Crystal Lake premiere review: gory, nostalgic Friday the 13th

The first episode of Crystal Lake, the Friday the 13th prequel starring Linda Cardellini as Pamela Voorhees, made for a strong start in our house. It's very nostalgic, it's gory, and its plot thickens fast. This was my wife's pick. I had planned to go straight to a different movie, but she wanted Crystal Lake, and we'd both been waiting for this one.

She isn't a big horror person in general, but she loves Friday the 13th. She grew up with it, sitting in when her sister had it on, and she admits she was probably too young for it. For her this is nostalgia, and it's the first genre show I've seen her get excited about.

Crystal Lake goes back to 1972 and humanizes Jason fast

The show is a prequel leading up to the first movie, and an on-screen date places it in 1972. The original film came out in 1980, so the prequel went way back. That fits an observation made early on: the outfits look more 70s than 80s. The hairstyles and styling drew praise throughout the discussion, along with the town, which looks like it's actually from that time rather than a set.

Within seconds the show had humanized Jason, a kid who suffers from some kind of condition and gets bullied at camp before he drowns in the lake. The reaction in the room was that the storyline is sad because he comes across as a fairly normal kid.

The opening and the old-school graphics stay true to Friday the 13th

The drowning sequence ends on what was called "such a Friday the 13th shot." The reaction was simple: "What a great opening that was." The title graphics are old school too. "They're keeping it so true to the graphics," and the show isn't trying to go modern the way the last series we reacted to did.

Linda Cardellini's grief as Pam drew praise as well: "She's such a good actress, though."

Fake police, a hidden past and a lot of gore

The episode jumps nine months ahead, with Pam furious that the camp is reopening. Then two men claiming to be Jersey State Police show up saying they may have found Jason's body. Their story falls apart, it looks like they were going to drug her, and she fights back. Her line about not going back raised the question of whether she escaped a mental institution, and one of the men asks what the people of Crystal Lake would say if they knew what she and Jason really were. We still don't know what that means.

The kills are brutal. "They're really laying on the gore," and the cleanup, staging the bodies for bears, was called "pretty clever." Maybe the whole series is Pam doing the killing, since she was the original killer in the first film and Jason doesn't kill anyone until part two.