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Unrated
Directed by Cory Stevens
Review by Dr. Royce Clemens
There are certain elements of fandom that give me the creeps. One of these elements is fan art. Everything from paintings of Riddick to slash porn fiction about Gumby and Pokey. The weird thing about it is the better and more artful it is? The more I’m freaked out. If it was shittily done, I’d have a nice little ironic out. But skill means sincerity and I find myself thinking “If you put that skill towards something original, you might get laid more.”
I mean if you have a resource, make it your own. Don’t spend it in thrall to someone else’s work.
Which is why I kinda feel sorry for Cory Stevens, writer and director of FRIDAY THE 13TH: MOTHER’S DAY, which is one of the saddest-ass pieces of fanfiction I’ve ever laid eyes on. Not only is it bad on its own merit, but it effectively neuters anything that was cool about Jason Voorhees. Something this amateurish engenders back-patting and “Good Job”-ing. Most people in their right minds won’t have it in them to tear this movie a new asshole. It’s kinda like getting angry at a monkey for flinging shit everywhere. After all, it’s just a monkey.
But I’m not “most people.” I figure if Clint Eastwood could get that ONE monkey to flip the bird and play dead, all monkeys should be held to the same standard. Just because Cory Stevens is an amateur, doesn’t mean he has the right to put out amateurish work and ask people to waste their time watching it. That kind of thinking engenders long and torturous slideshows of your parents’ vacation pictures.
Mr. Stevens, your movie is horrible. Better you hear it from me than your parents.
And the thing is, I don’t even have a real attachment to Jason Voorhees. I was more of a Freddy kid growing up and now that I’m an adult, I’m more of a Michael Myers guy. The last time I got excited about Jason was, well, when he fought Freddy. I’d be willing to venture that if Jason Voorhees wasn’t a big part of your childhood, or you have appreciation of other things outside of eighties slasher flicks, you don’t like his movies very much. With the exception of the fifth one and the last three (JASON GOES TO HELL, JASON X, FREDDY VS. JASON) they’re all pretty much the same.
But at least I admired the mercenary craft. Someone gets offed and you could set your watch to the time the NEXT person gets killed. Never more than twenty minutes. FRIDAY THE 13TH: MOTHER’S DAY just drops us in No Man’s Land with characters we’ve seen a million times before, and is under the impression we give a shit about them.
This is the part where I describe the plot, but I’ll make you a deal. How about instead of me doing that, how about YOU get up off your ass and watch one of the other movies. Really, they’re all the same.
I’ll omit the names of the actors, because they seem a mite innocent in all this. They’re badly played and not only that, this movie suffers from “T-Shirt Narration.” Why develop your characters, boys and girls, when you can plaster your characters’ “personalities” ON THEIR T-SHIRTS! That guy MUST be a stoner because he’s wearing a Pink Floyd shirt. She MUST be a free-spirit because her shirt is tie-dyed. He’s a geek because he has the BACK TO THE FUTURE flux capacitor on his.
Besides the initial slow pacing, F13:MD rapes the oft resurrected corpse of Jason Voorhees. This is evident in two ways…
First, no Jason. Sorry if you were convinced that this would be an actual FRIDAY THE 13TH homage. It’s not because, like I said, no Jason. Oh there’s a dude in a hockey mask, but he ain’t Jason. You see, this is supposed to be a “direct sequel” to JASON GOES TO HELL, which means Jason is inhabiting the bodies of people to do his bidding… And I was just thinking the other day about how I NEEDED to watch a FRIDAY THE 13TH movie that had no Jason in it.
Second, if the first wasn’t bad enough, the Jason-Host is given a gun. Yeah, there’s very little “slash” in this ode to the “slasher” genre. Our Jason Representative is given a hunting rifle to dispatch the teenagers.
I saw this and was shocked like you could not believe. At long last I have found a movie that doesn’t even know how to SUCK right.
To be fair, this isn’t all Mr. Stevens’ fault. It seems that F13:MD is based on a FRIDAY THE 13TH novel “for young readers” by Eric “Miss Congeniality” Morse. So apparently while good ideas flounder and are never discovered, not only in Hollywood, but in all walks of life, BAD ideas actually grow and propagate.
It’s no sin to love something so much that you want to emulate it. But just use it to do something worthwhile and not badly imitate something that was out of gas TWENTY FUCKING YEARS AGO! Better luck next time, Cory.
The only thing redeeming about FRIDAY THE 13TH: MOTHER’S DAY?
The amount of reading you’ll get done while it’s downloading.
½* out of 4
Watch FRIDAY THE 13TH: MOTHER’S DAY Here
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