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.