Despite what the title may suggest, Howard R. Cohen’s witless spoof isn’t lampooning the then booming slasher film (its most recent target is Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) and not the previous year’s Friday the 13th) but instead is taking aim at older horror traditions, mixing shaggy monsters, creatures from lagoons, black or otherwise, vampires, old dark houses, poltergeists and any other amount of supernatural paraphernalia into one of the great cinematic endurance tests of the early 1980s (when it was double-billed with Disney’s superhero/James Bond spoof Condorman (1981), it became an even more painful experience).

The Hyatt family – John (Richard Benjamin, who had form with this sort of thing, having appeared in the Dracula comedy Love at First Bite (1979)), Mary (Paula Prentiss), teenage daughter Debbie (Kari Michaelsen) and young son Billy (Kevin Brando) – move into their new, somewhat ramshackle home from a recently deceased uncle, unaware that vampires Waldemar (Jeffrey Tambor) and Yolanda (Nancy Lee Andrews) want the house for themselves. They’ve learned that it contains a legendary book of evil, a tome discovered by Billy who inadvertently reads out a curse concerning Saturday the 14th, unleashing the monsters illustrated in the book. The family are beset by all manner of strange events, Mary is bitten by Waldemar, Debbie is menaced by a gill man in her bath tub and an exterminator named Van Helsing (Severn Darden) turns up to help them rid themselves of the bats in their belfry. John and Mary plan a housewarming party for Saturday the 14th which ends in disaster as the monsters make short work of the guests before it’s revealed that Van Helsing wants the book in order to rule the world and that the misunderstood Waldemar and Yolanda are trying to stop him.

Saturday the 14tyh would dearly have loved to follow in the footsteps of the riotous Airplane! (1980), doing for horror films what it did for the disaster movie. But Cohen isn’t anywhere near as gifted a writer or director as the team behind Airplane!, his direction being wearyingly uninspired and his script mostly devoid of jokes and what few there are mainly falling flat. Comedy horror is a tricky thing to pull off and many a writer and director has fallen by the wayside trying to make it work but the scale of Saturday the 14ths failings in both departments is staggering.

The “horror” mainly consists of a few scabby looking monsters of the “man in a rubber suit” variety and the jokes are on the level of eyeballs in coffee cups, something like the Jaws theme playing as the gill man’s finned-head cruises around in the bath and a television set that only plays The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) no matter what channel it’s on. It never rises much higher than that and much of the humour tends to bounce off you rather than make a direct hit on the funny bone. It’s not even particularly consistent. Once bitten, Mary develops an aversion to daylight, yet both Waldemar and Yolanda are seen strolling about during the day, entirely unconcerned.

There are some weird tonal shifts to contend with too. Much of the film is very broad, knockabout silliness but three’s a bat attack on Mary that’s actually quite nasty. Cohen can’t get a handle on the material at all, having come up with a series of loosely connected set-pieces but failing to find anything like connecting material to hold it all together. He’s not helped by performances that range from undistinguished to dreadful (the two younger actors are particularly bad). The fact that much of the film must be taking place on the dreaded Friday the 13th is ignored completely, presumably in an effort to distance the film from the slasher film despite the title presumably imposed on Cohen by producer Julie Corman.

There’s nothing here that the seasoned horror film fan won’t have seen – both for “real” and being spoofed – far too many times for the film to make any real impact. Children just getting into horror might get a kick from it and may be the only ones to actually make anything of the film’s terrible humour, but as a good parent wanting to break your offspring into the joys of horror, you’d be far better off showing them something like The Monster Squad (1987). And yet someone must have watched this garbage – presumably it was a hit on video – as Cohen decided in 1988 what the world really wanted was a belated sequel, Saturday the 14th Strikes Back. understandably, the original film’s cast all bailed leaving it in the hands of people like Ray Walston, Avery Schreiber, Patty McCormack and Michael Berryman and it proved to be a wise move – if anything the sequel is even worse.