KILL HER, MOMMY!

Emmy Winner Steals This Horror Show as Slasher Villain’s Mom

Take a trip back to Jason Voorhees’ favorite summer spot with “Crystal Lake.”

Hockey-masked marauder Jason Voorhees long ago shifted from scary fiend to pop-culture punchline, thanks to a slasher series that grew goofier with each ludicrous, monotonous installment. So it’s almost impossible to get worked up about the origin-story reconfiguration in Crystal Lake, an eight-episode prequel about the events leading up to the first Friday the 13^th film.

Akin to Bates Motel for the counselor-slaying icon and his unhinged mother, it’s a return to Camp Crystal Lake whose gleeful, self-conscious absurdity fits a franchise defined by daffiness.

Crystal Lake (streaming Oct. 15 on Peacock) refrains from outright winking at its audience, but with every bit of over-the-top silliness, it makes clear that its tongue is in its cheek. That’s the ideal tone for such an endeavor, given that there’s nothing serious about Jason Voorhees’ big-screen features, whose outlandishness was so pronounced that, by the end, they seemed designed to garner as many laughs as screams.

The same is true of Brad Caleb Kane’s show, whose focus isn’t really Jason; it’s his mom Pamela (Linda Cardellini, fresh off her first-ever Emmy Award for HBO’s DTF St. Louis), who works as the cook at rural New Jersey’s Camp Crystal Lake. When she’s not making meals for the kids, she dotes on her son Jason (Callum Vinson), a young, deformed boy with a misshapen cranium and mouth that make him a target for ridicule from his fellow campers.

In no time flat, Jason—per the character’s lore—drowns in the camp’s lake, while his sole friend, Grace (Gwendolyn Sundstrom), covertly spies on his counselor, Claudette (Danielle Kotch), shirking her duties by running off to a shack to screw her boyfriend, Barry (Phoenix Parnevik). Crystal Lake leans into the films’ horndog energy as well as their fondness for gratuitous goriness, and its ‘70s-era soundtrack­­—Kane relocates the action from 1957-1958 to 1972—is similarly in tune with its predecessors’ atmosphere.

So too is Cardellini’s lunatic performance as Pamela, who’s introduced covered in blood in a bathroom (“What did you do?” she asks herself in the mirror) and whose grief over her child’s death is consuming to the point of creepiness.

In an early flashback, Pamela surprises Jason with a package full of camping goodies that includes a machete, which he promptly holds over his head, proclaiming, “These are my woods!” as his amused mom states, “You look like a crazy person.”

Such is the knowing ridiculousness of Crystal Lake, whose protagonist, nine months after her boy’s untimely demise, can’t stop staring out at the lake, convinced that Jason (whose body hasn’t been recovered) is still out there. Police chief Levon (William Catlett) treats her with kindness, but he can’t contain her psychosis at a Founder’s Day picnic where she loses her mind at kids swimming in the lake (“They’re going to disturb it!”) and, moreover, at news that the camp is reopening in the summer. Worse, upon returning home, she’s greeted by two New Jersey state policemen—or so they claim to be before a gruesome skirmish ensues.

Kane populates Crystal Lake with a few familiar faces (Claudette and Barry are the first to perish in Friday the 13^th, and Nick Cordileone’s PTSD-afflicted recluse Ralph is also a holdover) as well as a host of new characters who would have been right at home in Sean S. Cunningham and Victor Miller’s original. Rita (Joy Suprano) is the randy local who cajoles Pamela to attend a self-help seminar where she gets in touch with her inner self.

Dorf (Cameron Scoggins) is the clownish deputy who loves Japanese throwing stars. Enos (Daniel Stewart Sherman) and Gus (William Hill) are the backwater hunters who add humorous color to the show. These archetypes all fit the material, as does Levon as the noble cop with a tarnished past (and a reporter sister in Devin Kessler’s Brianna) and a crush on Pamela that threatens to blossom into romance.

Cardellini’s Pamela is clearly not altogether there, and by the end of its premiere, the series has not only shown her capacity for violence but also hinted at her twisted backstory. Crystal Lake’s secrets are wacko, albeit no more so than most of Jason’s cinematic hijinks, so it’s hardly as if Kane is sullying a sacrosanct canon.

The additions and revisions made to the boogeyman’s lore are suitably bonkers, as are intimations that someone other than Pamela—who slasher aficionados already know is the OG fiend of Friday the 13^th—is nastily offing kids and adults.

Crystal Lake takes great pleasure in teasing wildly and gazing longingly at mutilated faces, slashed throats, and ravaged torsos. In that regard as well, it embraces the spirit of its exploitative ancestors. Where it falters slightly is in its plotting; at nearly eight hours, the padding piles up, draining the proceedings of their suspenseful playfulness.

Still, there’s just enough madness to keep the show from getting tiresome, and that’s mostly thanks to Cardellini, whose performance as the grief-stricken and furious Pamela walks the line between empathetic and deranged.

Filmed at the same camp used for Friday the 13^th, Crystal Lake ultimately has its narrative dovetail with that classic. Even so, it never feels like a straight do-over; instead, it’s a remix that dramatizes the mayhem previously kept off-screen. Things don’t wrap up the way fans remember, leaving open the possibility of a sequel, though how that might work is one of many unanswered questions at the show’s end.

Nonetheless, getting preoccupied with continuity issues is beside the point for an endeavor that knows it’s rewriting history and yet, because the franchise is an incoherent mess, doesn’t care.

The late appearance of a not-to-be-named-here actor adds another malevolent jolt to Crystal Lake, whose thrills won’t have anyone jumping out of their seats (or off their couches) but will satisfy horror hounds looking for a cheesy throwback lark.

In general, very little good comes from explicating the roots of a legendary villain. Kane’s series, however, bucks that trend thanks to a great Cardellini turn, a lighthearted, jokey approach, and a shrewd recognition that there’s no besmirching a legacy already stained (in blood, guts, and comical inanity) beyond repair.

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Nick SchagerEntertainment Critic

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