'Crystal Lake' review: Fantastic kills succumb to a weak story in A24's 'Friday the 13th' prequel

A new contender for craziest penultimate flashback episode emerges in "Crystal Lake," the Voorhees family origin story of Brad Caleb Kane, who asks where the mother-son killers came from — and answers too easily, too late.

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To its credit, "Crystal Lake" isn't like many modern TV horror movies. The "Friday the 13th" prequel isn't a rehashed remake or a cheap rip-off. It's not a horror show that's actually a family drama or a slapstick comedy or made by Ryan Murphy. Most importantly, this is not traumatic horror, where everything you fear is a metaphor for repressed emotions, or high horror, where there is nothing to fear, or even horror as social commentary, where the real killer is the American health care system.

Caleb Kane's eight-episode first season draws some sympathy for the devil, Mike Flanagan, but not to the degree that the genre tends to show in our latest horror prequel. No, any sympathy for Pam Voorhees (Linda Cardellini) and her son, Jason (Callum Vinson), comes from natural human compassion. While they may grow up (so to speak) as mass murderers, they were once just a mother and her child, and it's natural to wonder what exactly happened to corrupt them in the meantime. RELATED STORIES Meet Terry Matalas, the new king of sci-fi TV Jacob Tierney created the hit series Fierce Rivalry — then wrote a book about it.

Notably, however, Crystal Lake's success as a throwback slasher (complete with frame-by-frame cutscenes, loud orchestral sounds and gruesome gore) isn't enough to overcome its failures as a prequel. All of those fictional kills are steadily undermined by an equally uncreative story, leading to a fatal blow or two of an ending: a penultimate flashback that answers every question you've had since the beginning, before the apocalypse wraps things up without much help from the first six hours of the season.

It's almost like... wait, let me do the math: an hour for the main story, plus an hour for the climactic aftermath, equals a two-hour narrative? Two hours... two hours, what usually takes two hours? Maybe… a movie?

Like Jason himself, "Crystal Lake" is grotesque and alarming, but it's also Jason-like in that it can be briefly and sporadically surprising, even fascinating. The opening sequence, unlike what follows, wastes no time: Pam is a cook at Camp Crystal Lake. His son is present at the event and, according to established accounts, meets a tragic fate during an unsupervised swim while responsible teenage lifeguards are rowing in an empty shed.

All of this happens before the title card is struck, and from there we jump forward nine months to find Pam still trying to come to terms with her new life. He visits the lake where Jason drowned every day. The camp was partially closed after the accident because his body was never found, but is now preparing to reopen next summer. Pam is immersed in memories, but she is also focused on feeling—feeling something, anything, even if it hurts. "He and I, we are joined at heart," he says. "I don't want to be healed, I want to find my son."

As the saying goes, hurting people hurts people and Pam hurts a lot of people. There are some strangers who accidentally unlock his latent rage. There are some colleagues who cannot understand what he is going through. One is the local police chief, Levon Brooks (William Catlett), whose interest in Pam blinds him to her suspicious behavior, and some of them are bad men from her past, who come after Pam when word gets out that she's a single mother with a dead child. (Catlett's tough-but-sympathetic cop is a highlight, especially when he's thrown for a loop—as when his quiet town is engulfed in strange murders, but also in smaller moments, like when he solves a racist crossword clue.)

The premiere teases Pam Voorhees' mysterious past well, as Cardellini does an exceptionally good job convincingly portraying the opposite extremes of the character: recluse and greedy hedonist. She's involved with a sinister company, has memories of a locked yellow door, and nightmares about Jason coming back to life. But why? Why is Pam so convinced that her son is not dead? Or will he see her again even if it is him? It all comes out in episode 7, "Friday...", a flashback episode that should really be where "Crystal Lake" begins.

Even if you put aside the annoying trend of television shows that are right on the brink of ending, "Crystal Lake" is heartbreaking. Like many modern mysteries, this book tries to root out Pam and Jason's penchant for violence in one psychological blow. Inevitable adversity sparks a series of bad decisions that create the people you meet in "Friday the 13th" (and, when it comes to Jason, its sequels).

Fortunately, their origins don't focus too much on metaphorical readings - '70s hits are sprinkled in here and there, from Cold War angst to Vietnam PTSD and corporate paranoia, but they're more background than allegory - and earlier episodes dismiss any suggestion that Pam is a victim. He's not misunderstood, he's not a product of his environment, and he doesn't cut camp counselors "for the right reasons." He's a badass, and my highest praise for Crystal Lake is that we're not afraid to let him be really, really bad.

But sticking to a completely villainous spin on Pam leads to a very simple "reveal" of who she is, where she came from, and why she lives in Crystal Lake. There's a reason that epic slasher movies aren't widespread. They are lean and mean, with just the right emphasis on the latter. They live and die with creative murders and immersive escapes, while many of the greats make for an unforgettable ending.

Going into "Crystal Lake," we already know where things are going to end, and it's hard to sustain a tension-driven escapism over the course of eight hours, especially when it's clear which new characters are being introduced just for the sake of slaughter. Hell, even recurring characters die a sickening death regardless.

This allows the answer to the show's provocative question to carry a lot of weight: "Just who is Pam Voorhees?" If you must know, skip to section 7. I promise you won't miss anything essential, and the missing fun bits aren't worth another six hours of your life. But what lies ahead isn't exactly amazing, and I suspect franchise die-hards will be happier left to their collective, unfettered imaginations.

"Crystal Lake" opens Thursday, Oct. 15 at the Peacock. All eight episodes will be released simultaneously.