'Friday the 13th' Redux

The "Friday the 13th" remake debuts today. I remember the first one like it was, well, like it was 28 1/2 years ago.

It was the summer of 1980, and I was living alone in an apartment before the start of my senior year in college. Me and a buddy went to see Friday the 13th. It was unlike any slasher movie before. In the first scene, a girl is backed against a tree and gets her throat cut -- but it shows it. Pretty graphic for those days.

It was like, "Whoa, Momma!"

That night, around 3 a.m., for some reason my clock radio went off. Why, I don't know. But it was on the hour so there was a news update. And in the pitch dark, I'm hearing about a housewife in suburban Dallas, eerily named Betty Gore, who was found hacked to death by an axe. They arrested a neighbor, Candy Montgomery.

If you remember the first Friday the 13th, it was Jason's mother who was doing all the killing. Now imagine being awakened in the middle of the night by a clock radio and hearing a woman using an axe to kill another just a few hours after seeing that movie.

You talk about an adrenaline rush. More than a few lights got flipped on.

And for those who are curious about the body count left by one Mr. Jason Voorhes, according to various websites, the count is either 154 or 183. Why the discrepency, who knows.

One site breaks it down this way:

Part I : None, it was his mad mother doing it all.
Part II: 9.
Part III: 12.
Part IV: 13.
Part V: None, it was Roy as the killer. Who's Roy?
Part VI: 18.
Part VII: 16.
Part VIII: 19.
Part IX: 21.
Part X: 28.

Just thought you might want to know.