Normally, the Friday Take Five feature is built around some new release.  But this is a very special day for bottom-drawer cinephiles the world over:  today is Friday the 13th, the day commemorated in a series of eleven of the rootin'-est, tootin'-est, sexually-active-teenager-beheadin'-east movies of all time.  While there isn't a new Friday the 13th movie coming out -- unfortunately, or thankfully depending on your perspective, we'll have to wait until 2009 for the proposed remake of the first movie -- there's no reason we can't take a look back at what is, despite the universal revulsion of critics, one of the most successful franchises in motion picture history.  It's hard to believe it's been 28 years since the first Friday the 13th movie, but the mass-murderous adventures of the scrappy, plucky Jason Voorhees (and what's with all the big-screen serial killers having such WASPy names, from Voorhees to Krueger to Meyers?  Aren't there any unstoppable, inhuman psychopathic butchers named Breitkowicz or Morelli?) have manage to last longer than most marriages.  With little more than a machete, a hockey mask, and a can-do attitude, Jason has become a cultural icon, almost single-handedly birthing the lamentable teen-slasher genre so popular in the 1980s and managing to set a standard for improbable resurrections that not even superhero comics can rival. I'm not going to say that the movies below represent the best of the Friday the 13th movies; to be perfectly honest, "best" just isn't a word than any of these flicks can aspire to.  But at the very least, these are the five that represent, in some way, a hallmark acheivement for everyone's favorite reason to avoid summer camp.

FRIDAY THE 13th (1980)

It's usually claimed that the first of the venerable hack-'n'slash franchise is the best, and we can't argue with that claim.  However, while John Carpenter's Halloween was a genuinely good low-budget horror movie that spawned a ton of far inferior sequels, Sean Cunningham's Friday the 13th was pretty much a crappy exploitation movie that produced a bunch of sequels that were marginally worse.  The francise didn't have far to fall, but at the very least, if you were of a certain age in the 1980s, seeing the original Friday the 13th was something like a rite of passage.  Of mild canonical interest due to the fact that Jason Voorhees isn't the killer and doesn't even appear in the film in his familiar form, this would still just be a long-forgotten curio along the lines of Silent Night Deadly Night if it hadn't happened to catch an inexplicable fire and turn into one of the biggest indie movie hits of all time.  The sequels that it birthed are all much, much worse, don't get us wrong -- but don't go into this expecting any kind of a diamond in the rough.  It's just the least objectionable turd in a very big punchbowl.
 
FRIDAY THE 13th PART 3 (1982)

Although the franchise was already a runaway hit, it wasn't until the third installment that the Friday the 13th movies finally took the shape with which we're most familiar today.  The third visit to woebegotten Camp Crystal Lake was marketed as a gimmick movie thanks to having been filmed in 3-D ("A new dimension in terror!", screamed the posters and newspaper ads), but what really makes Friday the 13th Part 3 so memorable in the series is that it's the first time the immortal and ill-tempered Jason Voorhees first dons his iconic hockey mask.  He also picks up a few attributes that would be reiterated, if never actually explained in any way, in all subsequent Friday the 13th movies:  his tremendous, almost superhuman strength, and his abilty to come back from almost any injury, however fatal.  Hockey goalies are the members of the team least likely to get into a fistfight on the ice, but starting with this movie, Jason Voorhees manages to make them seem like the most bad-ass guys in professional sports. 

FRIDAY THE 13th:  THE FINAL CHAPTER (1984)

The fourth installment of the franchise promised it would be the last, and some people -- including special effects wizard Tom Savini, who believed this would be Jason Voorhees' last ride, and actor Ted White, who played the killer but was so upset with the script and the poor treatment of the actors that he asked for his name to be removed from the credits -- seemed to believe it.  No such luck, though:  The Final Chapter made $32 million, which pretty much guaranteed that there would be more to come.  In most ways a typical example of the series (Jason goes bananas on a bunch of teens with a variety of sharpened implements), The Final Chapter is noteworthy largely for its cast:  a young Corey Feldman plays the male lead in a sure sign that you're watching a movie that was made in the mid-1980s.  Additionally, Crispin Glover's fans and detractors alike will be interested to know that in this movie, the always-controversial actor's hand gets nailed to a countertop with a corkscrew.  And then Jason whacks him in the face with a meat cleaver.

JASON X (2002)

It's the tenth movie!  Get it?  If that doesn't strike you as particularly clever, too bad, because believe us, it doesn't get any better from there.  By this point in the two decades of the Friday the 13th franchise, the character of Jason Voorhees has already become a sort of cultural punchline for improbable resurrections; in addition, he's already slipped the surly bonds of Camp Crystal Lake and visited, amongst other places, Manhattan, Hell, and the depths of Corey Feldman's soul -- each worse than the one before.  So what was left for the venerable franchise to do but send him to an even more absurd location (a spaceship orbiting a post-apocalyptic future Earth) and give him an even more ridiculous method of resurrection (infiltrated by a hi-tech nanobot virus and transformed into a cybernetic superman)?  The writers were also clever enough to use the movie's future setting as a way to give the finger to the innumerable continuity nerds who had started swarming around the francise.

FREDDY VS. JASON (2003)

Well, why not?  Pitting the two slasher icons against one another was an idea that had been kicking around for a decade, but by the time it finally got made, anyone who expected Hong Kong veteran Ronny Yu to bring the same sly, campy sense of humor to Freddy vs. Jason that he did to Bride of Chucky was in for a pretty big disappointment.  The plot to this thing is pretty incomprehensible, even by the convoluted standards of Friday the 13th movies, but it's all just prelude to the big showdown between the two bloodthirsty ne'er-do-wells that makes up the second half of the movie.  After a great deal of hurled cutlery, Jason seems to emerge victorious, trudging sloppily out of Crystal Lake with the severed head of Freddy Krueger -- which then proceeds to give us a wink, a laugh, and the terrifying prospect of yet another sequel.  Luckily, that's the last we've seen of Freddy or Jason for a good long while, but the remake is less than a year away...