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.

2000 Maniacs! (1964)

I just watched 2000 Maniacs! and by god is that a prescient film. It's redneck horror at its most carnivalesque.

Herschell Gordon Lewis looks eminently prophetic as his 1964 film sets a template for a subgenre of horror that would thrive in the 1970s. Texas Chainsaw Massacre would give us the male remnants of a family of cannibalistic rednecks living just off the main road. The Hills Have Eyes would give us an extended family and/or clan of inbred hicks cannibalizing wayward travellers. Both of these films are better made and more artistically sophisticated than 2000 Maniacs!. But Lewis's film is more demented and visceral: after all, it gives us not a family or a clan but rather a whole town of Southerners, all 2000 of whom are berserk and bloodthirsty and cannibalistic, at least when dealing with Northerners.

And so the film presents us with the multifarious maimings of our Yankee protagonists, making way for a tide of that orangey blood that was a hallmark of Lewis's films. Oh, sure, there's dismemberment and cannibalism, but for me, the piece-de-resistance comes when the locals cajole a Yankee man into a barrel under the pretext that they’re going to roll him down a hill in good fun. This is a risky enough proposition to begin with, but then the yokels gleefully proceed to drive nails through the barrel. By the time the Yankee gets to the bottom of the hill, he's no more than a shredded, red-orange rag. The rednecks rejoice. They have collaborated successfully on a slaughter.

And in these carnographic, set-piece scenes, after the violence has been wrought, Lewis provides us time and again with panning closeups of the faces of the mongrel herd. The vibe is reminiscent of a story that appeared in EC’s Vault of Horror but a decade before, specifically issue 34 from 1953. In this yarn, the supervisor of a psychiatric institution is placed in a casket by inmates. Through a square window in the very top of the casket, all the unhinged inmates peer in, prodding and poking and gaping at their captive. And in 2000 Maniacs!, we get comparable images of the deranged visages, with their gap-toothed smirks and their moon-eyed leering.

The psychiatric holding-tank, then, is the South itself, and every single son and daughter of the soil can be counted as one of the inmates. They betray an unabashed giddiness as they mutilate. They exude joie-de-vivre while they deprive their Northern countrymen and women of their lives. This is inestimably jarring.

So while Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes are better films, hands down, the former more artistic and the latter far more tightly plotted, 2000 Maniacs! is more horrifying. To stare into that joyous, murderous, and cannibalistic Southern horde is to stare into the faces of our present-day countrypersons. It is to stare into the faces of the Trump supporters and, more recently, the anti-maskers and the anti-vaxxers. Sorry Leatherface, but real-life horror doesn’t wear a mask.

And while the film sort of cops out at the end by suggesting (spoiler alert) hallucinatory or supernatural causes for the town with the eponymous population of 2000 sadistic rednecks, the implication is very real. There are people like this in our country, not just thousands of them but millions of them. They are the abscess on America that will never die. Worse yet, they are a cancer that might just kill you—that might just eat you alive.