13 Fanboy

I don’t even know where to begin with how terrible and misguided this is. And it breaks my heart to say everything I’m about to say, because the movie clearly has passion in it, and is meant to be a love letter or thank you to all the dedicated fans of slasher movies. But the fact of the matter is, this movie is astoundingly inept, a mess in every conceivable way possible. Let’s start with the editing. Fade-outs, frenetic camera jumps, effects layers like pixelizing the film, it’s like a beginner YouTuber’s wet dream, but it makes for an ugly film. Even worse, though, is how the editing ruins the viewer’s perception of time and space. Often, edits will be used within a scene to move characters around or advance the plot, rather than having it happen naturally. During a fight near the end of the movie, the killer and CJ Graham are squaring off. Cut to Dee Wallace on the ground, then cut back, and Graham has the killer in a chokehold. What?! This happens over and over again in the movie’s runtime. And hey, do you like drone shots? Get ready to see a ton of them, used not as establishing shots or mood-setters, but just to transition between scenes when they couldn’t find a more elegant way to do it. The music, when it isn’t banal noodling, is painfully generic songs with the volume turned up way too loud. There’s a scene where the heroine, Kelsey, had the earbuds on, and the song she’s listening to is deafeningly loud for us to hear. Why? Acting is all over the place, subdued when it should be energetic, reactions and emotions wrong for the scene, and ancillary characters whose acting choices are “exist” and “deliver lines like a Disney animatronic”. Oh, hey, speaking of dialogue, JESUS GOD IN HEAVEN SAVE ME, this dialogue is new levels of unbearable. It’s like aliens wrote it after digesting scripts from Ed Wood, Skinemax flicks, and the movies of Full Moon. Nobody sounds human, and exposition is vomited on a constant basis, people say completely inappropriate and unbelievable things because the story needs them to, and when they’re not, they’re delivering lines that sound written for a trailer. One character’s death is preceded by a “touching” soliloquy to the friend holding him saying how he’s more than his famous role, he’s also a father and a husband, and NOBODY WOULD SAY THIS TO SOMEONE THEY KNOW. And then there’s the story itself. I could go 10,000 words deep on how bad this story is and its execution, and not get to it all. Two sex scenes with the same two people in less than five minutes? Countless red herrings offered that make no sense when the killer’s stature is massive and clearly has a male voice (yeah, five-foot-nothing Corey Feldman, and elderly Dee Wallace are suspects when the killer is built like an interior lineman). Jump scares after jump scares after jump scares. Every actor playing themselves gets an on-screen graphic telling you their name and the role they’re famous for. Two characters (Lar Park Lincoln and Jennifer Banko, who oddly play young and old versions of the same character in Friday 7) disappear part way through, their fates unresolved. The 13 year gap (13, get it?) between the prologue and main story is never explained or rationalized, and chronologically makes no sense given the age of the lead in both time periods. The lead is an MMA fighter AND an actress in a series of slasher movies (which somehow doesn’t trigger her PTSD from witnessing her grandmother get butchered), and on the set of the new movie (which, at a convention, says she’s already made, but she’s then offered the part shortly after), she accidentally stabs a stuntwoman with a real knife and kills her. After the next scene where she’s sad about it, this never comes up again, is never explained how a real knife got substituted, and adds nothing but runtime to the movie. Dee Wallace is arrested for killing her husband with a machete, despite the body being found with scissors in a stab wound, and the lead instantly believes Dee — her surrogate grandmother whom she loves so dearly — is guilty because the movie needs her to so it can facilitate a late-movie “there’s two killers” twist. Who’s the first killer? I don’t know.; the makeup and lighting make it hard to tell if it’s someone we should know. The movie ends after the big second killer reveal, who is stopped and killed after a House-like flash of inspiration and in a matter of seconds, and the movie just ends. Is there an explanation for why these two people were working together? Hell no, there isn’t. And for a movie called 13 Fanboy, why was Dee Wallace — who was not in a Friday movie, but was in Rob Zombie’s Halloween movie — even in this?!? They couldn’t get literally ANYBODY else? Amy Steele, Marta Kober, Kimberly Beck, Susan Blu, ANYBODY? Clearly, there’s heart in this movie. It’s made from a place of love, by people who were in these movies and appreciate the fanbase. But that doesn’t excuse this movie being so painfully bad. I didn’t even touch on the over-reliance on known horror YouTubers like Drumdums and the guy from 13 on 13 being used to deliver serious news, or the bad cinematography that looks like this was shot on video, or how the kills are muted and unoriginal. Passion will only get you so far. It can elevate a movie to a degree, but there has to be something there to start with. This has nothing whatsoever, and no amount of passion can fix that. Hooptober 2021 movie #19/24