The Rube’s Review: Friday the 13th – The Series (1987-1990)

["Lewis Vendredi made a deal with the devil to sell cursed antiques. But he broke that pact and it cost him his soul. Now, his niece Micki and her cousin Ryan have inherited the store… and with it, the curse. Now they must get everything back and the real terror begins.”]

Yep, the pre-credit prologue right there pretty much sums it up. Mostly every episode started with an unexplained murder with this week’s cursed object in his/her cold, burned, butchered, or decapitated hand, which is then found by a person with low self esteem, lack of makeup, and hair in their face. Usually, this homely person would wish for things like being popular, love, wealth, power, being famous and *BAM!* the trinket would go on a killing spree which would hit page 3 of the local papers.

Other than Miki (played by Canadian popstar Robey) and Ryan dusting knicknacks(?)… selling un-cursed bobbles(?)… you know, I never can remember how they managed to keep that antique shop in business. Anyways, their pal Jack would spend most of the day looking at page 3 and reading in-between the lines to determine the location of the next cursed item. Then, through a novice process of blending in and grade school deductive reasoning the trio find the cursed item, but never before the now rich/powerful/cleaned up evildoer gets what’s coming to them. Then I guess its business as usual at the antique shop!

I know what you’re going to say, “But Rube, F13: The Series has nothing to do with Jason Voorhees and only used the infamous name to sell off a horror series to television.” Yeah, that may be true, but let me remind you that the same goes for Halloween III: Season of the Witch. Even though the movie is about a bat-shit, Druid mask maker that magically flew a giant slab of Stonehenge in the dead of night to a coastal Californian town only for it to later break into scraps which he then imbedded with a microchip and put into kids’ masks to kill them on Halloween… it still counts as part of the Halloween series. Check the name! Yeah, I know that it has nothing to do with Michael Myers other than he wears a mask and there’s masks in the movie. Anyways, my point is if Halloween III counts as a Halloween movie, than Friday the 13th: The Series is going to count in the F13 Genre. RUBES RULES!

Having made this statement, I can only compare this series to other classic (and some forgettable) horror television series of the era. Namely it was written better than Werewolf: The Series, it had better production value than Freddy’s Nightmares, but the stories weren’t as good as Tales from the Darkside nor were the SFX any cooler than Monsters.

SLASHER SCOREBOARD

MOST MEMORABLE MOMENTS:
Any episode when the adolescent Rube would see Robey in a tight shirt.

RATING:
4/10 for most episodes… 8/10 if Robey wore suspenders with that shirt.