13 Things You Didn't Know About Friday The 13th
8. Mrs Voorhees And The Odd Coincidence Part 2
The timeline to the Friday The 13th franchise is famously muddled and contradictory. The first film establishes Jason's 'drowning' as having taken place in 1957, and the resulting murders of the two neglectful counsellors a year later in 1958.
Now, a title card near the beginning and a local radio broadcast both firmly establish the main action of the original Friday The 13th as taking place on Friday June 13th. This would position it in 1980, the year the film was released: this exact date was later corroborated by the trailer to Friday The 13th Part 2. Confusingly, a later movie shows us Pamela Voorhees' gravestone with a date of death in 1979 - but for the moment, let’s assume that was a continuity error.
That's exactly 22 years since the original murders, one hell of a comeback - but what many people don't know is Betsy Palmer was on an unofficial comeback of her own. Although she’d never been completely out of work, it had been 22 years since she had last worked on a movie.
The last film she'd played in was The Last Angry Man, released in 1959 but shot in 1958. Reviews at the time were not kind. The Harvard Crimson wielded the machete:
"The worst of the group is Betsy Palmer... who is about as inspired as a deep sea diver in the Charles River."