The Astro Zombies (1968)

The Astro Zombies sometimes gets heralded as a schlock sci-fi/horror classic, but this is a gross misconception. I doubt if anyone who has ever suffered through this film in full could earnestly put forward a positive evaluation of the experience. Some might defend the movie by saying it's "so bad that it's good", but The Astro Zombies is just bad. The "so bad that it's good" designation really only applies to well-paced crap. The Astro Zombies may actually be the worst-paced movie of all time. It's ostensibly about alien-looking "quasi-men" who have escaped a lab run by John Carradine to commit "mutilation murders", but there's very little action of that nature depicted on-screen. Director Ted V. Mikels chews up most of the runtime with interstitial shots of driving, parking, and sci-fi babble, all of which makes for excruciatingly boring viewing. The only redeeming aspect of this movie is that it inspired The Misfits' song "Astro Zombies", a recording that accomplishes a lot more in two minutes and eleven seconds than The Astro Zombies does in an hour and thirty-one minutes.

Wrong Turn (2003)

Wrong Turn tells the story of a group of college-educated youths who take a shortcut through the West Virginia mountains and run afoul of a family of Republicans. It all starts with some tire damage caused by traps set by the Republicans. A quartet from among the college kids peels off in search of help and locates a ramshackle hutment, but when they find human remains inside, they realize that Republicanism is none too far away. Soon enough, the Republicans arrive home with the freshly riven corpse of one of the college students who’d stayed with the vehicle. From their hiding places, the surviving college kids have no choice but to watch as the Republicans dismember and devour their friend. When the Republicans fall into a satiated sleep, the college kids attempt to escape, but the Republicans are jolted awake and chase them into the forest, picking them off one by one. The urbanized college youths hide in trees, lookout towers, and caves to evade their pursuers, but the Republicans doggedly sniff them out. Can young, college-educated Americans survive the relentless Republican onslaught?

Upon its release, critics were initially hard on Wrong Turn. Scott Foundas of Variety describes the film as “frightless torpor”; Rotten Tomatoes calls it an “unremarkable slasher flick.” But these reviews come from a much different point in history. For those of us who survived the Trump presidency, the film rings irrefutably true and even prescient. In both mood and manner, these inbred, cannibalistic Republicans remind us of the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. As such, Wrong Turn is not a “slasher flick,” but rather a fictive, filmic ethnography of America. While it is not nearly as deranged as the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the ne plus ultra of American ethnographic cinema, Wrong Turn is nonetheless an honest film in perfect fidelity with the base culture that spawned it. Even more than it entertains, Wrong Turn educates us about a subspecies of Republican that American civilization would do well to avoid.

All told, Wrong Turn comes highly recommended, as it's an unrelenting thrill-ride that doesn’t let up, not even after the Republicans have been neutralized and the plot has resolved itself (hence, a mild spoiler alert here). Stick around for the credits, and you’ll learn along with an unfortunate deputy sheriff a harsh lesson about American life—the truest Republicans are the hardest to kill.

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.