Why Found-Again? Friday the 13th: The Series was my favorite of a trio of shows I watched as a teen with the express purpose of scaring myself witless at one a.m. (the other two were Monsters and Freddy’s Nightmares, the Nightmare on Elm Street anthology series). When I found out Amazon has the show streaming for Prime members, I knew two things:
- This would more profitably use time spent on my other weird Amazon streaming interest, which is finding the cheesiest made-for-TV detective movies I can and watching them anyway;
- This was going to be a Found-Again Friday post in a hurry—better yet, a Found-Again Friday post about something I don’t hate. Whew!
The Premise: Cousins Ryan and Micki find that they’ve inherited their creepy, evil uncle Louis’s* cursed antique store. Not being evil themselves, they embark on a quest to retrieve all the murderous antiques Louis sold over the years and store them safely (we hope) in the store’s vault. They’re hindered in this by both the artifacts and the occasionally not-dead-enough uncle, and helped by Jack Marshak, a man who never lets the fact that he is an actual SORCERER get in the way of being overpowered by bad guys at dramatically appropriate moments.
Aside from the quality issues inevitable for a show in a then-undervalued genre made in the weird dark age right before CGI started catching up with the human imagination, Ft13:tS has only one problem: the character of Ryan. He’s a lot like his partial namesake Richie from Highlander: The Series—so much so that I find myself wondering if all Canadian shows were once required to have an annoying, supposedly street-smart guy as a main character. (Both shows still beat Forever Knight, in which I’m pretty sure that guy is the titular protagonist, but that is a Found-Again Friday for another time.)
The Verdict: With a few exceptions, Friday the 13th: the Series is one of the purest monster-of-the week shows ever—I’m hedging only because Kolchak might have an unbeatable lead there. Yes, it’s cheesy—among other things, you’ll encounter a creepy doll, voodoo snakes, a riff on The Phantom of the Opera, chanting Satanists, Jack the Ripper’s blade, and an amusing reference to Boris Karloff. But the show is also great fun, even when the plot is so obvious you could swear it was lit by a cursed antique lamp.
Might go well with: Red wine, anything you have to cut up with a knife.
*His last name is Vendredi, the French word for “Friday.” What is it about the name Louis that brings out the scamp in some writers?
