The Review: Crystal Lake

Crystal Lake 9/10

Spoilers! There was no way this show should have been as entertaining as it was. This answer questions I didn't know I should have been asking. When I first heard about this show I thought it was kind of weird that they would make a series about Jason Voorhees mother. Now, I've watched the films and even have a tattoo of Jason on my arm. I did my own series for years where I played the character. There's just something about Jason that I thoroughly enjoy. Maybe it's the fact that he's just an unstoppable monster. So when this show began it shows Jason as a young boy which in the films you only see for a moment. In this series you get to see him as a child with a deformity and a mother who loves him. Everybody makes fun of him at the camp where Pamela Voorhees works as a cook. He's embarrassed by how much she outwardly loves him in front of other people and just wants to be treated like other kids.

One day while some counselors are having sex he ends up drowning in the lake. Pamela of course cannot get over this and just 9 months after his death they plan to reopen the camp. She is pissed off about this but the town is like “Hey we need money.” This show portrays Pamela in a very sympathetic light which is nuts when you know the story from the first film. It also goes into the tale of why Jason keeps on coming back to life. In the first episode after Jason has been killed she's at home when these two guys show up. They say that they found Jason's body a few miles away and she notices some things are off about these two guys. They end up breaking into the bathroom while she's trying to escape, stabs one in the legs with the scissors, and then slits his throat. The other one gets his face sliced like deli meat, and then the machete put through his head. She ends up taking their bodies to a bear den and covering them up with berries and honey and tuna. This big ass mama bear comes out and just starts snacking on them. This was just the first episode.

I was hooked immediately. There are other people on this show like the sheriff named Levon. He's dealing with the fact that it's the early 1970s and he is a Black man that is a sheriff of a very small town. His deputy is named Dorf and he is a jackass. His father is also a racist jackass that likes to hunt carrying around in oxygen tank. Levon's sister is named Briana. I swear this woman was just itching to get killed because she just kept digging into more and more information after the murder of those two men. There's also a young girl named Grace who was best friends with Jason. Grace is not as innocent as she seems. I'm not going to sit here do an entire season recap but this of course has spoilers.

We find out that Jason's mother was sleeping with this man named Elias. I have seen this guy in three different shows this year and didn't realize that it was the same guy. He is a fantastic actor. Pamela ends up getting pregnant and bleeds while performing live on stage. Elias says he knows of a place where they have some experiments and they can help her keep the baby. They end up moving to this nice little street and everything seems cool but slightly off. They take her in for this experiment and while she's fully conscious and strapped down with just a piece of leather in her mouth for pain they jab this gigantic needle into her stomach. It turns out that they're experimenting on her and other pregnant women trying to come up with a way for humanity to survive a nuclear holocaust. They compare it to roaches. Jason been the only person to be able to survive this and each time he dies he comes back stronger and larger. That immediately answered for me why even as far as the movies this child ends up being this big man. Jason has been killed a lot of times.

This show wrapped up in a fantastic way where if they do come out with another season I will watch it but if they don't I got a good story. The acting on this was really good. I thoroughly enjoyed the music and the sound effects in this. I like the way the cameras moved around. The violence in this was very sudden. You would see something escalating and then just when you thought it was kind of over all of a sudden you're looking at some someone with their face hanging half off. Literally. This lady had half her face hanging off. This was a very cool season and definitely one of the top series of this year for me.

Linda Cardellini as Pamela Voorhees

William Catlett as Levon "Lee" Brooks

Gwendolyn Sundstrom as Grace Snell

Cameron Scoggins as Ronald "Dorf" Dorfman

Devin Kessler as Briana Brooks

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