Thursday, September 8, 2005
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Today we added a book review for David Grove's Making Friday the 13th: The Legend of Camp Blood, which hits stores Monday. The book is the definitive history of the world's most popular horror film franchise. Fresh light on a cinematic phenomenon that's still going strong a quarter of a century after its debut, this an exhaustive detailing of all eleven Friday the 13th films, including detailed production histories of each film, rare anecdotes, scores of previously unseen photos from private collections, hundreds of rare interviews featuring, among others, Kevin Bacon, Wes Craven, Sean S. Cunningham, Robert Englund, Adrienne King, Betsy Palmer and Tom Savini, iconography, including Jason, the hockey mask, and a body count in the hundreds. Read on for the review...
Making Friday the 13th: The Legend of Camp Blood
By David Grove
Reviewed by Jessica Dwyer
Buy it here
Jason Voorhees is love. Or more exact, Making Friday the 13th is love for Jason Voorhees.
If ever there was a bible for F13’s long history of films, it is this book. Beautifully put together and full of still photos of behind the scenes goodness as well as kill shots and pics from the movies in the series, David Grove has assembled a definitive work on one of the longest horror movie lines in history.
Starting off with what inspired Sean Cunningham to make the first movie (John Carpenter’s success with Halloween, another long lived killer franchise) and goes all the way up to Freddy Vs Jason, Grove gives detail after detail on each movie.
Grove also has a chapter on the syndicated classic Friday The 13th: The Series (whose star John D LeMay went on to star in the Jason Goes to Hell) as it was in fact created by the makers of the Jason films. Although Jason had nothing to really do with the cursed antique business, it was still a great show. For those always wondering why the show never had Jasonesque tones this is explained, as well as why the show was cancelled after having a great 3 season run. The reasons? One reason was the threat of boycotts from religious groups who thought the show and its creative team were a bunch of Satanists. Nice huh?
The chapters on the films are detailed and fact filled to the point that I was just amazed at how Grove got all this info. It’s interesting to read about what has happened to some of the young actors that starred in the original films in the series and what went on while filming.
Things like how Tom Savini created his effects for the movies, such as the “death by arrow” that Kevin Bacon goes through is explained with the storyboards that were used to plan it. As I said, great stuff.
My only complaint is that I would have liked to have had a chapter on the merchandise that Jason has inspired. There has been some great stuff released in the years Mr. Hockey Mask has been stalking young nubile teens. Things like the Atari Video Game and the short lived young adult paperback series are just interesting little footnotes in the history of F13. But that is a minimal gripe. The books focus is the films and that’s what it does extremely well.
For anyone who is a fan of 80’s horror, splatter films, slasher films, or just horror films in general, Making Friday the 13th: The Legend of Camp Blood is a must have. It’s one of the best and most comprehensive film histories I’ve read in a long time.
At the end of the book is a complete body count by movie, by victim, including how they die. Impressive as hell.
The book is published by Fab Press. Check out their site at www.fabpress.com
Jessica Dwyer
Editor-In-Chief
www.fangirlmag.com
Fiction Reviewer
www.bloody-disgusting.com
Source: Buy it here, Jessica Dwyer
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