Halloween II (2009)

I had no memory of watching Rob Zombie's Halloween II, the sequel to the 2007 remake. I could swear I'd seen it before—twice, by my estimation. I purchased the Unrated DVD edition in 2010, and I could find it opened on my shelf. This suggested I had given it a watch back in the day. Tonight, I got the urge to screen the film, and from the opening credits, it felt unfamiliar, save for the faintest traces of what protagonist Laurie Strode looked like, strung out in the aftermath of witnessing brutal murders by Michael Myers. After the first hour, I had serious doubts I'd seen the film twice, let alone once. Perhaps I fell asleep the first time I attempted to watch it. This also puzzles me. The film turns out to be one of the most compelling in the franchise on account of its complex characterization, hypnagogic visuals, and thoroughgoing storytelling. These combine to make it one of the most interesting cinematic experiences the Halloween franchise has to offer.

The principal characters in Halloween II are not hollow slasher movie victims-in-waiting. The film centers upon Laurie, charting her transformation from the bookish, bespectacled high-schooler of the first film to the haggard, gloomy alt-girl who survived the murders and shot the killer. Between her therapy sessions, flashbacks, and assorted freak-outs, we see the very real PTSD that would be inevitable for anyone who survived the kinds of events documented in slasher films. We also see the aftermath for Annie, who survives Michael Myers' attack in the first film (unlike in the original John Carpenter continuity). Annie and her father, Sheriff Bracket (played by Child's Play legend Brad Dourif), have taken Laurie into their home, helping her through her breakdowns and attempting to provide some semblance of family life. Annie's pain is also very real, not only on account of having been scarred by Myers, but also from living with Laurie's constant anguished outbursts. Laurie feels inexorable guilt for what happened to Annie, and Annie must constantly convince Laurie it's not her fault. These factors deepen the psychological fault-lines, the kind that were only superficial in previous Halloween offerings. Dr. Loomis, meanwhile, the psychologist (psychiatrist in the prior continuity) responsible for Michael's care, has become something of a diva, profiting off sales and speaking engagements related to his book documenting the murders. Played by Malcolm McDowell, his venality raises the question of whether or not he'll do the right thing in the end and do something to prevent further slaughter.

Michael Myers' own motivations remained vague at best in the prior Halloween films. But in the unrated version of the Zombie sequel, the visual representation of his motivators makes for some of the most compelling imagery ever to appear in a Halloween film. Myers is haunted—or better yet guided—by the spirit of his deceased mother in a white gown leading a white horse. The horse, we are told by a rather heavy-handed epigraph, is a symbol of emotional release. Also accompanying Myers' mother is Myers in child form. Together, they advise the mute Michael on his journey through the film, orchestrating his reunion with Laurie, whom we the audience know, based on the first film and the earlier franchise lore, to be his sister. The appearance of these specters and symbols throughout Halloween II gives the film decidedly surrealistic and even Lynchian qualities. I would not have expected as much from a Halloween film; perhaps in oscillating between sleep and waking in my first viewing, I assumed I was dreaming all along.

In charting the mental and physical journey of Michael Myers, the unrated cut of Halloween II goes places no other Halloween film goes before, providing the kinds of interstitial storytelling we could only speculate upon in the previous films. Throughout the film, we see Michael trekking through fields and forests to reunite with Laurie. Surely he made such treks in prior films, but we were only ever left to imagine the logistics. On the way, Myers has neither his typical work-suit, nor his iconic mask. Rather, we see a massive bearded man, his face veiled only by long hair and a hood. He seems like something out of high fantasy, perhaps an itinerant barbarian guided by ancestor spirits. This is not the shadowy Michael Myers who has persisted throughout the series. Rather, he is out in the open. As the climax approaches, his face is shown on multiple occasions. He actually sort of looks like a steroidal Rob Zombie. Whatever the case, the horror baddie who travelled between shadows has been brought out into the light.

Here's what a Barbarian Michael Myers might properly look like

And this, no doubt, provides the main failing of the film for diehard fans of the series. Less has always been more with Halloween. Until this film (and, to an extent, the Zombie film that preceded it), Michael Myers has been a blank slate. The viewer had only the bare bones of his background. The man behind the mask was left almost wholly ambiguous, as were his motivations, and that's what informed the horror, to a large degree. The fact that an unstoppable killing machine could stalk victim after victim for no particularly good reason was a bottomless reservoir of terror. With Halloween II, that mystique is gone. We see the nuts and bolts of Michael's lunacy, and we have a good sense of his every move when he's not killing. This, undoubtedly, alienated some fans, who surely brayed that "this isn't our Michael Myers!" (I'm not even going to Google that so as to get a direct quote—I have a good enough sense of internet fan culture to know for certain that this was the criticism.)

This, however, is not a major flaw in the film, to my mind. Rob Zombie's reboot was committed to reimagining the series, and he delivered. That said, the film has plenty of other faults that keep it from being a classic. The film starts to lose focus around the three-quarter mark when, in the aftermath of learning the traumatic truth about her relationship to Myers, Laurie has a breakdown and then, on the spur of the moment, decides to go to a Halloween party. Why would Laurie be in the mood to party? And how often does a party scene with a live concert actually serve to the benefit of a movie? Rarely, if ever. It certainly does not work here. In typical fashion, the director gets distracted by the band and the (nude) dancing girls and the random MC who takes the mic and starts telling jokes. And it's Rob Zombie directing, so he gets doubly distracted and spends way too much time gazing on this Halloween rockabilly concert. As with most every party scene, it takes the viewer out of the movie.

Still, this is not enough, in my view, to write off the whole movie as a failure. I will not cast off the Halloween II unrated cut as utter crap, as so many others have (cf. The Halloweenies podcast on this film, which I've heretofore not listened to; nonetheless, they've referenced the Zombie films negatively in prior analyses, so it's safe to assume they shat all over this one). The concluding scene offers climactic surrealism, blurring the lines of hallucination and diegetic goings-on. In the final shots, Zombie makes a bold move with all the principal characters (the kind that, spoiler alert, typifies some of his other films), making the ending particularly memorable. Again, I'm shocked I didn't remember it the first time—again, a likely symptom of having fallen asleep. The film is definitely worth another watch, and this time I won't be waiting fourteen years before I fire up Halloween II again.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)

Until last night, I had never seen A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child.

I don't know how I could have gone this long without watching it. I'm a ravenous fan of franchise slashers. Friday the 13th is basically scripture to me, and I've watched each of the films dozens of times. Halloween marks another favorite, and I've viewed all the movies, including the extended editions and alternative cuts, on multiple occasions. I even screen the Rob Zombie versions with some frequency. I love Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers, and my feelings are much the same for Freddy Krueger. I've seen most of the Nightmare films several times. But for some reason, The Dream Child slipped through the cracks.

I can only hypothesize why things turned out the way they did. While I'm very fond of what Robert Englund brings to the Freddy experience, I found Krueger's increasingly quipster-ish behavior in the later films somewhat grating. In parts three through six, Freddy seems more like an insult comic than a horror icon. (By Freddy's Dead, he's an outright cartoon character.) And while I've generally enjoyed the imagery in the Nightmare films, I've often found the metaphysics perplexing. I know we're dealing in dreams here, but in almost every Elm Street movie, there's some point where Freddy crosses into reality, and I'm like, "wait, what?" (Part 2 is the most egregious in this regard.) The dream sequences make for the most creative and horrifying elements of the series, but by the time the plot of any given Elm Street movie resolves itself, it usually does so at the expense of coherence, I find.

But with that said, I've bracketed more serious issues in watching the later Friday the 13th and Halloween films. All told, the lacuna in my Elm Street viewing may simply be due to the fact that it's hard to find a good box set for the series. For years, the 8-film DVD box set has hovered around the same price as the 7-disc Blu-Ray collection. And while that Blu-Ray collection spent years on my Amazon wish list, it was sparse in nature (2 movies per disc and no Freddy vs. Jason) and generally overpriced. 

Finally, last week, Jeff Bezos dropped the price markedly, so I picked up the Blu-Ray box set. My first order of business was to watch The Dream Child.

This put me at a unique juncture. For all the other Friday the 13th, Halloween, and Elm Street films, my first viewing happened between the ages of 12 and 21, often on VHS. So now, at age 40, I had a chance to delve back into my youth, screening a franchise horror film for the first time. Perhaps the promise, wonder, and mystery of inserting a rental into the VCR would be recreated. Certainly, the anticipation was palpable as I pressed play on The Dream Child.

As it turns out, I was disappointed, but only mildly so. Regardless, a lot of my expectations were fulfilled. You see, a big part of renting horror movies in my youth was building up my preconceptions and then being moderately disappointed. Horror films, after all, rarely live up the cover art and screenshots on the back of their case. In this sense, The Dream Child helped me relive my youth.

What was the issue with A Nightmare on Elm Street 5? Well, once again, overly complex metaphysics bogged down a Freddy picture, and in the worst way. The Dream Child was a goulash of bizarre imagery and mythologies, overcooked in some places and undercooked in others. The writers gave every indication that they were making up the rules as they went along, pulling a means for defeating Freddy out of their asses at the very end. This is somewhat par for the course in Nightmare films, but in this case the end contrivance involved the combined efforts of the pregnant lead character Alice, the dream-manifestation of her future son at age five, and Freddy's deceased-nun mother, all in the dream world. There may have been other elements I've forgotten. There were simply too many variables for my simplistic, movie-reviewer mind to keep up with.

But the film has its strengths, too. Kudos go to the director and screenwriter for having Alice do what she wants with her baby in the latter third of the Reagan-Bush era. She spurns others' attempts to urge her toward abortion and adoption. Further to that, a lot of the nightmarish birth-canal imagery deserves some praise, as it takes viewers right into the Fallopian tubes, though the filmmakers go to the well a little too often. I also detected some effective Lynchian influence in the depictions of the cretinous infant Freddy, which is reminiscent of the baby in Eraserhead. The set-piece deaths generally deliver, as one expects from Elm Street films. The car-accident kill scene that takes out the father of Alice's baby is fantastic, as skeins of wires on a Knight Rider-esque talking motor bike piloted by a robotic Freddy entrap the victim in his dream, leading to a real-life car crash. Additionally, the kill scene where the comic-book fan gets eviscerated by "Super Freddy," a jacked super-villain Krueger in a cape, is particularly memorable. In these scenes, I felt some of that sense of wonder and awe I experienced as a teen (though I wouldn't have been able to designate filmic imagery as "Lynchian" at that age).

But the feeling that won out was disappointment. And this is okay. Because for me, I think disappointment provides its own brand of inspiration, and this is an important component of my creative process. For every horror movie I rented or bought or viewed on Tubi that didn't deliver on the promise of its box art and/or blurb, I felt the urge to sit down and write something that did meet my expectations. So maybe there's a nightmarish birth sequence in my literary future. 

Thanksgiving (2023)

John Carver, the new face of American Horror

With Thanksgiving, director Eli Roth has succeeded in creating a slasher film that feels authentic to the early-80s "Slasher Cycle." Thanksgiving accomplishes this feat by refusing to fall victim to the endless subgenre metacommentary that has clogged up neo-slashers ranging from the 90s Scream films to Scream VI or even the recent trilogy of Halloween sequels. Instead, Thanksgiving recaptures the vibe of true ur-slashers—that is to say, the ones based on days of sinister significance (to borrow a phrase from Vera Dika) such as Friday the 13th (1980) and Halloween (1978). More than a few scenes in Thanksgiving legitimately feel like Halloween II, with a pinch of Graduation Day's fuzzy detachment thrown in for good measure. All told, Roth effectuates the feel of a go-nowhere town racked by murderous brutality. The whodunit elements are well-executed and compelling, as they benefit from a healthy helping of red herrings to keep audiences guessing. I screened this film in a half-full theater, and all the teeny-bopper couples in attendance spent much of the runtime incessantly whispering to their squeezes with speculations as to who the killer behind the John Carver mask would be. All that said, the film doesn't take itself too seriously. Rest assured, my associate and I laughed uproariously for both the abundant one-liners and the uncompromising kill sequences (though we were the only ones in the theater who saw comedy in the latter, apparently). In 2023, guffawing at a depiction of abject slaughter feels far more satisfying than snickering at some "meta" wisecrack—the murder-laugh is just more honest nowadays. The jokes and absurdity do not compromise the gravity of the horror, though, as the gore and body count are taken very seriously. Of course, some of the kill sequences aren't entirely new, as we got glimpses of them in the supposedly standalone trailer for Thanksgiving that Roth produced for inclusion in the middle of 2007's Grindhouse double-feature. If you've viewed that brilliant piece of schlock, then you know exactly what's coming when you see the trampoline appear in Thanksgiving's much glossier 2023 fleshing-out. And if I do have one lasting criticism of the feature-length Thanksgiving, it's how sleek the cinematography looks. It's a far cry from the stark, grainy footage in the 2007 trailer, thereby eschewing the unsettling straight-to-VHS aesthetic. Nevertheless, Thanksgiving is an otherwise bona fide New Testament for the slasher canon. Eli Roth has solidified himself as a doyen of contemporary horror, and he deserves a place alongside Jordan Peele as one of the preeminent scare-slingers of the 2020s. I just hope that, over the remainder of the decade, we'll get invited back to dinner for Thanksgiving 2 through 8. 

CODA (with mild spoiler alert):

One of my favorite parts of this movie is when the credits roll to "Where Eagles Dare" by the Misfits—that is, the genuine, Danzig-era Misfits. The leap from turkeys to eagles might be a bit of a stretch, but the throaty, bellowing strains of Glenn Danzig never hurt in the context of horror. In the end, the choice of song and band makes for a well-earned victory lap, as Thanksgiving rekindles the Slasher Cycle's legacy of brutality.

The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978)

The Eyes of Laura Mars should be of obvious interest to slasher-flick historians. Written by John Carpenter and released just before his masterpiece Halloween, it represents a sort of spiritual prequel to Michael Myers' first movement. To wit, Laura Mars utilizes first-person perspectives to capture stalk-and-slash sequences, the very same that were perfected in Halloween. These sequences mark the central gimmick of the film, as the eponymous Laura Mars can see murders through the eyes of a killer on account of some unexplained psychic mind-meld. All told, this is among the least slasher-like of the proto-slasher films (that is, those films that predate the inception of the "slasher cycle" in 1978 with the aforementioned Halloween), and is probably better classified as a psionic whodunnit noir flick. The Eyes of Laura Mars seems almost giallo-like at times, blending Manhattan chic with late-70s NYC grime. The peerless Faye Dunaway, fresh off her deranged Oscar-winning performance in Network, turns in a serviceable performance as the titular character. A unrecognizably young Tommy Lee Jones delivers a solid supporting role as the detective investigating the murders. Raul Julia, the eventual M. Bison, plays Mars' alcoholic and histrionic ex-husband, while Brad Dourif, the eventual voice of Chucky, serves as her sketchy limo driver. This all-star lineup comes to comprise the prime suspects as more and more of the cast gets knocked off in murder-mystery fashion. Without offering any spoilers, I'll note that the killer turns out to be the person you least suspect (or, if you're into game theory, it's perhaps the person you most suspect, as inverting all expectations is a matter of course for game theorists). What really sets The Eyes of Laura Mars apart is its soundtrack, most notably a lengthy sequence backed by Michael Zaeger's disco classic "Let's All Chant." The arrangement is orchestral (at least by disco standards), juxtaposing jarringly with the vapid lyrics. This fits the uneasiness of both the 70s New York backdrop and Mars' confounding cognitive affliction exceedingly well. In the end, the visual and sonic experience offered by The Eyes of Laura Mars allows the film to hold up as a worthy period-piece for both slasher and noir fans alike.

X-Ray (1982)

If you consult a typical reviewer's take on the 1982 film X-Ray (a.k.a. Hospital Massacre), you will inevitably get a negative diagnosis. What you need, however, is a second opinion, as these reviewers are quacks. X-Ray is a well-conceived, well-executed slasher that benefits on two fronts. First, it depicts the harrowing process of dealing with hospital staff and trying to get information therefrom in accurate and Kafkaesque fashion. Secondly, it benefits from a memorable and convincing villain, a masked surgeon who absolutely massacres his victims. With his heaving breaths and medical mask-and-hood combo, the killer is simultaneously reminiscent of Kane Hodder's Jason and Mortal Kombat's Sub-Zero. But he's also something quite unique unto himself, as he hacks people to death with an unbridled fury not often seen in conventional, non-exploitation slashers. In this way, he's in contradistinction to the stereotype of the surgeon as methodical, precise, and dexterous, proceeding with a reckless abandon that makes Jason and Sub-Zero look downright surgical by comparison. Moreover, some praise is due for the female lead, Barbi Benton (pictured), whose acting sometimes gets a bum rap because she's a former Playboy Playmate. In X-Ray, she's convincing in her frustration and exasperation as both the confused patient and then the killer's prime target. That said, the scene in which a male doctor examines her while she's in the nude goes on exploitatively long and ends up being more uncomfortable than alluring. Still, this isn't enough to pull the plug on X-Ray. My diagnosis: X-Ray is a salubrious slasher that's essential to a healthy horror-fan lifestyle.

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.

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!

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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!

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.

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.

Friday the 13th: To Hell and Back

The Ur-text of Friday the 13th fan films is To Hell and Back. Made by a group of Pennsylvania teens in 1995, the film is rare among fan efforts to follow in that it is feature length. Much of that runtime is used profitably. The editing and cinematography are generally decent, and the lake exteriors look true to the franchise. As its title would suggest, To Hell and Back picks up where Jason Goes to Hell left off. The plot is set in motion when a goth-styled twelfth-grader summons Jason from the dead after chanting from some kind of Necronomicon (though at one point it sounds as if he evokes “Kali Ma,” apparently infusing the Voorhees mythology with some unprecedented Indic flavoring). The action that follows is almost as good as that of some of the Friday the 13th sequels; personally, I find To Hell and Back more watchable than Parts 7 and 8. As an added bonus, the ultra-cheap filmmaking gives To Hell and Back something of a grindhouse feel, fully realizing the exploitation spirit that obviously set in motion the original Friday the 13th but was never completely actualized in the series, especially as budgets increased thanks to Paramount’s backing. Because the cast is mostly teenaged or younger, To Hell and Back goes even lower than most grindhouse movies can. For instance, the film depicts the fairly grisly murder of two boys who can’t be more than twelve. Jason, however, is barely more than a child himself, as he stands perhaps a head taller than these boys. The kills are, for the most part, convincing, and the director, David B. Stewart III, has an unmistakable flare for depicting murder. Moreover, between the dialogue and the action, there are some truly haunting interstitial visuals—for instance, the wall-mounted, old-timey family portraits briefly glimpsed in the flicker of lightning. As could be expected, the acting is bad, but there are some shining stars among the dramatic dullards. Tina Celentano, for instance, who plays “Brenda,” the plucky it-girl, could hold her own in any Friday the 13th film. In terms of plot, meanwhile, the occasional draggy parts are more than atoned for with the final fight scene, which is well-conceived and well-choreographed. It is then followed by a lakeside denouement that synthesizes both Part 1 and Jason Goes to Hell in fine fashion, ending with an overly-long axe slaughter. It’s one of the finest scenes in any Friday the 13th fan film, as countless fan-fabricated kill scenes from the next quarter-century couldn't match its frenzied brutality. But despite all its invigorating kills, To Hell and Back leaves the viewer in something of a melancholy mood. David B. Stewart III evidently possessed directorial talent as a teenager, but alas, he didn’t make it big. Not all American stories of prodigy culminate in some later fame. For most of us, life just goes on and goes to hell, and there's no coming back.

You can watch the film here.

Edge of the Axe (1988)

Edge of the Axe is not a very good slasher film. Released in 1988, it came out well after the slasher cycle had ended, and the movie industry had moved toward supernatural franchise slashers as per A Nightmare on Elm Street and the later Friday the 13th and Halloween films. Edge of the Axe is fixated on the early slasher tropes, but this is less a conscious throwback and more a case of being ridiculously late to the party. The film is altogether fairly retardataire, or backward. 

Edge of the Axe was an international production, with scenes shot in Spain and the States. It's actually hard to tell which scenes are in Northern California and which ones are in Madrid, which makes it feel as if the action isn't happening anywhere. The mix of European and American sensibilities is uncanny, and this is especially obvious in the dialogue. A preponderance of lines sound as if they were written by someone learning English, and doing a pretty good job of it—but still learning, nonetheless. Even more damningly on the writing side, the film's ending is somewhat muddled, but I'll say more about that in the post-spoiler addendum.

If Edge of the Axe does anything right, it can be seen in the kill scenes. These don't benefit from their good gore effects (which are poor), but rather from their brutal realism. The eponymous axe hits the victims with blunt force, not making a clean and seamless cut as per the standard slasher flick. It's rather ironic, given the film's incisive title. And on the subject of cuts, the camera does not cut away when the blade makes contact, contra most mainstream slashers. Rather, the viewer is subjected to an unedited sequence of the killer pummeling screaming women with an axe as blood gradually crops up on their clothing. 

With only one exception, the victims are all female, giving the film a decidedly misogynist vibe. This has not aged well, though it does afford Edge of the Axe a full-bodied meanspiritedness, marking it as archetypal exploitation fare. If axe bludgeonings and fairly unapologetic sexism are of interest to you, then check out Edge of the Axe. Otherwise, you're not missing much.

These next two paragraphs contain spoilers, as I'd like to add some further discussion of the ending of Edge of the Axe. 

In the final scene, the at-times sketchy computer-geek male lead bursts into the female love-interest's house (after he's been solidly teased as the killer). He then holds the love-interest captive and insists that it is she who is the killer, explaining that, via a proto-internet "central database," he has found out that she's spent time in a mental hospital on account of having "psycho amnesia." Ergo, she must be the one doing the killings. There is, of course, total disbelief from the love-interest, and she escapes her captor. Police show up as he's chasing after her, and, in unadulterated American form, gun down the nerd without questions asked. Obviously, the police, working on chauvinistic assumptions, presume that being a male pursuer is sufficient evidence to pronounce the lead geek guilty on sight. When the love-interest leaps into the embrace of her police rescuer, we then get a shot of her eyes turning maniacal. The film closes on this shot, making her guilt seem incontrovertible, at least for the viewer. 

But this viewer wasn't so convinced. The male lead still seems like the most plausible culprit, and not just because the rather petite female love-interest didn't match the body-type of the masked killer at all. Rather, time-period and technology factor heavily into my doubts. After all, I/we live in an era where the internet is not some esoteric niche pastime. Moreover, we've all seen how much misinformation is contained in computers. Indeed, entire political movements are based upon bad data. Since the male lead is an early adopter and the only civilian with an online presence in his rural American setting, wouldn't he be the most likely person to have planted the "fake news" in the terminal to convince the female love-interest that she was crazy? In the end, he certainly acted unhinged enough to seem capable of having orchestrated such a scheme. To me, Edge of the Axe contains a reminder that we can and do give computer nerds too much power, when many of them are morally dim basement dwellers who can't handle the fine-grain nuances of social responsibility or human relationships. That we have, since 1988, handed the keys to our society over to a caste of people easily agitated when forced to think outside the boundaries of binary, well, that is the real horror. Unlike the exploitative visuals in Edge of the Axe, this horror will burgeon through many decades to follow.

Delirium (1987)

As genres, the slasher and the erotic thriller share plenty in common, including a firm grounding in brutal realism. That is to say, the murders and the gore and the sex and the nudity are presented as-is with little ambiguity. Delirium, a 1987 giallo that incorporates elements of both the slasher and the erotic thriller in depicting a series of centrefold murders, breaks with this trend, presenting some crucial killings in surrealist fashion. In these scenes, Delirium follows the slasher trope of moving into the first-person perspective of the killer, but this point-of-view is, contra that of Halloween or Friday the 13th's antagonists, wracked with bizarre hallucinations. As the killer stalks after victims, the entire screen pulsates red and black; when the victims come into view, their faces are monstrous–by turns Cyclopean and theriomorphic. This imaginative depiction of the killer's psychotic, chimerical delusions marks Delirium as truly inventive across a pair of genres typically resistant to innovation. But this is not the only virtue of Delirium. The film is also a cinematographic marvel from start to finish, with intricate, luminous interiors and vast, palatial exteriors. The affluential aesthetic is realized entirely through visuals. Your reviewer supposes that he is expected to say something to the effect of "but no visual is more aesthetically pleasing than leading lady Serena Grandi," but he will not. Grandi's sex symbol status precedes her, at least in Italy, so it needn't be restated (see picture). Rather, it should be said that Grandi brings an unassuming warmth and earnestness to the protagonist's role, culminating in a human grace that transcends her statuesque physique and tameless, oft-exposed bust. You empathize with her character for the trauma she's experiencing due to the loss of her colleagues and family members, and not just for the backpain she's likely experiencing on account of her Brobdignagian bosom. Despite all it's merits, however, Delirium is not without its flaws: as is typical of an Italian film, it features some improbable plot developments and sketchy redubbing. Perhaps most disappointingly, the aforementioned surrealism is only overt in the first two kills, and tapers off as the film reaches its climax. Nonetheless, Delirium's replacement of realist brutality with vivid glimpses into the schizoid visual field of a psychopathic killer makes the film a refreshing take on the slasher/erotic thriller.