The Screengrab

Marilyn Chambers, who was found dead in her home yesterday at the age of 56, was best known as the star of Jim and Artie Mitchell's Behind the Green Door (1972), one of the three biggest hits of the brief era of "porno chic" in the early 1970s. Where Linda Lovelace, the star of Deep Throat, had a winning, giggly anything-goes quality, and Georgina Spelvin, of The Devil in Miss Jones, stood out for her voracious level of on-screen enthusiasm, the youthful Chambers (nee' Marilyn Ann Briggs), who was twenty when Green Door was made, had what porn directors invariably claim to value above all else and seem to find once in a blue moon: a fresh-scrubbed, girl-next-door, all-American cheerleader look and manner that, to the Mitchells and their audience, must have seemed to be screaming out to be defiled. In the movie, Chambers played an innocent miss who is abducted and spirited away to a sinister underground club where she spends the bulk of the film's 72-minute running time being ravished for the delectation of a masked audience; she loves it, of course.

Green Door, which would go on to make millions, was made for $60,000, with the leading lady receiving $25,000 and one percent of the gross--a very good deal for her, because the Mitchells were tough businessmen and Green Door would be one of the few hardcore porn "classics" to make money that actually wound up in the hands of the people who'd made it. The Mitchells were lucky to find Chambers, but their cup really ranneth over when they discovered that their leading lady was the recently anointed face of Ivory Snow; she could be seen, with her hair pulled back and cuddling a baby, on boxes of the detergent from coast to coast. Procter & Gamble wound up giving the movie a shot of free publicity (and taking a bath itself) by recalling all its products and advertising that featured her face, thus demonstrating that it's that 56/100% that's not pure that'll kill ya.

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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.

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Thanks to reader Jason Alley for requesting this week’s review. As always, for instructions on how to request the next review for this feature (to run in two weeks) see the bottom of this post.

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