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.

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.