deal with the Devil.  Upon breaking that deal, the Devil came to collect.  Oh, and many of the items that have been sold through the store are probably cursed, including a murderous doll.  Jack, Micki and Ryan have to work together to at least get the doll back, if not the other items listed in a ledger.

If you’re wondering what connection there is to the movies, there doesn’t appear to be any.  I remember reading that there were several people involved in both projects, but there’s no official connection.  There’s no mention of any characters or locations from the movies.  It’s not even mentioned where the shop is.

The episode doesn’t go into very many details at all.  We don’t know much about Vendredi’s pact except that it was for immortality.  We’re left to assume that Satan wanted to spread evil and mayhem through the items.  There doesn’t even seem to be any way of determining whether or not an item is cursed except through the ledger, which was just items sold to other people.

I don’t remember much about the series, so it’s entirely possible that such details were written into later episodes.  I’m kind of debating whether or not to start reviewing the series.  If this is going to be what a normal episode looks like, I may not last long.  Episodes will also be spread out, as I’ll probably be getting discs from the library.

This episode was somewhat gruesome.  I think that was par for the course; I remember a lot of episodes dealing with people dying in bizarre and gruesome ways.  If you’re at all squeamish, you’re probably not going to like the series.  Here, we get to see a doll kill or attempt to kill several people and yes, we do see blood.

Fans of more modern stuff will probably find the show kind of cheesy.  It was meant for TV, which limited what the writers could get away with.  I doubt hardcore fans of gore will make it past the second or third episode.  I’d imagine that most of the people that buy or rent the DVDs are like me.  It’s probably going to be someone that’s looking for a blast from the past or specifically likes the low-budget look.

IMDb apparently has the series listed as Friday’s Curse, showing Friday the 13th: The Series as the original title.  I’ve never seen Friday’s Curse as the title of the series.  I don’t know if there was some issue with the rights to the title or if Friday’s Curse was used in markets outside the United States.

I don’t really think I’d recommend paying money for this until you’ve seen a few episodes.  If you can get it for free, either streaming or from a library, it’s a good way to waste an hour or two.  Just don’t have high expectations.

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