Monday, September 13, 2021

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.

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