13 FANBOY (2021)

13 FANBOY (2021)

Tagline: Some Fans Love You to Death

(Horror, Mystery, Nostalgia) [R]

Note: This movie never got an MPAA rating, but it would be a [R] due to intense violence and nudity.  

You don't have to yell, I'm right in front of you.

In this one cast members from horror films are getting letters and threats that seem more real than normal after the death of Deborah Voorhees, a fan favor actress from FRIDAY THE 13TH  PART V: A NEW BEGINNING. Kelsie Voorhees is working on a new film with Mike Merryman and it doesn’t take long before she realizes that more very real killings are happening around her, longtime friend Dee Wallace and others in the horror community. 

First off, this movie feels overly long because the first hour or so is bogged down with a lot of not much happening and heavy reliance on nostalgia. So let me talk about that a bit. I am pretty nostalgic. In fact for the past 2 years and likely again next year, I am reviewing a ton of 80’s horror flicks and have done reviews on every FRIDAY THE 13TH movie. The big reason I even watched this thing was because of the names involved. I am not even going to go through them all, but you are welcome to look them up. Director Deborah Voorhees herself was Tina from FRIDAY THE 13TH PART V: A NEW BEGINNING. Sadly though direction is a big problem with this movie and as a result, a lot of this thing feels very amateurish. Like someone is walking around with a smartphone just recording a party. 

What I did like about the movie is that we get a really sinister-looking killer and even though he’s killing older actors and actresses, he’s pretty brutal. The kills seem like they were pretty well thought out and Dee Wallace crushes her role as herself. She actually has to show more range than just about anyone else in the movie. Oddly she is kind of the focal point but doesn’t have anything to do with the FRIDAY THE 13TH movie series. I also liked that they kept the mystery going and kind of hinted that the killer could be any one of about 4 different characters. 

Where this thing goes sideways is in the storyline. Oddly Deborah Voorhees and Joel Paul Reisig take this script in a jumbled incoherent direction for most of the movie's run time. When you throw in Corey Feldman playing Mike Merryman and Hayley Greenbauer as Kelsie Voorhees only disconnect their stories from the main storyline with an incident on the set of the movie Merryman is shooting, then try to bring it back to the main story, it just feels like un-needed misdirection with no real purpose. For the record, Hayley is good in this but has no ties to the FRIDAY THE 13TH movie series either. Corey Feldman does (FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE FINAL CHAPTER, FRIDAY THE 13TH: A NEW BEGINNING), but he’s one of the few characters in this movie that isn’t playing themselves. I also wasn’t crazy about how they treated Judie Aronson (FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE FINAL CHAPTER), and Lar Park Lincoln (FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VII: THE NEW BLOOD). Not that some characters weren’t going to get less screen time or have to step out of their “I’m playing myself” box. 

I wish with the opportunity they had here, that we would have gotten a better production, but the final 15 minutes or so are sufficiently horror, just with a weird script that went quite a bit darker than it needed to be. I also didn’t appreciate some of the lines kind of assuming things about horror fans that simply aren’t true for probably 95% or more of typical horror fans. I appreciate the cast though and I have to give props to Deborah Voorhees and her crew for getting us a LOT of the franchise's mainstays to bring us a bit of a “what if a crazy fan was trying to kill actresses” flick. We also get a Vincente DiSanti appearance in this movie and I thought for a while there he’d kind of cornered the market on high-quality FRIDAY THE 13TH fan films while the powers that control the franchise battle it out in court. He directed NEVER HIKE ALONE and NEVER HIKE IN THE SNOW. Apparently, he’s not anymore. In 2021 we also got another fan film called ROSE BLOOD: A FRIDAY THE 13TH FAN FILM that actually includes Lar Park-Lincoln reprising her role as Tina and Terry Kiser reprising his role as Dr. Crews. 

Overall this is a 2 out of 7 for me. A better script with less weirdness going on with Judie Aronson would have helped this one out.

GRAPHICS ARE THE PROPERTY OF VOORHEES FILMS AND ARE USED FOR REVIEW PURPOSES ONLY. 

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