13 Fanboy (2021)

13 Fanboy is so bad it makes Halloween Kills look like a masterpiece in comparison. This movie is like Wes Craven's New Nightmare minus the budget, talent, visual effects, creativity, and intelligence. Some of these shortcomings are because this horror movie co-written and directed by Deborah Voorhees (whose last name helped her land an audition and win a role in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning) is, as the title suggests, a glorified fan film that has no official connection to the Friday the 13th franchise — but then neither did Friday the 13th: The Series, and yet that TV show was an entertaining product that went beyond exploiting an intellectual property to which it was attached by the most tenuous of links. “An obsessed fan stalks his favorite actors from the Friday the 13th films and beyond ... The cast includes a myriad of real life actors and actresses from the Friday the 13th films as well as iconic scream queens” (IMDb). The first problem with this is that Friday the 13th, unlike Nightmare on Elm Street, Hellraiser, or Halloween, doesn't have an iconic scream queen, so Voorhees was forced to borrow them from other movies: for example Dee Wallace, who in the 70s and 80s appeared in The Hills Have Eyes, The Howling, Cujo, and Critters, and in the 2000s in Rob Zombie's Halloween As for the "myriad" of "favorite actors", the killer must be the only person on the face of the planet able to recognize them and distinguish any particular one from the others. Lar Park Lincoln? Judie Aronson? Tracie Savage? Jennifer Banko? These are names so esoteric that Voorhees herself doesn’t trust the audience to be able to identify them, so she plasters the screen with their names, their characters’ names, and the movies in which they appeared. I can understand that C.J. Graham, by the nature of his character, would be unrecognizable, but even Kane Hodder who, mask or no mask, is arguably the 'poster child' of this franchise, gets the equivalent of 'name, rank, and serial number'. The question is, if Voorhees didn't make this movie for the kind of viewer who would instantly recognize Kane Hodder, for whom exactly did she make it? All this demolishing of the fourth wall is a deliberate choice as well as a necessity brought on by the public's understandable ignorance of who the fuck these people are, so here’s another question: why even bother with this meta-bullshit? Why not just go full-on film-a-clef? Instead of real-life nobodies (and the cumbersome, intrusive exposition they cause), you could have fictional characters standing in for some of the actors who actually became household names post-Friday the 13th; that is, characters that would be, albeit justifiably so, as unknown to the viewers as Mr. Graham and Mrs. Banko, and at the same time belong to a familiar frame of reference. Since I’ve mentioned Graham twice, I’d be remiss if I didn’t observe that he takes in this movie’s single memorable moment; face to face (or, rather, face to mask) with the villain, who confesses he’s "been waiting my whole life to fight you, Jason" (although only a few scenes ago he had already fought Hodder), Graham blurts out: "What do you say, boy? You want a shot at the title?," his delivery punctuated by a conveniently timed flash of lightning. This and no other is the spirit in which this film should have been made; with enough of a sense of humor to be able to make fun of itself. Unfortunately, Voorhees takes her material too seriously — almost as if she believed she's actually related to Jason.