Stage It Up

No, it was definitely the original Friday the 13th. Adrienne King was the girl in the canoe. I never saw any of the subsequent Friday the 13th movies.

I’d completely forgotten till now, but you’re absolutely right, there was a canoe scene in the first FRIDAY THE 13TH as well. And it, too, was preceded by an after-dark skinny dip scene. as I recall. Since I saw both films on cable and not at a theater, also FRIDAY THE 13TH, PART III, and it was so very long ago, it’s easy to forget a lot. So I guess it’s to the credit of the makers of the second one that all these many years later I still remember the great skinny dip scene with Norwegian beauty Kirsten Baker. And even with my not having seen it at an actual theater at that!

As for DEAD & BURIED, there were brutal scenes in it which clearly were intended to appeal to the most criminal-minded, and that was their ONLY intent. For the most part it was a snuff film through and through, with the filmmakers going all out to ensure the highest degree of medical accuracy — such as to show what it would actually look like if a person is unwillingly pinned to the floor and acid is passed through tubes shoved deep up into their nostrils. While certainly its filmmakers achieved their minor goal of horrifying some with that scene and others, their major goal of making happy the most perverse among us is what stands out most about that particular film. For rather than horrifying such people, you could see how certain audience members in the theater that night were totally feeding on it; it was their own special brand of pornography. They didn’t come to that theater to be shocked and entertainingly horrified, but rather, titilated. And totally fairly, I feel, the film’s two biggest stars — Farentino and Albertson — got harshly criticized for it. Did they know what they were signing up for when they made that film? Who knows? In Albertson’s case he passed away soon afterward, so in his case the fact that he made DEAD & BURIED could be greatly downplayed and the highpoints of his vareer played up in his obituary. Farentino wasn’t quite as lucky. Pity, too, because he had such a great career leading up to then and with a lot of shelf-life still left…only for it all to fizzle out with his being brought up on cocaine charges and arrested for stalking Tina Sinatra not long after that. And who today remembers he also did great films such as EL CID and THE PAD AND HOW TO USE IT?

Getting back to the Mayfair, I saw Alfred Hitchcock’s THE BIRDS there back in the mid ‘60s, and I’ll always remember the calm of my friends and I as we were walking back home up Frankford Avenue right afterwards —– “calm” that is, until the most innocent looking little tiny sparrow swooped in close across our path. With our minds still back at the theater watching that film, on cue, all of us jumped back away from that tiny little bird in shear terror — only to then just as quickly catch ourselves, at which point all of us laughed, the transition of coming back from fantasy to reality….and a great tribute to the power of Hitchcock and the Mayfair Theatre combined!

The search is a bit tricky, but the pic of the Mayfair on page 31 is worth it. The link is View link

Here is a 1984 photo:
http://tinyurl.com/yed8fy3

Clarifying the present use of the Mayfair. The box office area, lobby , concession area is now a Fulton Bank. The rest is used by a youth theatre group “ Stage it Up”