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.

Little Miss America

The President of the United States of America is dating a twelve-year-old.

Reluctantly, I reread the article again. My eyes cannot be pried away:

Dolly Carruthers bounces buoyantly upon the saddle of Dandy as he slows to a canter, approaching the presidential stables at Camp David. The President financed the expansion of these stables as a birthday present for Dolly. Dandy was also a gift from the President, their first anniversary.

With Dandy nestled contentedly in his capacious stable space, Dolly adeptly climbs down and ties him in place, her pale green eyes rapt, pink tongue-tip peeking out from between her lips. Rosy-cheeked, hers is a wide-eyed, gamin countenance. In an instant, her shoulders sag.

“I miss him already,” she says. “But it is nice to get some peace and quiet for a change.”

While Dolly relaxes at Camp David, the President is off in Mexico City, renegotiating with President Nieto over Mexico’s one-side backdoor tariff. This weekend has been a much-needed reprieve for Little Dolly, who has been swept up in a media firestorm since she and the President first went public with their relationship. In spite of the initial criticism, Dolly has stayed faithfully at the President’s side, traveling with him to all domestic appearances.

I permit myself a few seconds reprieve from the prose. I look to the picture displayed on the page facing the text, Dolly staring through the camera. Inlaid within is a small picture, the First Family inside the White House, First Lady and First Daughter on the President’s left side, First Nymphet on his right, bulb of her bare shoulder in his tiny palm. The women’s smiles make it seem as if their teeth are trying to climb out of their mouths.

Her long, lovably gangly legs, clad in immaculate white breeches and suede half-chaps, carry her down the paved path to the guesthouse in what seems like only a few steps. In spite of her ranginess, Dolly bears a surprising grace well beyond her years. She removes her riding helmet circumspectly, steadying the short brim between her fingers and tilting her head downward, letting her flaxen hair spill out over her shoulders.

“It’s just all been so stressful,” she says, sinking down onto a bench, settling into a splay more jejune than unladylike. “I want to just hide away sometimes. But it’s like the President always tells me, ‘Dolores, you can’t just fall asleep on us.’”

While the President may refer to her by her full name, her adoring fandom will always know Dolores Carruthers by her sugary sobriquet. America has fallen in love with Little Dolly. Her Twitter account has attracted over ten million followers, and at least one major network has proposed a reality show set in the President’s Manhattan headquarters. Paparazzi were held in thrall by the possibility—proven false though it was—of a baby bump. Playboy has even tendered the idea of a pictorial—non-nude, to be sure. America’s sweetheart is humble about her fame.

“I’m just happy that I can make other people happy.”

Dolly is not without her detractors, though. There are, of course, small sections of the far left that are less than enthused with the President’s relationship, if not with Dolly herself. Radical conspiracy theories abound, including the preposterous imagining that Dolly hails originally from Tijuana, having been kidnapped by Secret Service operatives at the President’s command. While some have demanded an investigation, and even called for charges to be pressed against the President, the White House has larger concerns.

“The President is very invested in this nation’s youth,” one White House publicist has gone on record as saying. “He cares very much about relating to them. And if it helps him do his job more effectively, what’s the harm in love?”

Dolly seems to have won over far more than she has offended. The President’s approval ratings have actually skyrocketed since Dolly entered the public eye, and early polls suggest the Democrats will have their work cut out for them come 2020. Many Americans have softened their position on the once-polarizing President. Dolly, it seems, has won their hearts. She has turned America’s collective frown upside down, offering us all a much-needed break from Kim Jung-un’s bottomless nuclear overtones and Putin’s persistent march through Crimea.

Inset within the text is a photograph of Vladimir Putin shaking hands with the President, the Russian autocrat tilting his thin smile and dozy gaze toward Dolly. It is a fundamentally Russo-American moment. Nabokov must be groping himself in his grave.

And as for Dolly’s opinion on her overnight fame, she remains optimistic.

“He’s done so much for me, I can’t understand why anyone would be so negative. All they have is their simple criticisms. They don’t understand how complicated this world actually is.”

These wise words are no surprise. Dolly is exceedingly mature for her age. Taking this into account, her private tutors have accelerated her studies. So while most American kids are on summer vacation, Dolly is currently working through a tenth grade curriculum. Camp David has given her a rare chance to kick back for a weekend, outside of the limelight.

“It’s all about stress relief,” Dolly offers. “For me and for him.”

And maybe, just maybe, Dolly has relieved some stress for America, too.

I let the magazine fall back down to the kitchen table. I cannot read it again, but I know I will. I roll it into a tube, stuff it into my khakis so no one else in the house can find it. There’s no point in hiding it; the online version went viral overnight. Everyone in the house will read it, I suppose, and I will too. I will read it again, yes, because I was the person who was supposed to have written it.

I got the job at Sampson Magazine eleven years ago, when I was a struggling freelancer with a newborn baby and an almost useless master’s degree in journalism. Desperate for a job, I managed to put together a journalistic essay on sex selection and female infanticide in India based on my graduate fieldwork, and Sampson accepted it. The article received good feedback, and Sampson offered me a full-time position at an unstinting salary. It was my dream job. Sure, the articles were generally apolitical, but the pay was good. For eleven years, it helped support my wife and my daughter, keeping us in a comfortable upper eastside apartment, keeping savings in our bank account.

And then Dolly showed up.

It seemed like everyone loved her except me. The President’s girlfriend is pre-pubescent and yet she becomes America’s sweetheart overnight. Every news channel, every newspaper, every website and every surviving print magazine does an affectionate story about her. And of course Sampson had to as well, securing a rare one-on-one interview with her at Camp David, outside of the President’s paternal gaze. My editor said she wanted the best. She came to me. I said no without even having to think about it. When my editor pressured me, I resigned.

I wanted to write a tell-all. In those frantic, puzzling days that followed, I pitched such a piece to a number of other magazines. They all said no. They wanted Dolly qua Dolly. I considered a blog post in protest. My lawyer advised me against it. The Dolly interview ended up going to an NYU grad, fresh out of journalism school. Her minor, I heard, had been women’s studies.

It gets to the point where you wonder if it’s worth carrying on. You wonder if it’s worth bringing someone into the world now, a confirmed nine billion people and not eight, as the statisticians had for so long insisted on the basis of their projections. Is it moral to reproduce anymore? Is it moral to bring anything into this world? These thoughts have seized me again and again since I left my job.

I start into a slow shuffle up the stairs, my destination the master bedroom. There in the bed I see my daughter. She lies with my wife curled around her, their sleeping breaths synchronized, their exhalations gentle. They are women and the world will eat them. If I try to protect them, I have come to accept, I am not an ally.

We will have to leave Manhattan now. Our savings are not so deep that we can continue to live here without two incomes, especially with my wife soon to be on leave. We will have to look to other places now, less overpriced, the kinds of cities and towns where people consume magazines like Sampson for articles like the one about Dolly, places populated by people who vote Republican with ferocity or Democrat with indifference. But I have to protect my daughter, my wife. Chauvinist though it may sound, that certainty tolls within me.

But I love women. I am not sexist, chauvinist, misogynist. I have marched in women’s rights rallies as a college student. Mere months ago I found myself back in the streets with my wife hefting placards of dissent when the sitting President repealed Roe v. Wade. But now I look at these women in the bed in front of me and I want nothing else but to protect them, forever.

Between them, a swell grows in my wife’s stomach. She went for the sonogram just this morning, but we still have not talked about the result.

I’m afraid to ask, and I suspect she’s afraid to tell.

***

“Little Miss America” appeared in Republican Party Massacre, a privately-circulated samizdat from early 2017 featuring Trump stories. This collection was originally intended to be published, but co-editor Charles Norwood and I got too scared of Trump’s legal team to follow through. Other stories of mine from that samizdat did receive publication in real-life collections, including “The Hills Have Votes” in HellBound Books’ Schlock! Horror! and “Commando-in-Chief” (with Norwood) in Econoclash Review’s Trump Fiction.

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.