FRIDAY becomes a franchise, Richard Pryor busts loose, The Lone Ranger does not ride, and Hal Ashby lays an egg in May 1981

It's a jam-packed opening to the month with a pivotal horror sequel

The premise is simple, but the task is not. Every single movie released in the United States during the 1980s, reviewed in chronological order, published month by month.

Buckle up, because this is The Last ‘80s Newsletter You’ll Ever Need…

MAY

Billie Jean King became the first prominent sportsman to come out when she announced her relationship with Marilyn Barnett.
26-year-old Bobby Sands died as a result of his 66-day hunger strike.
SCTV Network 90 debuted on NBC, to the delight of a generation of comedy fans, and Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Cats debuted in London, to the delight of a generation of tourists.

By far, though, the most important story of the month was the premiere of The Harlem Globetrotters On Gilligan’s Island, perhaps the finest crossover-between-a-basketball-team-and-a-sitcom movie of all time.

Rolling into May of 1981, I was starting to really cycle up into an insufferable movie nerd.

My parents, god bless them, indulged me as much as they could. I don’t think either one of them knew what they were unleashing when they took me to see movies or when they brought an early VCR into the home, allowing me to start working my way through various rental libraries. This was the year they started relaxing their standards on the R rating in a big way. I’d seen some R-rated films before this, but largely by accident. After April’s back to back of Nighthawks and Excalibur, it felt like something had shifted, and I started pushing much more aggressively for things that interested me.

My parents always seemed to be open to me ingesting art that was above my pay grade as long as I could explain my reactions to them. There were things that made them uncomfortable, but considering they were both raised in fairly conservative Southern families, they were much more lenient than many of my friends’ parents. That created a system where I had to know who was likely to take us to see things and who wasn’t, and which kind of things were most likely with which parents or older brothers.

Friday the 13th was a big deal already by the time the first sequel was released, and we knew months ahead of time that our parents weren’t going to let us go anywhere near the theater. The first film existed for me as photos in Fangoria and a breathless blow-by-blow by my friend’s older brother, and we decided we were getting into the second film no matter what. I think the reason I have so much fondness for the franchise is because my first experience with it was this one, seen as part of an excursion with a whole group of guys from my scout troop. Some people were able to buy tickets. Other people were admitted through a side door. We went on the first weekend, on a Saturday evening, and it was a galvanizing experience for a young film fan. The audience was vocally involved in everything about the movie, and Jason was a terrifying presence that had everyone screaming and jumping, popcorn in the air repeatedly. I loved it, and I was absolutely terrified by it. Trying to play it off around my parents was tough because I was so affected by the movie and by the entire experience, and they were so irritated by the entire idea of the Friday the 13th movies and contemporary hyper-violent horror.

The thing is, everything in our pop culture was rougher in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Maybe it was because of the hangover from Vietnam. Maybe it was the entire turbulent era that America had survived that left these scars that made even family entertainment feel much rougher. I know that going into this summer, I was out of my mind. There was a new James Bond film coming. There was a new movie from George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. There was a new Superman movie. And there were so many other things that looked fascinating. I had a notebook I kept with my list of things I wanted to see and things I’d seen, and I made notes on movies I saw on TV or in the theater or, increasingly, on video. This was also the beginning of the era when May was the official start of the movie summer. The year before, we got a totally stacked line-up in May, building up to my birthday weekend at the end of the month, and that was a trend that only became more pronounced as the decade wore on.

The other two R-rated priorities for me this month were Richard Pryor’s Busting Loose and Happy Birthday To Me, which had an absolutely hog-wild poster. I got my mom to agree to Busting Loose, surprisingly enough, but there was a condition: we weren’t going to tell my dad about it. My dad had a few triggers when it came to media, and subversive comedy was one of those triggers. We had an ongoing game in the house where I would try to smuggle in comedy albums and he would keep a keen eye on what I had. I remember hiding my Richard Pryor’s Greatest Hits album in my Empire Strikes Back soundtrack sleeve, and when he found it, he was livid. Pryor seemed to set him off far worse than George Carlin or Robin Williams, and I honestly don’t think it was about race. I think it was because Pryor genuinely felt dangerous, and I think that’s what made him so attractive to me. Pryor’s albums had an edge that most mainstream comedy did not, and one of the things that I find most frustrating about his film career is how it felt like much of that danger got sanded off of his persona by Hollywood. I think my mom was surprised by how mild-mannered Busting Loose was, and that helped the next time I tried to make the case for an R-rated comedy. I had to pick my battles, and sometimes I picked wisely, and sometimes I picked poorly.

For example, Happy Birthday To Me was a poorly-chosen battle. Again, my mom was my target. I figured I could sell it to her as an “Agatha Christie kind of thing,” and that got us into the theater. She was so mad at me by the end of the film that I was worried I had nipped my new R-rated habit in the bud. I realized that I had to be smart about realizing which films would upset my parents and which ones they had a chance of enjoying. For example, there was one final R-rated film I saw in theaters this month, and I didn’t have to campaign to make it happen. All it took was a single conversation with my father.

“Hey, dad, there’s a new movie called Outland we should go see.”

“Why? What is it?”

“It stars Sean Connery, and the director described it as High Noon in space.”

Tickets. Fucking. Sold. We were there for the first weekend. And while I thought it was moody and compelling, my dad’s main comment when we walked out after the screening was, “Well, that was not High Noon.”

Looking at it now, May of ’81 feels like a very slow warm-up to a very big summer, but there is plenty here to dig into. Let’s jump right in with a title pretty much everyone knows…

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MAY 1

Friday the 13th Part 2
Amy Steel, John Furey, Adrienne King, Kirsten Baker, Stuart Charno, Warrington Gillette, Steve Dash, Marta Kober, Tom McBride, Bill Randolph, Lauren-Marie Taylor, Russell Todd, Betsy Palmer, Cliff Cudney, Jack Marks, Walt Gorney, Jerry Wallace, David Brand, China Chen, Carolyn Louden, Jaime Perry, Tom Shea, Jill Voight
cinematography by Peter Stein
music by Harry Manfredini
screenplay by Ron Kurz
based on characters created by Victor Miller
produced by Steve Miner and Dennis Murphy
directed by Steve Miner
Rated R
1 hr 27 mins

Five years after the events of the first film, a new series of murders takes place at a teen counselor training camp near Crystal Lake.

You can’t blame Paramount for striking while the iron was hot. I don’t think anyone could have predicted quite how crazy audiences would go for the first movie, and as soon as the movie’s success was obvious, Paramount went to work locking down worldwide distribution rights for a sequel. The first major creative decision that had to be made involved Jason Voorhees. Half of the people involved with the first film thought the ending was not meant to be literal, and the other half saw it as a promise that they’d made to the audience. Tom Savini, who was the one who originally suggested Jason’s shocking appearance at the end of the first movie, thought it was insane to actually use a resurrected Jason as the bad guy in the sequel and decided to do another movie instead of returning.

Another person who decided to sit out the sequel was Sean S. Cunningham. Much of what defined the first film’s success was devised by Cunningham, but he had mixed emotions about what the audience who showed up for the original and for Last House on the Left. He decided not to make a sequel and Steve Miner happily took over, just as Ron Kurz, who did some of the rewrites on Victor Miller’s script for the first film, was happy to step in as the primary writer on the sequel. Frank Mancuso Jr., son to the president of Paramount, was assigned to the movie as an associate producer, and while no one was excited to have him there, he turned out to be a major asset to the film and to the franchise as a whole.

I’m not sure the five year time jump accounts for the difference between the Jason who popped out of the lake and the giant hulking menace in this movie, but then again, there’s not much about this one that makes literal sense. The kind of horror that really gets under my skin is horror based in an experience we recognize, fear that speaks directly to our actual understanding of the world. I am afraid of something happening to my family. I am afraid of failure. I am afraid of dying unloved. Even if you’re making a movie about a monster of some kind, you can speak to those fears. You can tap into something true. That is not what the Friday the 13th films are about, and maybe that’s why they never really scared me. They can startle you at times, and they eventually start to really lean on the idea of shocking you, but they aren’t scary. I am not afraid that Jason Voorhees is going to kill me for trying to open a summer camp on the ground where his mother was killed. I do not carry this around as an active phobia. These movies are goofy fun, something that horrified critics like Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel when this one was released. Roger wrote about his reaction to seeing this with a crowd and how the moment Jason killed Adrienne King with a screwdriver, he stopped having fun. I get it. It must have felt seismic and unpleasant to see this sudden explosion of hyper-graphic violence when you were used to a totally different aesthetic in film. For someone my age, though, the appeal was like watching a magician perform his act. I didn’t think any of this shit was real. I just loved trying to sort out how they did these terrible things for the camera.