Critic Gene Siskel hated the original Friday the 13th so much that he not only spoiled the films ending in his review...

I never actually knew Siskel's opinion of Wes Craven's Last House on the Left but now we know--a complete divergence from Ebert's 3 1/2 star review for it . Friday the 13th has never been a very good horror movie but those movies can be fun if you're in the right mood. It isn't even egregiously violent compared with other slashers from that era. Siskel acts as if it's one of the most offensive pictures ever made, which probably gave it some "outlaw" image it didn't deserve and made curious thrill-seekers look for it in even greater numbers. I'm sure Paramount was happy once it was a confirmed hit, but there's nothing cinematically interesting about it as a film (unlike the artistry of Carpenter's Halloween). A more interesting question is why we're still talking about the rather unremarkable Friday the 13th 40 years after it was released. I'm guilty of it as well having all the Friday movies which are watched at least once or twice a year.

The big deal was a young boy drowned while he was in a canoe or some small boat by himself because the camp counselors were having sex and not watching over him. That's horrifying for the parents, in this case, Mrs. Voorhees (played by Betsy Palmer), who lost her only son.

Then we get one of the unexpected forms of violence in the film. Well, not just one haha. Was it a meat cleaver to the head in Part I? Or something else? I still remember some of those bloody scenes vividly, especially the machete through the stomach from underneath the bed. What a way to get killed so sudden and unexpected while having sex.

Maybe it was the film makers taking advantage of the ratings system to bring us viewers more bloody carnage on the screen that he couldn't take. What a wimp, Siskel!

I still consider myself a fan of Siskel and Ebert as I grew up watching their show. When it came to horror movies most of the time they were uptight pricks.

Siskel and Ebert had kind of a complicated history with the horror genre. They really hated trashy sorts of movies that focused on gore and sex a lot.

I don't really fault them for hating a movie like Friday the 13th. I enjoy the series for what it is, but it's not any kind of artistic achievement. They really took it too far at times doing what Siskel did in his review and campaigning against some of these sorts of movies. They also gave positive reviews to a lot of horror movies, though. Some that had almost as much violence and nudity as those exploitation movies. Something like Re-Animator comes to mind. Plenty of gore, sick humor and some nudity in that one and poor Barbara Crampton is really put through the ringer, but they liked it, both of them IIRC.

Whether they thought a horror movie was misogynistic and all those other bad things they talked about or not seemed to come down to whether they thought the movie was good, had artistic merit of some kind.