‘Crystal Lake’ Review: Peacock’s Linda Cardellini-Starring Series Is the Best ‘Friday the 13th’ Property Yet (Which Isn’t Saying a Lot)

As somebody who spent countless hours in the ’90s trawling Blockbuster shelves with friends looking for or awaiting the return of Friday the 13th entries we hadn’t seen, or hadn’t seen recently — my apologies for the wasted time, guys — it gives me no pleasure to admit that “What is the best Friday the 13th movie?” is a trick question.

Unlike the Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises, there’s no clear prestige Friday the 13th film — just minor gradations in the quality of makeup effects or the creativity of the kills. I appreciate The Final Chapter for the weirdness of Crispin Glover’s performance, Part III for the hilarious vestigial 3-D effects, and even Part II because director Steven Miner knew where to put the camera, which can’t be said for all of his successors.

Crystal Lake

The Bottom Line Bloody well exceeds the low bar set by the movies.

Airdate: Thursday, October 15 (Peacock)
Cast: Linda Cardellini, William Catlett, Davin Kessler, Cameron Scoggins, Gwendolyn Sunstrom
Developed by: Brad Caleb Kane

Still, it was possible to assume that Peacock‘s Crystal Lake would be the best entry in the franchise; the presence of Linda Cardellini getting eight hours to play Pamela Voorhees generated hopes for a level of quality none of the earlier films could muster, with or without such tantalizing revelations as “Where Jason’s mother got that spectacular sweater.”

Indeed, thanks to newly minted Emmy winner Cardellini, giving the best Friday the 13th-adjacent performance to date, Crystal Lake lives up to that very reasonable level of potential.

Is the series beyond Cardellini any good? It’s hard to always say.

Following a template that eventually worked extremely well on A&E’s Bates Motel, occasionally well in Amazon’s newly released Carrie and barely at all on Netflix’s Ratched, Crystal Lake deserves some credit for taking a narrative expansion that could have been silly and making it earnest and nuanced, albeit in familiar prestige TV ways. But that also means that Crystal Lake takes itself more seriously than its auspices demand or can justify.

Most of the episodes run at least 50 minutes and, after a fairly promising start, there’s a multi-episode lag before a season-closing rush of episodes that include a wild reconfiguring of the events of the first movie, as well as a wholly original flashback installment that plays like the bizarre love child of David Cronenberg and Douglas Sirk.

Ultimately, Crystal Lake is better than it needed to be, occasionally because it’s twisted, gory fun and occasionally just because of the easy comfort of low expectations.

After an in medias res introduction with Cardellini’s Pamela starring at herself in the mirror, drenched in blood, the story goes back nine months and we’re introduced to a cleaner Pamela working the kitchen at Camp Crystal Lake in New Jersey.

Initially, camp is heaven for 11-year-old Jason Voorhees (Callum Vinson).

Jason has a variety of birth defects that cause the cruel campers to make fun of him, but he does have one friend, fellow outcast Grace (Gwendolyn Sundstrom). He also has the doting love of Pamela, who tries to be a constant presence in Jason’s life and even gets him a mail-order box of camping supplies like a tent, nature cooking provisions and a machete.

“You use it to clear brush and get rid of obstacles, make your own path,” Pamela explains helpfully, a line of dialogue most viewers are likely to miss because of the maniacal giggles elicited by “How Jason Voorhees Got His First Machete” origin story.

Things do not work out well for poor Jason, who isn’t a very good swimmer to begin with — his malformed head makes him buoyancy-challenged — and then goes on an unsupervised swim.

Why does he lack supervision? Because counselors Claudette (Danielle Kotch) and Barry (Phoenix Panevik) chose to go to a barn for nookie rather than watching their campers.

Bad decision, Claudette and Barry.

Back in the present day, which is actually 1971 or 1972, we see a distracted and grieving Pamela. The community of Crystal Lake wants to be supportive, especially Levon (William Catlett), a widower with a dark past and big ole crush on Pamela and her exceptional sweater. Levon, the local sheriff, wants Pamela to bowl and go to town picnics, but Pamela can’t move forward — especially since Jason’s body was never retrieved after his drowning.

For a while, Crystal Lake hews closely to the very rudimentary mythology introduced in Sean Cunningham’s original movie. It’s structured so that dedicated fans are able to point in happy recognition at town landmarks, the architecture of the camp and the appearance of familiar characters including Ralph (Nick Cordileone), the crazy “Don’t go to Crystal Lake!” guy in the movies, now a Vietnam veteran suffering from serious PTSD.

Then strange things start happening that don’t align with anything in the movies, including the arrival of two threatening men who show up asking questions about Pamela’s past and bring out the worst — or best, since Pamela Voorhees: Non-Violent Lunch Lady is not a show anybody would have watched — in our heroine.

For a while, Crystal Lake suffers from many of the same issues that plagued the first season of Bates Motel — namely, a whole lot of incongruous elements that don’t even feel thematically connected to the things (hockey masks, nudity) that resonate about the movies.

It feels like series developer Brad Caleb Kane is throwing random things against the wall, particularly seeding elements for a vast conspiracy that’s like something out of a half-dozen Stephen King novels rather than Friday the 13th. There’s a dogged journalist (Devin Kessler as Levon’s sister, Briana), who serves no purpose for a long time. Even when she becomes useful, it’s in a complementary way that could have very nearly been removed from the story entirely. There’s even a full episode set at an EST-style retreat, an over-extended if amusing gag suggesting that Pamela’s road to empowerment reaches a fork at which she has to choose between harmless self-actualizing platitudes or chopping negligent counselors to bits.

I didn’t mind the EST episode, because it’s one of the moments that the series’ early-’70s setting pays off. It doesn’t quite make Pamela Voorhees into a feminist icon, but if you set your story in the days of Manson-inspired paranoia, Nixon-inspired institutional distrust and a burgeoning ERA ratification movement, the extreme reaction of a doting mother struggling to raise and then mourn her special needs child gains some resonance.

The early episodes have a gritty, grindhouse-friendly look, with washed-out colors and grimy, dilapidated cars and exteriors. Michael Lennox, whose credits run the wide gamut from Derry Girls to Say Nothing, strikes an interesting balance among grounded realism, campy performances, gloomy settings, cheery soundtrack choices and wildly extreme violence.

Very extreme. People in Crystal Lake are constantly being dispatched in ways that offer the most shredded flesh, spurting blood and oozing viscera possible. Why simply stab somebody when you could flay their face off and then do something even more disgusting to finish the job, before disposing of the body in an additional nasty way? It’s my instinct that more of the violence is CG-driven than practical, but if you come to Crystal Lake hoping to go “Ew!” and episodes require you to sit around for 45 minutes during which nothing happens, at least the kills should deliver. And they do.

Without spoiling much, it’s the sixth and then seventh episodes directed by duo Celine Held and Logan George and then former cinematographer Quyen Tran that kick the show into a higher gear before an okay finale. The flashback episode, with a color scheme and overall tone lifted from 1950s melodramas and 1970s conspiracy thrillers, was the one hour I found myself wholly and unapologetically loving Crystal Lake, as opposed to mostly being curious about what the spine of the show would be once the homages ran dry.

The primary reason to keep watching is Cardellini, who makes Pamela her own with few traces of Betsy Palmer’s fine, very broad work in the first film. Cardellini plays her as a strong but brittle woman, looking for a purpose without the child she built her life around, but always right on the edge of going to pieces. Don’t worry, the breakdown starts in a hurry and Cardellini is terrifying, if perhaps not as sympathetic as the series requires long-term.

Fortunately, Sundstrom generates enough sympathy on her own, giving a sweet and vulnerable performance as the only Crystal Lake character you really don’t want to see die. Kotch and Parnevik, as the negligently canoodling counselors, inspire the opposite reaction as two characters whose destiny is inevitable and earned.

Catlett’s character is an arbitrary addition to the series, and I never cared what his secret was from his days as a cop in Newark, but the actor is an assertive screen presence and there’s borderline sweetness to the flirtations between him and Pamela, two damaged souls.

Other standouts include Manon Gage as a trouble-making hippie; a very hungry brown bear; Joy Suprano as a budding feminist who befriends Pamela; and a prolific TV presence who guest stars in the second half of the season.

That’s already more standout performances than in the entire run of films, a reminder that working with trashy IP is a safer bet than attempting to embellish a classic. (Of course, Bates Motel got better and better as it went along, even though it got closer and closer to the key events from Psycho.)

Crystal Lake may already have moved beyond the parts of the Friday the 13th franchise that made me keep watching film after film without thinking any of them was truly “good.” So even though the seeds planted for future seasons don’t fill me with optimism for more Crystal Lake, my low expectations have already been exceeded once.