Thursday 13 August 2015

Hollywood Babble On & On #1247: Friday The 13th The Series?

Flush with success from DC superheroes, magicians, and a pregnant virgin, the CW Network now thinks it can work miracles by raising the dead. The stinking foetid corpse in question is the Friday The 13th franchise which they hope to adapt into a TV series about the people of Crystal Lake facing the return of a more "grounded" version of the unstoppable killer.

Now I've never been a fan of the franchise, it came to embody the worst of the 1980s slasher-horror boom, coming up with lamer and lamer excuses to ramp up the gore and keep Jason coming back no matter what happened to him. It got very silly and very boring, and it showed in the diminishing returns at the box office.

Even a big budget remake failed to revive interest in a franchise that was deader than a Voorheez victim.

The funny thing is that the franchise had already branched into TV back in the 1980s.

Sort of.

Back in 1987 the producers of the Friday the 13th movies were branching into television with a Canadian-USA syndicated late night horror series that was originally going to be called The 13th Hour.

They decided that title was too obscure and went with the more famous "brand" even though the show had nothing to do with Jason Voorhees.

The premise of the show was pretty straightforward. An antiques dealer named Louis Vendredi made a pact with the devil for wealth and immortality. To cash in the stock in his store had been cursed to lead those who buy them into madness and murder by bombarding them powerful temptations.

But in the pilot Louis had an attack of guilt and broke the pact, and ended up dead and in hell.

Two distant relatives then inherited the store, which they then cleaned out in a huge sale. Shortly afterward, with the help of their uncle's ex-partner, they discover the curses and spend the rest of the series trying to get the stuff back and locked up safely in a supernaturally fortified vault.

Now I was just a kid when I saw it, and it ended 25 years ago, but I remember that it was one of the scariest things I had ever seen made for TV, and that includes Dark Night of the Scarecrow.

As far as I can remember, it sure was scarier than anything the Friday the 13th movies dished out.

Which is why I'm not holding out much hope for the CW's idea.

They should stick to DC superheroes.

2 comments:

  1. Rainforest Giant13/8/15 4:57 pm

    Plus the redhead was smoking hot.

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  2. This was already tried, with Harper's Island, a CBS (!) show that was basically a slasher TV series, or a very drawn out slasher film. At least one person died a baroque death every episode--Harry Hamlin, for instance, was hewn in half.

    A more "grounded" version of Jason doesn't even sound like Jason. Although Freddy vs. Jason worked a LOT more than it should have, so who knows?

    Poltergeist: The Legacy was another decent horror show that had no real connection to the film series it was named for.

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