“Don’t You Dare Die on Me!”
Main Cast: Dee Wallace, Hayley Greenbauer
Director: Deborah Voorhees
Twelve years ago, Kelsie Voorhees, granddaughter of FRIDAY THE 13th: A New Beginning actress Deborah Voorhees, witnessed her grandmother’s brutal murder. Now grown, Kelsie, an MMA fighter and actress in a popular horror franchise, is watching her friends meet the same fate in 13 FANBOY.
Several FRIDAY THE 13th franchise actors are being targeted, starting with Lar Park-Lincoln (Tina from FRIDAY THE 13th Part 7: The New Blood), followed by Jennifer Banko (Young Tina from part 7) and Kane Hodder (the infamous Jason from parts 7-10), and Tracie Savage (Debbie from part 3).
Meanwhile, many of the other actors have gathered at a horror convention, including C.J. Graham (Jason in Part 6), Judie Aronson (Samantha from part 4), Ron Sloan (Junior from part 4), along with the grown Kelsie Voorhees (played by Hayley Greenbauer from nothing you’ve ever heard of), Corey Feldman who IS NOT playing himself, but instead is Mike Merryman, producer of Kelsie’s new movie, BLOOD LUST III, and Dee Wallace as herself, but she was never in a Friday movie. She did play Cynthia Strode in the Rob Zombie HALLOWEEN remake and, in this reality, is said to have been best friends with Deborah Voorhees.
It’s clear there’s a stalker out there, and none of the actors know who’s next, but this movie is chock full of red herrings, including a creepy guy from Kelsie’s gym, Kelsie’s boyfriend Christopher (Drew Leighty, NEVER HIKE ALONE), Feldman’s Mike character, and even in one scene for about 5 seconds, Kane Hodder himself. I know it’s a trope of the genre, but good God, 13 FANBOY is 85% red herrings and 15% actual killer. It’s almost like the real Deborah Voorhees who wrote and directed this thing, was making a movie with a checklist in hand. And the way this thing’s edited, it wouldn’t surprise me if that was the case; it feels more like a series of individual scenes that, eventually, join hands to make a story.
There’s little actual transition from scene to scene; in most cases we do a fade to black, then pick up again some unidentified time and place later. In one transition, we see Kelsie go from one location in one costume where she’s about to film a scene, to the next scene where she’s in an entirely different outfit and we have no idea where or when we are but it feels like we’re still on set.
When I watched the trailer for this movie, I was expecting something bad—and I wasn’t disappointed—but I was also kind of hoping for something a little fun? It felt like they were doing the lowest-budget version of WES CRAVEN’S NEW NIGHTMARE, only without all the metaphysical nonsense of that movie.
13 FANBOY is, when you get to the bottom of it, a story about a kid who got beat by his father, who used to get locked in a basement where all he had to keep himself company was a TV and a stack of FRIDAY and HALLOWEEN VHS tapes. Eventually he watched the movies so much, he says the characters became like family. Now he wants to recreate some of his favorite death scenes from the movies.
Simple, workable plot, with all kinds of potential. Until you start to realize there’s a reason many of these actors never went on to bigger and better roles…
My biggest gripe is what the hell is Dee Wallace doing here unless the friendship between her and Voorhees is real. But so many of the other elements of this movie say it’s just as likely a fictionalized version of reality—for instance, in this movie Dee Wallace and Ron Sloan are married, but in reality, Wallace has been married to Skip Belyea since 1998. Judi Aronson, in this movie, is a photographer, but in reality she owns a Pilates studio. Again, I’m reminded of NEW NIGHTMARE that said Heather Langenkamp was married to special effects man Chase Porter, and while she and her husband do own AFX Studio, his name is David Anderson. If you want me to believe your meta movie is close to reality, make it as close to reality as possible.
And for God’s sake, if you’re making a movie about old FRIDAY THE 13th actors getting killed one by one, and you’ve got Corey Feldman in your movie … HE WAS IN A FRIDAY THE 13th!!! Why is he playing anyone other than Corey Feldman of FRIDAY THE 13: The Final Chapter??? Throughout the entire movie, that made no sense to me at all. And I hate to say it, but it felt to me like Feldman was the only one here even trying to do any real acting. And I have nothing but respect for Wallace and Kane Hodder. I mean, Dee Wallace is horror royalty, making her name in THE HOWLING, CUJO, THE STEPFORD WIVES, THE HILLS HAVE EYES, CRITTERS, ALLIGATOR II: THE MUTATION, THE FRIGHTENERS, THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, JEEPERS CREEPERS: REBORN, and she’s pretty much a mainstay in the Rob Zombie filmography at this point. But this movie just did not bring out the talent I know she’s got. I want to blame the script and the direction, and I’m sure they’re both to blame. But at the end of the day, an actor has to get by on their own talent, and Wallace just wasn’t giving it her all in this one.
I can’t really blame her.
Let’s talk for a second about the killer. At the time 13 FANBOY was made, there was some legal question as to who owned the rights to the FRIDAY franchise. Because of this, they weren’t really allowed to go TOO meta with the connections, and the killer wears a mask original to this world. At first, I thought it was just some made up thing (I mean, it WAS), but in one of the clumsier red herring moments, Kelsie’s boyfriend Chris produces a mask identical to the one the killer wears and asks Dee Wallace to sign it for him, as if this image is famous in the world of this movie. Okay, so it’s NOT—in this world—an original mask, and it is somehow connected to Dee Wallace. Again, she was never in a FRIDAY movie, and this ain’t no Michael Meyers mask, so what gives? It would have been better if the killer had been some sort of amalgamation of Jason and Michael, considering those were the slashers he grew up watching.
And while we’re on the subject, 13 FANBOY is about a fan of the FRIDAY franchise who starts killing the actors FROM THE FRANCHISE (Wallace is the only non-FRIDAY actor in the killer’s crosshairs). So you make your two main characters a made-up character who is starring in a series that ISN’T FRIDAY THE 13th and the other one famous for all the horror movies that AREN’T FRIDAY THE 13th. Um… alright…
Look, I knew going in that this movie was going to be terrible, but it was movie night, Paramount+ was the next streamer to pick from, and this one was first, alphabetically, after 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE, which I’ve already seen several times. So this was the movie. I’ve seen it, I don’t need to watch it ever again, and, if nothing else, it was good to see where the fictionalized versions of actors I had forgotten were even in the FRIDAY THE 13th franchise are now.
Overall, I have to say 13 FANBOY does not deliver. I mean, if you’re looking for a slasher movie and you want to see some familiar faces, I guess, sure, give it a watch. If you want a fictionalized look behind the scenes at the slasher genre, okay, fine. If you want to watch a good horror movie with an excellent story, a killer script, made by a director who’s got years of skill behind the camera … Voorhees has zero acting credits between 1986 (an episode of “Riptide”) and 2014 in a movie she wrote and directed called BILLY SHAKESPEARE. That’s also her first directing credit.
I don’t know Deborah Voorhees personally, but I’d be willing to bet whatever she was doing in the years between was not honing her craft to become the best filmmaker she could. I’ve seen much worse, but given the names connected to 13 FANBOY, there’s no reason it shouldn’t have been ten times better. Final recommendation? Go watch FRIDAY THE 13th. All the parts. Even the worst of the franchise is better than this.
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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