As much as I enjoy the camp (no pun intended) value of the Dragnet hippies, the horny teens, and the Mayberry RFD yokels, it’s undoubtedly a good thing to have an episode’s tone determined by the acting of Linda Cardellini, William Catlett, and Hamish Linklater. As Briana, Devin Kessler also performs in this serious register. When comic relief characters like Dorfman, Rita, and Enos are used here, they’re used in a way that feels consistent both with their own humorous track records and with how normal people would behave. That neatly ties both halves of the show together.

But the real dramatic energy here is from the demented nuclear (again, no pun intended) Whittering/Voorhees family: patronizing, patriarchal, sociopathic Elias; ferocious, loyal, chemically imbalanced Pamela; and…Jason, or whatever’s left of him.

I reviewed the season finale of the fantastic Crystal Lake for Decider.

There’s nothing surprising about the secret origin of Pamela and Jason Voorhees. Should there be? It might be nice, I suppose, but then there was never anything all that surprising about Friday the 13th to begin with. You’re not here to watch Crystal Lake reinvent the wheel, you’re hear to see it stud that thing with spikes and run people over with it. In that sense, this episode delivers. You may have seen this kind of super-child origin story done before, but rarely with the gusto you get here by the end.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Crystal Lake Season 1 for Decider.

If you can’t solve a problem, make it bigger. This maxim was a favorite of United States Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. It seems to be the approach favored by the increasingly unhinged Pamela Voorhees as well, and with similarly grisly results. 

I reviewed episode 6 of Crystal Lake for Decider.

I am now fully on board with the cartoon hippies of Crystal Lake. I’m smoking their grass, I’m dropping their acid, I’m rockin’ their van till no one comes a-knockin’. They’re simply too funny to resist anymore.

Funny on purpose, I mean. To me, that’s obvious, because the show is funny on purpose all the time. Claudette droning on about how the power of prayer can spiritually replace her hymen because “Jesus has a hard-on” for her, Barry teaching the kids how to row with a paddle by saying “cup the tip, guide the shaft, in and out, in and out” over and over, the dark dark comedy reveal that Claudette’s pastor is a pervert — this episode alone has ample evidence of the show’s comedic chops. But you can also think back to the brilliant splatstick comedy of Pamela’s fight with the Bellflower thugs, or the bawdy read-along that introduced us to Rita and the rest of the townsfolk. 

In other words, when this show wants to be sharp, it is. And not just in the comedy department, either: The gap between how seriously Pamela, Lee, and Grace are taken versus the rest of the cast remains pretty vast, which by now seems deliberate. The point is that if Crystal Lake is ever stupid, it’s stupid like a fox.

I mean, for crying out loud, they’re giving Harmony, the lead hippie, dialogue like this:

“The straight world’s no place for our kind.”

“Our souls are vibrating at the same frequency.”

“Everyone’s waiting for us. We’re building a new society.”

“I get the suffocating hypocrisy of our male-dominated society.” (“Right on, sister,” her friend chimes in.)

Everyone making this is aware they’re just doing the Dragnet hippie episode on the shores of Crystal Lake, and everyone’s having a whale of a time with it. So am I.

I reviewed episode five of Crystal Lake for Decider.

Crystal Lake’s problems remain consistent: Pamela, Lee, and Grace’s material remains much stronger than everyone else’s, and man do I wish the nighttime cinematography made real use of darkness and light. But so do its strengths: Linda Cardellini and William Catlett are fantastic, the gore is gross and right in your face, and perhaps most importantly, it’s suggesting that Jason Voorhees and Captain America have similar origin stories. Now all we need is a little mass murder and we’ll really be cooking.

I reviewed episode 4 of Crystal Lake for Decider.

Crystal Lake isn’t a perfect show. The yokels are drawn a little too broadly to be effective as characters, especially up against characters as serious Pamela and Lee and performances as strong as Linda Cardellini’s and William Catlett’s. The nighttime photography is flat and lifeless, an especial shame given the original films’ oceans of black illuminated by flashlights and porch lights. 

But there’s just so much fun stuff here! In the opening flashback, young Jason blows off a nasty series of jagged cuts in his arm he got from a branch, feeling no pain at all; “I’m pretty tough,” he says, in the understatement of the year. The discovery of the cabin is another piece of the “how did Jason survive out there” puzzle. There’s a creepy shot that reveals Jason has been in Pam’s garage without her knowing it, going through his old box of toys. The opening credits are striking and unlike anything else on TV right now.

On a more serious note, Grace remains a refreshingly imperfect and complicated child character; watching her try to figure out how to parent these terrible adults is heartbreaking, as is the scene in which it’s revealed her cigarette burn was self-inflicted. Pam and Lee’s chemistry is as incendiary as her need to mother Grace is stifling. “I couldn’t save my son,” she growls at one point, “but I can save her.” From whom?

Bottom line: Pamela Voorhees knocks a woman’s face off with a bigass meat hammer. That’s entertainment, if you’re a sicko. If you’re not a sicko, what are you doing here?

I reviewed episode three of Crystal Lake for Decider.

The thing I love most about Crystal Lake so far — and I do love it, make no mistake, I’m a real sucker for what this show is doing — is its hidden depths, no pun intended. You don’t have to make a character like Rita both a classic ’70s floozy and a woman who suffered a stillbirth and thus sees Pamela’s strength and love for her child more clearly than anyone else on the show, but isn’t it better if you do? You don’t have to burrow into the original series’, how shall I put this, fraught relationship with teenage female sexuality so deep that you’ve got Grace mimicking older kids gossiping about “sluts” in the bathroom mirror, or staring intently at the sexual graffiti all over the stall door, or putting on lipstick and clogs to hang with the very kids she watched have sex while Jason drowned — but again, doesn’t it make this a more interesting show when you go there?

I reviewed the second episode of Crystal Lake for Decider.

As a slasher series, Friday the 13th is like a chainsaw that took three tugs on the cord to fully fire up. 

Like Scream famously points out, Jason Voorhees, the unstoppable killing machine that the franchise turned into a horror icon, isn’t even the killer in original 1980 film. It’s his mother, Pamela Voorhees. Even though Victor Miller’s unevenly written script doesn’t bother introducing this character before the big reveal, the gleefully deranged performance of actor Betsy Palmer ensures Pamela’s place in horror history.

After we watch a gaggle of camp counselors engage in fairly wholesome sexual activity (strip Monopoly! oh no!) and get slaughtered one by one by an unseen assailant, we learn that Pamela has gone insane and is out to avenge her son’s death from drowning at Camp Crystal Lake decades earlier. The culprits were a couple of neglectful, sexually active teenage camp counselors whom she killed a year after the incident; now, to Pamela, the only good camp counselor is a dead one. No lumbering behemoth in a hockey mask here, just a middle-aged lady with a haircut and sweater that scream “church bake sale,” slaughtering teenagers for “making love while that boy drowned!”

Only in Part 2 does Jason himself, who survived his apparent drowning and has lived in the woods as a feral scavenger ever since, begin his own killing spree. Taking the same zero-tolerance approach to camp counselors as his mother, whose death he’s now out to avenge, he is defeated by yet another sexually active camp counselor, who smartly uses his fixation on his mother to escape certain death.

By Part III, Jason’s a lumbering behemoth with super-strength, seemingly just killing anyone unlucky enough to be near Crystal Lake, where he, uh, didn’t drown. It’s here he gets his trademark hockey mask, grabs his trusty machete, and becomes the monster the series is famous for. It’s also here where the series gets incredibly dumb: toilet humor, central-casting hippies and “punks” as victims, and the worst 3D effects you’ve ever seen. By the time he literally rises from the dead in the fourth film, infamously subtitled The Final Chapter, he might as well be Godzilla, if Godzilla movies had gratuitous nudity and special gore effects by Tom Savini.

Sleazy, silly, and creatively disjointed as they are, though, there’s an arc formed by these initial Fridays — the story of a disabled and bullied boy, a mother driven mad by grief, and an improbable tale of survival that turned the boy into a monster like his mother before him. The heart of it all is an incredible scene at the end of Part 2, in which the film’s “final girl” (Amy Steel) finds Jason’s macabre shrine to his mother (complete with her severed head), puts on her trademark blue sweater, and pretends to be her, cooing at the crazed killer to “come to mommy.” The scene is such a psychosexual live wire, so brilliantly acted by Steel and Palmer, that it feels like it’s from a different, better series. 

Wisely, it’s on this powerful, ultimately lethal relationship between mother and child that Peacock’s Crystal Lake focuses. This prequel/reboot hybrid from creator-writer Brad Caleb Kane, co-showrunner of the excellent, similar It: Welcome to Derry, launches with an entire episode about a mother losing her vulnerable, beloved son before her eyes. It actually takes the emotional stakes of the films’ premise seriously, even as it plants seeds for some of the franchise’s most outlandish elements — and, arguably, gets even more out-there than they did by the end.

I reviewed the series premiere of Crystal Lake — and the Friday the 13th movies too — for Decider, where I’ll be covering the whole show over the next few days. KI KI KI MA MA MA