Friday the 13th: The Series -- Season 1 Episode 15 (Vanity's Mirror)

Some shows have internal consistency.  Shows like 24 have a single narrative.  Others, like the X-Files, may be more episodic, but at least have a mythology going.  I’ve come to realize that Friday the 13th: The Series is more of anthology that uses the same characters.

Micki and Ryan inherited an antiques shop that sold cursed stuff.  Along with the uncle’s former business partner, Jack, they’ve taken it upon themselves to retrieve as many of the cursed items as possible.  This serves as a backdrop for the episodes, which seem to follow an item-of-the-week format.  Each week, an item comes to their attention.  With some effort, the trio manages to get the item.

This week, it’s a compact that makes someone fall madly in love with the person using it.  All a lady has to do is use the mirror to reflect light onto an unlucky guy.  Suddenly, she’s his entire world.   The episode starts with a flower vendor using it on a customer that has never really noticed her.  She uses his newly found obsession to lead him into a back alley so that she can kill him.  Her success is short lived, as she’s soon hit by a bus.

A girl by the name of Helen Mackie finds the compact and picks it up.  She accidentally figures out what it does when she uses it on a boy at her school.  The boy is now enamored with Helen, who makes him go into a trash compactor to retrieve something.

Why would she do this?  Helen isn’t that popular.  Her sister, Joanne, has a good-looking boyfriend, Scott.  It’s cruel that two sisters would be so different in terms of appearance and popularity, but life can be cruel like that some times.  Helen decides to use the compact to repay that cruelty to the other boys who tease her.  Thus, several of them meat a similar end.

This is the first episode where the team doesn’t actually retrieve an item.  As far as they know, someone walked off with it.  They just have no idea who.  (This isn’t far from the truth.  In the final scene, we see a hand reaching for it.)  This leads to some major overacting by Louise Robey, who plays Micki.  She’s all torn up over the fact that such a dangerous item is out there.  As Jack points out, they’ve had a pretty good run.  There are also a lot more items out there.  At 23, they’ve almost gotten 10% of the items in the manifest.  That means that there are more than 200 items still floating around.

My big problem is that the episode is more about the item than the issue.  There’s no talk of Helen being beautiful on the inside or using her inner light or anything.  She’s just a homely, awkward teenager that takes revenge when given the opportunity.  She only has a change of heart when she snares someone she actually likes.

Another thing that I noticed was an obvious lack of parents, or any adults for that matter.  All of these students go to a school that doesn’t seem to have many teachers.  Even at the dance, there’s an obvious lack of adult supervision.  Am I to believe that Helen and Joanna don’t have parents?  You’d think that a proud mother and/or father would want to see them off.  There’s no mention of parents working late or Joanna taking care of them.  Having some sort of adult present, other than Jack, Micki and Ryan, would have been a great way to have some commentary, even if it’s along the lines of, “kids these days.”

The show did manage to last three seasons, so I am hopeful that the episodes will get better.  I think there’s a reason why I don’t really remember the show, though.

IMDb page

Friday the 13th: The Series -- Season 1 Episode 11 (Scarecrow)

Sometimes, when reviewing a TV series, I have the choice of reviewing by the episode or reviewing by the season.  Some series, like 24, don’t lend themselves to an episode-by-episode breakdown, as the story is stretched over the entire season.  Other series have more of an episodic nature.  While Star Trek did have some continuity, each installment tended to deal with a particular issue.

Friday the 13th: The Series tends more towards the episodic format.  Cousins Ryan and Micki inherited an antiques store from their uncle.  With the help of Jack Marshak, they retrieve cursed items so that they can’t harm anyone else.  As you might infer from the episode’s title, this one is about a cursed scarecrow.

Several mailers were sent out by the antiques store asking about cursed items.  Someone in the country responded asking to take back the titular item.  So, Micki and Ryan head out to retrieve it, without help form Jack.  As in the previous episode, he’s out on important business. (It’s established that he’s retrieving another item this time.)

When they get to the house, they find a married couple, the Cobeans.  Tudy appears to want to tell them something, although Nick is quick to be rid of them.  Micki and Ryan eventually leave when the developmentally disabled son is set free from the closet.  It’s a shame, because Micki was about to try that may-I-use-the-ladies‘-room trick to look around.

Micki and Ryan know something’s up because the husband tells them that the scarecrow was destroyed in a fire.  (Cursed items can’t be destroyed.)  So, they do their best to snoop around anyway only to run in to Marge Longacre.  There’s no more snooping around, but Marge tells the cousins that she runs the local bed & breakfast.  At least they have a place to stay.

As luck would have it, Marge is also the one controlling the scarecrow.  The way the curse works is that the scarecrow has to kill three people, but the person selecting the people gets a bountiful harvest in return.  A boy’s father was the first victim, shown at the beginning of the episode.  Tudy becomes the second victim.  When Ryan and Micki get too close, Marge steals Micki’s driver’s license so that Micki can become the third victim.

Several things bothered me about this.  First, you know that she’s going to survive.  So, it’s just a matter of getting the picture off the scarecrow.  Second, the scene where Marge comes across Micki’s license is a bit contrived.  Micki conveniently leaves her purse out where anyone would have access to it.  When Micki returns, she checks her wallet only to notice her license is missing.  Third, the license is the most generic-looking license I’ve ever seen.  There’s no mention of an address or a state or anything else that would identify where the show takes place.  The entire thing is just a way for Marge to set the scarecrow after Micki.

The series so far has been fairly decent.  It seems to have found itself rather quickly.  This is the twelfth episode and it’s a pretty solid one, relatively speaking.  Sure, it’s cliché.  (It’s funny how law enforcement shows up just in time to save Micki.)  The episode is at least entertaining.

The scarecrow looked a little odd to me.  This, to me, is where commentary on each episode would be helpful.  It didn’t look like what I think a scarecrow looks like, but this may be because TV shows tend towards one type of scarecrow.  It’s also possible that the costume was designed to have an actor inside rather than be a puppet.  These are the kinds of things I’d like to know.  Did they at least try for a more traditional look?  Is this just the way Canadian scarecrows look?  I may never know.

Speaking of how things are in Canada, you can tell the series is filmed in Canada if you look closely enough.  For instance, this episode had bridge-clearance signs with the distance in meters rather than feet.  The series does a decent job of obscuring or hiding these details, but they are occasionally visible if you’re looking for them.

One of the good things about the series being episodic is that you can pretty much watch them out of order without much loss.  I don’t think that there’s anything a casual viewer would be confused by.  The only thing someone might ask is why two people are looking for the antiques in the first place.  As long as you’re familiar with the general premise of the show, you could skip around at will.  This is definitely one of the more interesting episodes so far.

IMDb page

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.

IMDb page