Friday the 13th: The Hunt for Jason

Any viewer’s search for the best Friday the 13th fan film needn’t go much further than The Hunt for Jason. The film grips its viewer by the throat from the get-go and holds steady at full throttle until its finish. There is little if any dialogue. If the characters do speak, it’s not memorable. Rather, The Hunt for Jason is all about meticulously choreographed action sequences. In fact, its brisk runtime plays out more like a fight scene, or perhaps a particularly well-conceived pro wrestling match or even a brutal ballet. Jason and his Special Ops pursuer trade various blows and grapples while countering one another’s attacks. This film’s Jason is styled after Richard Brooker’s performance in Part 3, and the actor portraying him achieves the shambling gait, the hanging arms, and the knuckle-dragging impeccably. The actor playing the Spec Ops guy isn’t so bad either. They complement each other so compellingly, you almost forget they are both teenagers. Together, they’ve come up with some truly virtuoso stuff and culminate in a few undeniably cinematic moments. All people involved should end up working in films or gaming. Of course, The Hunt for Jason is a fan film so, as could be expected, it’s not perfect. Sure, it’s mostly set in a desiccated Southern California backyard, but the departure from the lake setting is not to its disadvantage. The Hunt for Jason is about claustrophobic, non-stop action, and it delivers that. Any description provided here will do little justice to the kinesthetic brilliance the players in Hunt for Jason embody. So with that said, I urge you to fire it up on YouTube, and to be awed.

Watch it here.

Friday the 13th: Fan Film(s)

There are two Friday the 13th fan films that go by the rather unimaginative title Friday the 13th: Fan Film, both of which were released in 2016. One of them is classically bad, and the other especially terrible. 

The bad one is directed by Riley Lorden and, to its credit, features a body-positive Jason. It offers little else in the way of positives. The dialogue is so bad it seems improvised—either that or it was just particularly poorly written. It may very well be the latter, as the script provides no real story arc. The only other commendable feature is that it closes on a pretty adept drone shot. The reward for sitting through the credits is a shot of another slasher, this one in a Shatner mask, picking up one of Jason’s discarded weapons. This teases a crossover, which is cool in and of itself, but the viewer is left hoping that Riley Lorden et al. won’t be the ones to make it. 

Nor should the guys who made the other Fan Film. This flick is credited rather obliquely to “The Cast,” and with good cause, as even the most superlative ironist would not want their name associated with this steaming pile. The cast is a thirty-and-over sausage fest; indeed, it seems like the guys who put this together were having a party in the midst of filming (or vice-versa). This film’s Jason is dollar-store quality, with a street-hockey style mask that looks more fitting for Lord Humongous than Jason Voorhees (now there’s a worthwhile crossover, fan-filmmakers) and Halloween-decoration plastic ribs that he wears like a necklace. Moreover, this Jason proceeds almost daintily with his kills. I guess the guys who made this were going for laughs. That said, they seemed to earnestly sketch out the homosocial and outright homoerotic trajectories between some of the characters, an element that would be more praiseworthy had the film taken itself a little more seriously on the whole. If nothing else, this Fan Film’s only redeeming quality might be that it stands as the only really queer-friendly Friday the 13th fan film. It offers some strangely intimate moments between the characters, as if the boys were working things out between one another in real-life as the party was happening and as the movie was being filmed. This is the only conceivable reason why it should be watched. In fact, this so-bad-it’s-good aspect actually makes this Fan Film better than Riley Lorden’s not-as-bad but still unremarkably crappy fan film of the same name. If you find yourself confused, I’d suggest watching neither film.

Watch the bad one here. Don't watch the terrible one anywhere.

Camp Crystal Lake

Camp Crystal Lake is not the best Friday the 13th fan film, but it might just be this author’s sentimental favorite. The film was purportedly made in one night, but watching it, you’d think it took a full three or four days’ work. There’s not much of a storyline here beyond a “Mr. K” having purchased the camp with hopes of fixing it up. There are, however, lots of lovely visuals. The director, Rickey Bird, found some prime abandoned camp locations, to which the editors have overlaid various augmentations, including on-the-fly VHS tracking fixups. Perhaps the finest piece of cinematography in all the Friday the 13th fandom is this film's shot of Jason in a meadow in the moonlight, looking perplexed. Also easy on the eyes are the female cast members. Your author doesn’t mean to get caught up in matters of male gazing here, but the female lead, one Erica Morgan, is so pretty that she almost takes on a translucent quality. Her runway-ready beauty in combination with her pixyish voice establish her as a truly unforgettable fan-film female lead (if not the only one). When she (mild spoiler alert here) finds Mr. K’s corpse and squawks “Mr. K! Holy fuck!” it is one of the most hilarious and unvarnished moments in any Friday the 13th fan film. And while Camp Crystal Lake doesn’t have much of a plot to resolve, it does clear up some questions circling  around (at least for this reviewer) Jason’s sexuality. The final image (another mild spoiler alert) has Jason taking an incapacitated Erica Morgan back into the lake as a prize, of sorts, suggesting that the hockey-masked maniac is moving towards a more distinctly heteronormative sexuality. And although I’ve given several spoilers in this review, this shouldn’t deter anyone from watching Camp Crystal Lake. Among Friday the 13th fan films, it’s an atmospheric triumph that must be experienced.

Watch it here.

2000 Maniacs! (1964)

I just watched 2000 Maniacs! and by god is that a prescient film. It's redneck horror at its most carnivalesque.

Herschell Gordon Lewis looks eminently prophetic as his 1964 film sets a template for a subgenre of horror that would thrive in the 1970s. Texas Chainsaw Massacre would give us the male remnants of a family of cannibalistic rednecks living just off the main road. The Hills Have Eyes would give us an extended family and/or clan of inbred hicks cannibalizing wayward travellers. Both of these films are better made and more artistically sophisticated than 2000 Maniacs!. But Lewis's film is more demented and visceral: after all, it gives us not a family or a clan but rather a whole town of Southerners, all 2000 of whom are berserk and bloodthirsty and cannibalistic, at least when dealing with Northerners.

And so the film presents us with the multifarious maimings of our Yankee protagonists, making way for a tide of that orangey blood that was a hallmark of Lewis's films. Oh, sure, there's dismemberment and cannibalism, but for me, the piece-de-resistance comes when the locals cajole a Yankee man into a barrel under the pretext that they’re going to roll him down a hill in good fun. This is a risky enough proposition to begin with, but then the yokels gleefully proceed to drive nails through the barrel. By the time the Yankee gets to the bottom of the hill, he's no more than a shredded, red-orange rag. The rednecks rejoice. They have collaborated successfully on a slaughter.

And in these carnographic, set-piece scenes, after the violence has been wrought, Lewis provides us time and again with panning closeups of the faces of the mongrel herd. The vibe is reminiscent of a story that appeared in EC’s Vault of Horror but a decade before, specifically issue 34 from 1953. In this yarn, the supervisor of a psychiatric institution is placed in a casket by inmates. Through a square window in the very top of the casket, all the unhinged inmates peer in, prodding and poking and gaping at their captive. And in 2000 Maniacs!, we get comparable images of the deranged visages, with their gap-toothed smirks and their moon-eyed leering.

The psychiatric holding-tank, then, is the South itself, and every single son and daughter of the soil can be counted as one of the inmates. They betray an unabashed giddiness as they mutilate. They exude joie-de-vivre while they deprive their Northern countrymen and women of their lives. This is inestimably jarring.

So while Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes are better films, hands down, the former more artistic and the latter far more tightly plotted, 2000 Maniacs! is more horrifying. To stare into that joyous, murderous, and cannibalistic Southern horde is to stare into the faces of our present-day countrypersons. It is to stare into the faces of the Trump supporters and, more recently, the anti-maskers and the anti-vaxxers. Sorry Leatherface, but real-life horror doesn’t wear a mask.

And while the film sort of cops out at the end by suggesting (spoiler alert) hallucinatory or supernatural causes for the town with the eponymous population of 2000 sadistic rednecks, the implication is very real. There are people like this in our country, not just thousands of them but millions of them. They are the abscess on America that will never die. Worse yet, they are a cancer that might just kill you—that might just eat you alive.

Friday the 13th: The Legacy Begins

Fan films are ineludibly regionalized. In the Friday the 13th fandom alone, you can find Deep South, South Californian, British, Canadian, and French versions of the Crystal Lake mythos, among many others. As such, it was inevitable that there would eventually arise a French Canadian iteration of Friday the 13th (or Vendredi Treize, as it were). The Legacy Begins fills (or better yet embodies) the French Canadian void. Perhaps the most immediately noteworthy feature of the film is that the characters aren’t actually speaking French, or even Quebecois. Rather, the writers have opted to let their cast of unanimously Francophone actors struggle it out with barely serviceable CEGEP*-level conversational English. The viewer gets the full Quebecois experience with a dash of Friday the 13th overlaid. Quebecois males are a subspecies unto themselves—shaggy and smirky and stammering—and the lead dudes fully fit this billing. Quebecois females, meanwhile, are their own subgenus. Vine-like, frazzled, and foul-mouthed, the two female leads in The Legacy Begins are nothing less than archetypal Quebecois. The dialogue that passes between these characters is charmingly stilted, chock-full of strained English vocabulary. But as complete as the Quebecois experience is in this film, the Friday the 13th elements don’t translate well. Jason is terribly staged, and he stalks about with almost a hip-hop swagger. This interpretation doesn’t mix well with the various pratfalls around which much of the action is based. On the whole, The Legacy Begins suffers on account of what we might call a cap-and-bells sensibility: What I mean here is that the film is shot through with a deeply Quebecois comedic aesthetic—one that basks in gestures fit for jesters, rubbery and exaggerated facial expressions, and reliance on folly and circumstance as a key driver of plot. To put it simply, this film is too regional. Instead of taking what it can from the local backdrop, as per A New Wake (the Friday the 13th fan film from France), The Legacy Begins has simply spiraled deeper and deeper into its local color and subsequently crash-landed in a tailspin in that French-Canadian void. The only highlight comes when a 40-something mom karate-kicks Jason, and manages to do it in rather unceremonious fashion. This image, I’d say, is an apt synecdoche of the banal silliness of Quebecois culture.

Watch it here.

*CEGEP refers to the mandatory year of pre-University college undertaken by Quebecois students.

Friday the 13th: The Curse of Jason

Among the most pathetic and execrable of the Friday the 13th fan films is The Curse of Jason. It’s made in Indiana and does not lack for local color; once again we see the solidly mid-western Hoosier state doing its best to stay at par with the Confederate South. If you want to see Jason slaughtering a cast of fleshy-faced men in camo hats, then this is the fan film for you. The Trump-Supporter sensibilities make most of the victims wholly unsympathetic. The only really interesting thing that Curse of Jason does is managing to shoehorn several iterations of Jason into the mix. At first, he’s got a bag on his head as per Part 2. Then, during an early kill sequence, he conveniently finds a hockey-mask sitting on a bureau, and he upgrades to that. Variations of Jason from Part 5 and Part 3 make appearances in the ensuing scenes, thanks in part to a (spoiler alert) fake Jason “subplot” (I’ve opted for quotations because there’s not much a plot to begin with). The acting here is atrocious even relative to other fan films. In one case, a young man shows up at his sister’s soiree only to find all the partygoers slaughtered. He is mildly perturbed by the discovery. Jason appears, only to have the young man’s sister emerge from a back bedroom and push him aside, her facial expression pacific all the while. The kill scenes are moronically choreographed. In one scene that marks the nadir of the filmmaker’s imaginative capacities, Jason throws a portly fifty-something guy with a neck tattoo into a shallow marsh. But the worst directorial decision is by far the depiction of the lone African American character, whose conceptualization is southern-fried, to say the least. Playing on Southern Caucasian stereotypes of the oversexed black man, this character is introduced in the midst of seducing a white woman. When Jason appears, the African American man pushes his paramour into Jason so that he may flee. It’s no spoiler alert, to my mind, to tell you that the African American guy gets his comeuppance after the credits roll. I guess this black man’s murder is something of a parting shot or a punchline…if you’re going in with massively racist assumptions. Steer clear of The Curse of Jason unless you want to suffer through the Birth of a Nation of Friday the 13th fan films.

Don't watch it here.

Friday the 13th: Repetition

Friday the 13th: Repetition takes a schlocky, mirthful approach to Jason-related fan filmmaking. Lensed on Canada’s pacific coast, it benefits from trashy, Western-Canadian sensibilities. The script features some truly good badinage, such as the quip offered by the South Asian camper who is skeptical of his Caucasian friends’ idea to go into the woods looking for Jason: “This is what white people do,” he says, pretty much distilling the whole Friday the 13th franchise and even, dare I say, the entire slasher genre along with it. All told, the players’ performances are overblown, none more so than that of the Crazy Ralph analog, who really doesn’t look or sound like Crazy Ralph and is better off for it. With a straw, he drinks from a bandaged wound on his hand. He also issues another of the script’s restaurant-quality one-liners when he breaks the fourth wall to tell the viewers: “It’s not easy being creepy.” Amen to that. With the cinema-vérité camerawork and the occasional, purposeful graininess, the director almost lends the Friday the 13th materials a House of 1000 Corpses vibe. Indeed, the film smacks more heavily of early (and tenuous) Rob Zombie directorial efforts than it does of Friday the 13th. The cast is mostly on the heavy-set side, and I bring this up not to fat-shame the players but rather because the script itself draws attention to its body-positivity. Jason himself is fairly portly, and appears to be winded for many of the pursuit scenes. Still, he catches up with his victims eventually, though the kills are nothing special, marred by unconvincing effects. Nonetheless, Friday the 13th: Repetition is worth watching for a few chuckles, as it does not take itself too seriously—which is, surprisingly enough, rare among horror fan films.

Watch it here.

Friday the 13th: A New Wake

Fan films necessarily allow for some refreshing regionalized re-imaginings of ossified franchises. A New Wake places Friday the 13th in Europe, specifically in France. As could be expected, the dialogue is in French with English subtitles. Hopefully that’s not a bridge too far for the average American consumer, because if it is, then they are missing out on a fantastic visualization of the Voorhees milieu. The European locations add a Gothic stateliness to the Friday the 13th experience. In this way, A New Wake is reminiscent of Part VI, Jason Lives, one of the few canonical Friday the 13th films that actually benefited from the unique look of its filming location, in that case the American South. And fittingly, A New Wake has patterned its Jason after C.J. Graham's Part VI performance as the hockey-masked maniac. The staging of Jason is outstanding, easily among the best in the fan-film world and on par with any canonical Jason, save perhaps for the Kane Hodder version. This Jason has musclé, as the French say. A New Wake is lean on dialogue, which only serves to emphasize its fantastic visuals. The best example is the day-dream sequence, of which I will say very little since it is better watched than described. If A New Wake has a flaw, that would be its anemic story and short run-time. What it gives you, however, wets your appetite for more. Tres bien!

Pour le film, cliquez ici.

Friday the 13th: Extraction

Friday the 13th: Extraction stands out among its fan-film kin on account of its well-framed shots and fantastic locations. The exteriors are full of driftwood and escarpments; the interiors are constituted by claustrophobic and convincing military bunkers. The story is short and to the point, centering upon a tactical team tasked with the mission of taking down Jason. The script brims with great tough-guy dialogue, and it even addresses in some detail Jason’s persistent ability to regenerate tissues. The only downside is that Extraction's ending comes a little too abruptly, leaving the viewer wanting more.

Watch it here.

Friday the 13th: No Man's Land

One of the benefits of the fan film phenomenon is that it takes transregional Hollywood franchises and relocates them, creating refreshingly regionalized re-imaginings. No Man’s Land transplants the Friday the 13th license into the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, the cast attempts to play it off as if the events depicted are happening in the United States. Hearing unskilled British actors trying to pull off American accents—most of which tend toward Deep Southern inflection, for whatever reason—quickly wears thin. It doesn’t help that they’re stumbling through their lines all the while. Much of the cast is thirty or older. While this isn’t exactly convincing given Friday the13th’s traditionally youth-infused casting, it creates some interesting interactions. There is, for instance, a compelling moment when Jason confronts the entire group. Forced to choose a victim among the scattering campers, he chases after (spoiler alert) the older woman, who evidently reminds him of his mother. Many of the kills in No Man’s Land deserve commendation. The Crazy Ralph character suffers from a protracted choking which goes on far longer than his swift suffocation in the canonical Part 2. Other kills have campers spilling innards and entrails in an admirable excess of detail. The director also adds some nice innovation to the accustomed rock-smash kill: In this case, the victim takes the rock to the mouth, making for a veritable orthodontic holocaust. Apart from these kills, however, there is little else salvageable in the British version of Friday the 13th. The directors would have offered far more to the fandom, I contend, had they gone the route of Jason Takes Buckingham Palace or Jason vs. Jack the Ripper.

Watch it here.

Friday the 13th: The Man in the Lake

The Man in the Lake stands out among Friday the 13th fan films as somewhat ambitious. It charges out of the gates with a grainy grindhouse-styled “feature presentation” intro and mostly keeps its foot on the pedal from there. The story is unravelled by way of nested narratives, starting with a campfire scene in which counsellors sing kumbaya to preteen campers and then tell the ur-myth of Jason in modified form. The campfire story then gives way to the oft-repeated arc of an earlier set of counsellors coming back to the camp and getting slaughtered despite warnings from the townsfolk. This version even has an amped-up iteration of the “Crazy Ralph” character, complete with his old-fashioned bicycle. The film draws from all parts of the franchise, thereby speaking to the timelessness of the Jason myth. That said, The Man in the Lake seems especially fixated on Part 6 and Part 2, and this turns out to be a fairly profitable pairing. The murder scenes are generally compelling, and there is one rock-to-face kill sequence that is commendably brutal. Some of the cast truly hold their own, most notably J.M. Finnel, who packs star power and winds up being the final girl, at least in some limited sense. Also praiseworthy is the non-plagiarized soundtrack. While most Friday the 13th fan films rely on Harry Manfredini’s original score—and forgivably so—The Man in the Lake by all indications contains original tunes that are eminently listenable. In true fan film form, though, The Man in the Lake is far from perfect. There are a few places where the dialogue tails off, and the settings are hit or miss (Jason’s shack, for instance, looks far too well-organized). Moreover, director Ron McLellen is too fixated on showing Jason in motion; the hockey-masked revenant is far more effective when he lurks in (and lunges out) from shadow. Finally, the film ends a bit abruptly. Nonetheless, The Man in the Lake holds its own with virtually any B-grade slasher, and therefore stands at the top of the pack among Friday the 13th fan films.

Watch it here!

Bea Priestley: An Appreciation

[B]osom heaving, her eyes flashing [...] [s]he was slender, yet formed like a goddess: at once lithe and voluptuous. [...] Her rich black hair, black as a Stygian night, fell in rippling burnished clusters [...] Her dark eyes burned [...]. She was untamed as a desert wind, supple and dangerous as a she-panther.

- Robert E. Howard

1.

You likely haven't heard of her, yet you know her already. You want to have known her. She's that girl with the Kool-Aid-colored hair smoking cigarettes at the school's rear entrance.

She is Queen of the Black Coast and beyond. Robert E. Howard couldn't have conjured a more consummate vamp, not in his most vivid, virginal reverie, not in his spiciest of stories. The epigraph above does her little justice. H. Rider Haggard could have done little more to comprise her, though with his sorceress Ayesha—the eponymous “She” from his famed novel—he draws nearer.

She hails from Wellington, NZ, by way of London. She bills herself the "Top Gaijin." At its most euphemistic, “Gaijin” translates from Japanese as "foreigner." At its most xenophobic, "Gaijin" can be rendered "outsider" or "alien." She is outside, yes, but also far above.

Her signature finish is the electric chair suplex. She calls it the "Queen's Landing," and with good cause. One of the most ascendant male wrestlers in the world is her male suitor, and she and he seem apt heirs apparent for wrestling royalty.

The "She" in question is Bea Priestley, grossly underappreciated wrestler for whom I am now about to attempt an appreciation.

2.

You might mock professional wrestling, and you are mostly justified in doing so. The wrestling you've glimpsed briefly and dismissed, perhaps while flipping channels, is all defined by some measure of compromise. There is little compromise in Bea Priestley.

She's all flailing mop and tomboyish stomps, each unpitying boot a flash of checkerboard patterns and leopard-skin prints. She has a swashbuckling swagger, jaw perpetually working with an insouciance, her sneer painted in greenish-black under jagged bangs. Without fail, that sneer gives way to a pout so pronounced it's nearly jejune. In between it all, she freely dispenses her middle-finger with arm held out at full span.

I saw her holler "fuck off" at a male fan who wolf-whistled as she exuviated her entrance robe. With that, I fell hard into her fandom.

3.

I think a lot about Bea Priestley's bumps. They have such force and gravity. They are unrelenting. They paralyze the gaze. Her bumps inspire. Her bumps titillate. Her bumps look so painful, yet they ease my pain.

I once saw a bump of Bea's where her head was caught up in a chair and then the face she was facing kicked her stiffly sans abandon (see below). I once saw Bea Priestley take multiple head-bumps, including two Tower Hacker Bombs, in a match against Kagetsu in Japan. The internet saw her take an inter-gender kick to the face from Ricochet. Bea Priestley deals in pain so expertly, log-rolling on the canvass, shag of hair roiling, gripping her brain-pan in both palms, selling the hallowed rear-blow-to-head bump.

I watch her bumps and I ache for Bea Priestley. Can't the majority audience, the common public, see what Bea's putting herself through? Can't the talent scouts see what they're missing out on? I ask these questions like these matches aren't widely available on YouTube, like they don't have hundreds of thousands of views. Hundreds of those views are mine, as I can't take my eyes off her bumps.

At this juncture, I should clarify for the non-wrestling fan that, in the wrestling business, "bumps" refer to choreographed landings.

4.

Bea's breakout bout, arguably, was her Last Woman Standing match in which she faced Nixon Newell for the WCPW Women's Championship. You may know Newell as "Tegan Nox," her moniker in NXT, WWE's "gold brand."

Newell, playing the face, came out sweet and enthusiastic and insipid. Newell's given middle-name is Rhiannon, so we must assume that the "Nixon" in her ring name is a Stevie Nicks homage. Any kindred linkage with Nicks, even tangential and/or unconscious, solidifies "crowd-pleaser" status. And Bea quickly established herself as the heartless challenger to the Gold Dust Woman.

Bea Priestley did not merely play the heel; rather, she epitomized it. She entered as the sour-faced silicone Valkyrie, in kick-pad boots and a carapace-like bikini that looked très impractical for pro wrestling.

Of course, Bea and Newell did not wrestle in any conventional sense. From the outset of the match, Bea wielded a kendo stick as liberally as she did her middle finger, dealing out many a thwack to the fawn-faced Newell.

The eroticized nature of the beating was never lost on the mostly male crowd or on Bea. At one point, Bea took the liberty of licking Newell across the face before slapping her with an open palm. The homology drawn by these consecutive indignities was virtuosic, both the tongue and the slap like unto a paintbrush across Newell's face.

Bea would eventually bring steel chairs into the ring in the promise of a massive, maleficent spot to finish the match. She would be hoisted by her own petard. Newell grabbed back the momentum and German-suplexed Bea onto the chair. It was this chair into which Bea's head was fed, and here (all kayfabe aside) where Bea laid dutifully on her cheek such that Newell could curb-stomp her ala Seth Rollins and then, only then, veritably Pillmanize Bea Priestley via an unprotected kick to the face. How many male wrestlers would take that bump?

Of course, the referee's count climbed to ten and Nixon Newell was the winner. She would go on to NXT, to be given her new name, and to flounder in the gears of the WWE machine, one among many gold dust women who would have their illusions shattered by that corporate entity and its capricious septuagenarian overlord, that reverse-alchemist who unfailingly makes lead from gold.

But Bea Priestley's name, by contrast, became elemental and immutable from that evening onward.

5.

I like Bea Priestley because she is not easy to like. She is a challenge. There is an offensive quality inhering within her. At times, her in-ring work verges upon appearing unworkable. In each gesture, she betrays some measure of disdain for the pageantry surrounding the pseudo-sport of wrestling itself.

She gives no indication of caring what the fans think. It is as if we the fans were chewing gum to be gnashed and spat out (or perhaps, once thoroughly chewed, placed in an opponent’s mouth, a tactic Bea used to intensify a camel clutch in one of her battles with Newell).

Unsurprisingly, Bea Priestley turned down an early WWE contract offer. Bea Priestley is not clay to be shaped. But alas—and, surprisingly—even the relatively progressive shores of All Elite Wrestling couldn't keep her moored. She was too talented and too jaded for WWE—that goes without saying—but even AEW, a company built on being the alternative, could not fully apprehend her acumen. For it must be said that AEW, for all the good it has done, is built in no small measure on fan-service. Bea Priestley is not there to render services for the fans.

Bea Priestley's talent is not in her promos. (She sounds one-half Valley Girl, one-half Cockney bootblack, and tends to get caught up in cursing.) And though her in-ring work is solid, this is not the locus of her talent, either. Her talent is her presence. A buxom woman with green lipstick is going to strut down the ramp with a wide and manly swagger, as if making way for comically large testes, and then is going to work stiff. Just ask brittle Britt Baker, whose skull fell victim to Bea Priestley’s rumbustious boot. (I say this not to take anything away from Dr. Baker, whose recent "Lights Out" match with Thunder Rosa marked a tidal shift for women's wrestling.)

Bea Priestley does not map on to any recognizable wrestling archetype. She is indeed Top Gaijin, but not just in Japan. She is an outlander in any federation or confederacy. She is a feral, strong-style mercenary in a milieu of fake fights.

Bea Priestley could be a female Bruiser Brody. This is both high praise and a death warrant.

6.

When grown men wax literary about female celebrities, the reader can safely presume the male author is having some sort of sexual fantasies about said celebrity women. Indeed, Norman Mailer wrote an entire volume about a decades-dead Marilyn Monroe that was rather frank in its sexual reveries.

Vis-à-vis Bea Priestley, this is not the case for me. Rather, in my fantasies, I call to mind a world in which Bea Priestley and I are, like, acquaintances at best. I spend a lot of our time together fawning over the high spots and head-drops in her matches. She is not forthcoming with chitchat, but she mostly talks about how busy it is being on the road in four continents, and about the challenges of maintaining a romantic relationship within the business. Sometimes, I mention my own dating woes—the lack of dates one presumes of men who write lovingly about female celebrities—and Bea Priestley sneers and says "well then try getting your fat fucking arse to a gym."

"Oh, Bea," I then say. (And this is also a Norman Mailer reference; cf. Mailer: His Life and Times, p. 72. The first of Mailer's six wives (a) was also named Bea and (b) was also foul-mouthed.)

To make this fantasy world even remotely plausible, in it I am necessarily employed in the pro-wrestling industry. I picture I am Bea Priestley's manager, my hit-or-miss articulateness subbing in for her mediocre mic skills. I berate her scheduled opponent, and then she finishes the pre-match segment by berating me. I refer to her as She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. The commentators speculate as to our relationship, the persistent question in this fantasy world being: am I Bea Priestley's gimp? It's obvious to everyone this relationship can't possibly be romantic, and would still be obvious even if she wasn't involved with Will Ospreay.

7.

If you want to see the future of wrestling and romantic relationships, you must watch Bea Priestley versus Will Ospreay. A boyfriend vs. girlfriend match may smack of exploitative fluff, for this was certainly the precedent set by WWE in less progressive times (cf., for instance, Marc Mero vs. Sable). Some may dismiss Priestley vs. Ospreay as desperate content creation from the early COVID-19 era. But it is not to be dismissed. It is arguably a five-star match.

Priestley takes to the ring with ratty Kool-Aid colored pig-tails swishing, a bad-ass Raggedy Ann in laced tights and a halter top. Ospreay has more flash and gasconade. But Bea Priestley slaps that gasconade off Ospreay's face early on with many a resounding shoot-style strike, and the beau quickly sheds his self-assured smile.

In due course, Priestley takes a resounding slap to the chest. Ospreay begins to assert his size advantage, playing to every conservative’s expectations.

But then Priestley turns the tides with what is possibly the best DDT ever executed onto the ring apron—the hardest part of the ring (if you ignore the posts). As her male suitor staggers to his feet on the ringside mats, Priestley follows up with a double foot-stomp to the back. Flying from the turnbuckle to the outside, she looks every bit Belît, Howard's "wildest she-devil unhanged." Yet her exit route leaves her with no choice but to take an excruciating back bump on the floor. After this, moaning and almost in tears with pain, she manages to get her boyfriend back in the ring to score a near-fall.

Of course, Ospreay charges back, and soon enough he's hooked Bea's arms and secured her shaggy mop between his legs so as to presage the Storm Breaker, his A-level finisher. And then, even after all the beating she has taken, Bea counters the Storm Breaker into a Code Red. And then when Ospreay goes to his other A-level finisher, the Os-Cutter, Bea counters with a bottom-rope-aided German suplex. This is all fantastic.

So now Ospreay has to resort to his A+ finisher, his top-tier signature move, the rarely seen "Hidden Blade." It is only after he succeeds with this glorified knife-edge chop that he is able to execute the Storm Breaker and score the pinfall. The Storm Breaker—that double underhook corkscrew neckbreaker—strikes me now as the truest consummation of a relationship.

The match could be five-stars. It loses at least a half-star, however, for Ospreay's male-gazing contemplation of Priestley’s felled, face-down body, and his subsequent consideration of grabbing some sweet. Thankfully, he thinks better of it, but even the mere ideation of a goosing takes the match down a notch.

Yet the match we have just watched cannot be reduced to a mere gazing and enumerating of stars. What we have witnessed obviates words, attesting to what is really the most transcendent intercourse: to meet your significant other in a choreographed fight. This is what a romantic relationship should culminate in. The goal of coupling is not a happy, long-lived marriage or, I don't know, a quasi-mystical sexual encounter. Rather, it is a worked, twenty-plus minute battle, and a strong-style fight at that.

This is love. And due to a raging plague, no one got to see it live.

8.

I've thought a lot about women I've loved or could have loved, and I've dreamed of strong-style bouts with them. Would I put them over? How would I get myself over? Would they put me over? How would I bump for them? Would I let them roll me up in the highest of high-stack pinfalls? Even if you don't let them beat you, you must make your lover look good.

9.

There are several female celebrities I greatly admire. These include Lana Del Rey, Stevie Nicks, Serena Grandi (Italian b-movie luminary, FYI), and, what the hell, we'll throw Amanda Seyfried in there too. I've considered writing long-form pieces about all of these people (with the exception of Seyfried), but in the end I chose to write about Bea Priestley. Why? Because I imagined—as all people who write about people they admire but will never meet must—the person being written about somehow actually reading the work. 

In the above cases, there is the possibility, admittedly slim, that the person in question could like what I wrote about them. But Bea Priestley is the outlier. There's not going to be some personalized tweet about how "you're so sweet." Bea Priestley does not give a fuck what I think and would appear to be wholly incapable of ever giving a fuck what I think. All of my above praises would matter no more to her than that male-gazing Britisher who wolf-whistled at her lissome body as she bared it. 

And I admire that complete disdain for the fan. Because the fan is ultimately a spectator partaking in something altogether lower than watching or observing or gazing. They watch with empty-headed expectation of being entertained. This is, for lack of a better term, "spectation." Fans are defined by their maniacal commitment to observing exalted others in this way. That Bea Priestley hates this makes me like her all the more. 

Because I hate being a fan of anything or anyone. It pains me that, as someone who believes that what he thinks is worth writing down, I would even consider writing about any of the aforementioned celebrities. Their talents do not make them exalted or transcendent. Our worship for the marketing of their talents is what keeps them afloat, and this worship makes us so irredeemably common, insofar as we would accept such a low standard for transcendence. 

Bea Priestley's thesis, if she has one, is almost an argument against spectating itself. This, to my mind, makes her wrestling's perfect heel.

10.

That is Bea, that is Belît. The name bewilders you and so you dismiss it, you forget it.

I whisper that name like a prayer, while I pray that Bea Priestley will not be the female Bruiser Brody, that she will not end up as wrestling's Marilyn Monroe. I pray that all her bumps will land true, and that her stingers, when they happen, will heal and feeling will return even fuller than before. I pray that one day some promotion will see that there is something generational, something elemental, something eternal in Bea Priestley. I pray that you will all see this much, and feeling will return to you, too.

Rumor has it that Bea Priestley is headed to NXT, that most palatable tentacle of WWE. Specifically, she'll be in NXT UK, a tameless outlander shoehorned back into her ostensible home. When I hear this, I feel that strange mix of exultation and envy one experiences when a friend has some success. I also feel sorry for her. Because I doubt that WWE can ever truly know Bea Priestley.* Indeed, that feeling she embodies is so subtle, so rarefied, I fear that the WWE creative team cannot fathom it, let alone capture it in the ring.

I mean that feeling that high school's over, and school’s out forever, but still you know She is still there, still smoking at the rear entrance, and that She always will be. You don't know her, but you realize in time that you want more than anything to have known her.

---

Footnotes:

*Update, July 4, 2021: As could be expected, WWE has rebranded Bea Priestley, settling upon the name "Blair Davenport." While certainly maintaining the Britishness of Priestley's given name, WWE Creative has erred on the side of posh British rather than the hard-bitten British of the original. It's some consolation, I suppose, that the last syllable of "Davenport" does maintain Priestley's littoral associations (e.g. her mastery of the "Japanese Ocean" suplex). Still, I personally find that something is lost when someone submits themselves to a pseudonym. 

The Slider - T. Rex

T. Rex is perhaps best known for their radio-friendly 1971 single "Bang a Gong (Get it On)" from their stellar Electric Warrior LP. That album was the band’s seventh (but their second after abbreviating their name from the less commercially viable "Tyrannosaurus Rex") and marked the height of the band's commercial success. Critics both contemporaneous and retrospective have taken Electric Warrior as the artistic apogee for T. Rex and its virtuoso frontman Marc Bolan, but this is up for debate. T. Rex's 1972 album The Slider proves itself far more expansive than Electric Warrior, benefitting from some of Bolan's most mystically and ontologically sophisticated songwriting.

The Slider starts off with "Metal Guru," one of the record's two singles. While "Bang a Gong (Get it On)" is undeniably top-forty bait, "Metal Guru" is something quite different. Its title belies its content in that it’s not a heavy, hardscrabble jam but rather a jubilant, sing-songy meditation on the titular phrase sung over and over again by a sizable chorus. On account of the cheery bombast and sheer repetition “Metal Guru” offers, it feels as if the album is starting with a vamp—that is, the kind of all-in close-out with which one might end a song or even an album. The reference to a "guru" in the title is apropos, as both the song and the album in its entirety possess a distinctly mantraic vibe. The Slider fixates on phrases as if determined to produce in the listener an altered state.

Marc Bolan, virtuoso

Bolan follows with "Mystic Lady," a song featuring an odd time signature which doesn't just slow things down, but actually confounds the listener in an intriguing way. "Rock On" reclaims the pace with intimations of roadhouse rock, but this song is also given to fits and starts. Bolan wants to defy expectations not just for lyrics but for song structure as well.

The titular track showcases Bolan's psychedelic lyricism at its best. "I could never understand/The wind at all/Was like a ball of love//I could never never see/The cosmic sea/Was like a bumblebee." Here Bolan appears to be collapsing perceptual and linguistic distinctions between phenomena in hopes of moving toward a mystic, quasi-Vedantic state. The bumblebee, then, can indeed be the cosmic sea, when one lets go and proceeds "to slide." As Bolan attests, "And when I'm sad/I slide ." This song, then, is a sonic replication of a psychological and/or religious state. It's an invitation for the listener to slide all the while. Drugs likely were and are implicated in conceptualizing and realizing this state of "The Slider." Knowing Bolan, the main suspect here is cocaine.

With "Baby Boomerang," T. Rex hearkens back to the jaunty, infectious pop stylings of Electric Warrior. Bolan slows things down again with "Spaceball Ricochet," an ode to various instruments integral to the speaker’s self-expression: the titular space-themed game (possibly a pinball variation), a Les Paul guitar, and books—many books. The bibliomania broached here is just one among several writing and reading references on The Slider, as these activities are obviously crucial tools for perpetrating creative escapes. These elements have also paid more ethereal cognitive dividends for the song’s speaker. Calling back to "The Slider," Bolan proclaims early on that he now “understand[s] the wind/And all the things/That make the children cry." His interiority is fast progressing. 

"Buick Mackane" marks another milestone track on The Slider. Is it about a girl or a car? It may very well be both. Certainly, sexual opportunities and car ownership are closely imbricated, at least in the 20th-century English-speaking world, and Bolan is well aware of this inevitability. Sexualization of automobiles figured into several prior T. Rex tracks, including “Bang a Gong (Get it on)”: “Well you're built like a car/You've got a hubcap diamond star halo.” With “Buick Mackane,” the girl and the car have become virtually indistinguishable, once again dissolving a perceptual boundary and speaking to an underlying monistic substrate. By now, Bolan's mysticism has taken on sexual valences. As conceptually complex as "Buick Mackane" may be, its musical arrangement is one of the finest on the album, with authoritative, clangoring guitar work that gives away to grooves at its close. This vamp involves a multilayered wall of sound, culminating in an orchestral jam session that is itself semi-numinous. Evidently, "Buick Mackane" inspired Guns N Roses, as a cover thereof found its way onto The Spaghetti Incident?, in this case as part of a song suite with "Big Dumb Sex" by Soundgarden. The explicit Soundgarden vamp—"I wanna fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck you, fuck you" serves to accentuate the sexual undertones of Bolan's original composition.

"Telegram Sam" served as the initial single from The Slider. It's upbeat, the guitar hook highly reminiscent of "Bang a Gong (Get it On)." The lyrics deal with some curious characters, including not just the titular man but also one "Jungle-Face Jake" and a "Golden Nose Slim." Judging by their names, these individuals don't sound like personages one would want to meet. Despite his relatively upstanding name, Telegram Sam is hardly any better. He is, in actuality, T. Rex's manager, Tony Secunda, and Bolan labels him as his "main man," in that Secunda was their primary drug supplier. Undeniably, there would be no "Slider" without the efforts of "Telegram Sam."

"Rabbit Fighter" aspires toward some amazing scope early on before making an involution into bluesy rock throughout its verses. But in the end, Bolan telescopes back out to re-acquire that grandiose sound. For "Baby Strange," Bolan strips it down all over again, getting sexual and quirky on the strength of a simple, neurotic electric-guitar riff.

The best song on The Slider is "Ballrooms of Mars." Here Bolan gets balladic, tenderly and deliberately delivering beautiful, wistful images of seduction by way of poignant maunderings. Bolan sings of how "Your diamond hands/Will be stacked with roses/And wind and cars/And people of the past." Here again Bolan collapses the permeable boundaries between people and cars and wind, the elemental aspects of the album. Bolan yells "Rock!" to inaugurate each of the masterful, siren-like guitar solos, and his one-word command is fully realized in his fretwork, which serves as an apt synecdoche for all that rock and roll can be. He even references other rockers by name, specifically John Lennon and Bob Dylan, neither of whom could hold Bolan's jock in terms of raw creativity. Of course, Bolan lacked the Dylanesque and Lennonesque attunement for mass appeal. "Ballrooms of Mars" is too capacious to make mainstream waves. Nonetheless, it's not just the highlight of the album, but a high watermark for the rock and roll genre.

With "Chariot Choogle," Bolan offers up another precarious rock anthem, with heavy guitars laid out over yet another non-conventional time signature. This song teeters on the brink of collapse all throughout its verses, but with each chorus it gives way to jubilation and upliftment, at least momentarily. After the nervous verses, the sudden build to orchestral strings gives the listener some release—some temporary deliverance. Perhaps our deliverance comes by way of Bolan’s reassurance: "You know who you are," he murmurs. All told, the trepidations of the verses feel like they've been allayed, and the song has effectively resolved itself.

The original pressing of The Slider finishes with "Main Man." Here, Bolan slows it down with a bass-heavy backing track. Spacey effects give the vocals a dreamy quality as Bolan sets into his refrain: "Are you now? Are you now?" he asks repeatedly. Bolan talks intimately to the listener, asking "Are you frog man?" and, going back to the record’s pervasive preternatural undertones, reports that "Heaven is hot, babe." By this endpoint, the writer has even brought himself into the mix: "Bolan likes to rock now," he says over and over. We've come full circle, for here, it seems, is our metal guru speaking to us from outside the surrealistic prisms that have veiled him throughout the album. Bolan goes on to sing about laughing in childhood and crying as an adult, and then reflects on his sanity. This is not at all out of place on this album. As he approaches the end, Bolan has moved toward casting doubt on the status of "Telegram Sam" as the true "main man." Bolan, it seems, is the only viable main man left, and such a conclusion is not out of character, as Mark Bolan was reputedly a narcissist of the highest order. Of course, some narcissists truly earn the right to be as self-involved as they are, embodying in full the undisputed main man or main woman, and Bolan is one such person.

Future reissues of The Slider provided further additions to the initial thirteen songs, none of which take away from the original arrangement. The track "Cadillac" brings back the car motif, benefitting from another sturdy rock riff that is augmented by the liberal use of maracas. "Thunderwing" also rocks, ornamented by nursery-rhyme lyrics. "Lady" makes for an even better finish to this record than "Main Man," arguably. In offering up a dreamy appreciation of Lady Luck via some country-fried rock and some of Bill Legend's finest drumming, T. Rex takes it home with a smooth groove, delivering us into a space much less manic than that in which we began. "Lady" also makes for a satisfying conceptual capstone, for in this alternative conclusion, Bolan simply gives his pain to Lady Luck—whether or not everything’s all derived from one essence in the end, from day to day she's our main woman.

In sum, The Slider helps the listener toward realization of a psychologically and mystically complex umwelt. Bolan's writing covers a lot of conceptual territory in just 53 minutes, making for a jamboree of strangeness that inevitably complexifies the interiority of the auditor, just as it has for the composer. The Slider embodies a weirdness that transcends era. It's less a rock album than an extended meditation with delightful psychoactive effects. And yet much of The Slider hinges upon building a song around a simple riff and then giving way to an orchestral chorus and/or an orchestral vamp at the end. It's an effective formula, but the album is in no way formulaic. Indeed, it's verily mantraic in its commitment to repetition. This is rock and roll as high-end abstract art, and Bolan is a Warhol whose oeuvre is comparably much easier to take. Yet The Slider's many confounding, oceanic elements are mollified by the fact that it rocks well. If Electric Warrior is stellar, then The Slider is nothing short of cosmic. 

Friday the 13th: The Storm

Friday the 13th: The Storm opens with a shot of two girls kissing. It goes downhill from there. Oh sure, it quickly goes on to check off the nudity box as well (an important component of Friday the 13th films not often found in the fan films), and so praises are due to the lead actress for taking a risk and baring it all, but a flash of bust and backside cannot redeem this film. And sure, there is some beautiful HD imagery, but it’s hard to put a finer point on pointlessness. Jason’s motivation is unclear, as there is no discussion of why he has come out to southern California to continue his killing spree. The dialogue is stilted and the characters are introduced haphazardly. To the credit of the filmmakers, the kill scenes look as if they were painstakingly choreographed, though the murders mostly seem to have been inspired from the canonical franchise entries and don't make any innovations upon those. All told, The Storm in many ways gets at the bare essence of fan filmmaking—that is, simply making a film for the sake of making a film. It adds nothing to the Friday the 13th mythology or its fandom save for a lesbian kiss.

Watch it here.

Minus Forty

When Kyla called and asked me to go for a walk, I said yes and ran to her. I left my sociology textbook open on my dorm-room desk. The final was two days away; it was my last exam and we had all the questions in advance. So it didn’t matter. It was well-below freezing outside and the wind had a sharp edge, but that didn’t matter either. I sped up as she came into view, wind blistering my face.

Hugging herself in front of the the Arts Pavilion, Kyla was easy to spot. She wore a puffy, pristine-white nitrous-down jacket and her accustomed cuff-knit hat with the varsity logo, her blond hair spilling out onto her shoulders. Her hat was not unlike the one I wore, but she was Canadian, so she called it a toque.

We exchanged greetings and then walked around campus and beyond, weaving through the snowy paths in the woods surrounding. The sun was lemony, but the air was getting even colder. We pushed aside birch branches and pulled each other up hillocks banked with snow. When we came running down them, our laughter echoed. Everyone left on campus was indoors studying. We hardly said a word, save for when Kyla would point out some species of bird, some genus of tree. She was a bio major, pre-med.

“Two weeks ago,” she said as campus came back into view. “I don’t know what that was.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “If it was something I did or said—”

“It wasn’t so much you,” she said. “I was thinking about other things, doing math in my head. It was so dark with the lights off.”

Two weeks before, we had made our way back to her dorm after an end-of-semester mixer and fumbled around in the pale light of her desk lamp. It was frantic and tacit at first. Then it became lethargic, abortive. I’d offered to stay, but Kyla said it would be better if I just went. She hadn’t called since, at least not until that afternoon.

“Things are working themselves out now,” Kyla said. “One way or another, the math is done. It’s getting cold. Super-cold. My phone said its going to be minus forty.”

“Is that Celsius or Fahrenheit?”

“They’re the same, John. Minus forty is the one time they connect up.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. It’s almost there. Let’s go inside.”

We came in from the cold and went to her dorm room. The sun shone bright through the window, and it was very warm. We took off all our clothes but left on our cuff-knit hats—our toques. She laid down on top of the comforter and invited me into the bed with her. The sun was a rectangle across her breasts. We had sex in that one position until we warmed up. Smiling, she told me to pull out. I came into that rectangle of sunlight that had migrated to her long, lean abdomen, the top of her plump mons.

I collapsed beside her, pulled her close, pushed the toque up on her forehead. I kissed her brow, my lips tracing the fine film of perspiration there. This was how things had worked out. For a long time, we didn’t say anything.

“When’s your next final?” I asked, inanely.

“I’m done.”

“Then why are you still here?” I said, an upwelling in my stomach. I could tell her that I like her.

“Yeah,” Kyla whispered. “I failed chem. There’s no way I can pass based on everything I left blank. There’s no way I can keep my GPA over 2.6.”

“I—I thought the cut-off was like 2.4.”

“It’s higher for internationals,” Kyla said. “After the break, I’m probably not coming back.”

I stared up at the stucco ceiling for a long time. Long enough to perceive the sunlight waning pinkly, to feel Kyla roll gently out of her bed. Long enough to listen to her shower and then resume packing. Her remote car-starter chirruped and then she sat me up and dressed me wordlessly.

I carried her suitcase out to the car, the Honda with the Ontario license plate. Moving through the rising plumes of exhaust, I went to hug her, but she stuck out her mitten, seizing my bare hand. She shook my hand vigorously.

“Did we ever get to minus forty?” I said, not knowing what to say. “I know it’s cold, but it doesn’t feel that cold.”

“We didn’t,” Kyla said, relinquishing my hand, heading around to the driver’s side. “We came pretty close, though.”

She got in the car, flashed a smile, and then pulled out of the parking lot and out of my life.

Friday the 13th: The Cold Heart of Crystal Lake

The only redeeming feature of the Friday the 13th fan film The Cold Heart of Crystal Lake is that it is set in the winter, which makes it stand out from the intractable summertime backdrop of the canonical series and also the fan films it has spawned. One of the characters even remarks upon the trend when restating the Jason Voorhees legend, characterizing the killer as “monotonously seasonal.” Don’t let this witty meta-commentary fool you, though—the dialogue is otherwise quite awful. The Cold Heart of Crystal Lake is marred by poorly framed shots and muddy, murky video quality. The only real highlight comes when Jason fells one victim by body-checking him, a nod (perhaps unintentional) to Jason’s ineffaceable associations with hockey equipment. We are also graced with bra-level nudity; I point this out not to deign to the compulsions of the male gaze but rather to give kudos to the amateur filmmakers for meeting, at least to a partial extent, one of the necessary conditions for qualifying as a true Friday the 13th film (the breastless Part 6 being the forgivable exception). Some kudos are also due for the gory kills, including one in which Jason pulls out an annoying girl’s intestines. These kills, however, generally go on too long. In that sense, they are a microcosm of the film itself. Even at a runtime of sixteen minutes, The Cold Heart of Crystal Lake tries the viewer's patience.

Watch it here, if you must.