Friday The 13th Blog

In September 2024, I reviewed a fan film that was released in 2024, called Friday the 13th: The Revenge. The film is very well known amongst the fans that frequented the old message boards of fridaythe13thfilms.com. The movie is still not available to watch online now and back in 2024 I really wanted to watch the film, so huge Friday the 13th fan, Scabboy, was nice enough to snail mail me a low res, compressed DVD copy of the film. After watching the film I wrote my review and posted it here on the website. Well, almost an entire year later, the director, named Josh, got in contact with me and basically gave me a full write-up of responses to different points of my review.

I thought it would be cool to re-post my review along with his responses for everyone to read. For those that have seen Josh’s film, this will be a blast from the past. For those interesting in seeing this film, you will not be able to at this time, however, Josh promises that he plans to upload a high quality version of the film in the near future. Also, some big news for fans of the this iconic fan film, Josh plans to begin shooting the sequel in July 2024! The tentative title is “The Escape of Jason Voorhees”.

Enjoy the pics of the film and the review and Director responses below!

Scab does rock, and I’m glad he got you a copy of the flick on DVD. I should send the both of you higher-res copies of it just out of the goodness of my heart, eh?

I have to say that this was an awesome fan film. The amount of time and energy used to make this must have been draining. The end result is a movie that pays a lot of homage to the original 3 movies. That being said there are my own personal negative comments as well.

That’s quite a compliment, and thanks! Hopefully I can get the extras cut together so that when we put the flick back on the net, those can compliment it. It was fully my intent to pay homage to the first four movies (Or at least parts 2, 3, and 4), when I set out to make it, but it was and is my story I made which considered the question “How would YOU end the series?” That didn’t go over too well with everyone, but hey- it’s my flick, right?

And negative comments are ok, too. In fact, they are often more helpful to us as moviemakers to keep us learning and growing. If everyone says it’s great, what can you learn from that to get better?

It was a six month shoot, from April to October of 2024, after a failed attempt during the summer of 2024, which had a significantly different cast and look to it. But you are right- the time and energy it took was staggering, so thanks and hats off to my boss at my day job during that time.

The DVD menu was really cool looking. Scab, I am assuming you made this. If so, you did a great job incorporating the trailers from this movie and also other fan films as well.

Yep, Scab had to have made that menu, as I’ve never really put together a full DVD of the movie.

The opening of the movie has Jason washing up on the shores of what I believe to be Crystal Lake. In the beginning of the movie there is some dialogue between Will Christie, now the owner of the camp, and the poorly acted hick-town sheriff. I mean that in a good way! During their conversation, it is mentioned that Jason was last heard from in Manhattan and that he washed out to sea. I found it interesting that the film makers decided to use Jason Takes Manhattan of all movies as the starting off point to set up how Jason gets back to the camp.

Jason actually comes to along the banks of a stream/river after being washed out of the Manhattan sewers. I chose to pick it up after JTM because neither of New Line’s… ahem… interesting entries allowed for a very old school pick up. Some have suggested this is between JTM and JGTH- sure, why not?

My father-in-law played Officer Stone, god bless him, but don’t smoosh his acting too badly. A lot of the reason he comes across so awful is that many of the lines suffered during recording, and had to be looped in. This being the first time I had dubbed such things, I didn’t do a bang-up job on them, and I think it makes him look like a worse actor for it. He’s no pro, but my editing skills killed him!

Most of the first two thirds of the movie is a lot of dialogue between all of the new counselors that have just arrived and their impending sexual exploits. This is where my only negative feelings of the film lie. I think that this could have been trimmed down a good bit and kept the flow of the movie at a quicker pace. But for what it’s worth the characters are a bit interesting. I have to say that the actress that played Katie was by far and away the best actor in the movie. She brought a lot of energy and believability to the part.

Abigail would be thrilled to know you liked her acting best in the movie. My only re-think on her was that I should have had a bit more say in a lot of the costuming. It’s also good to know that you found the characters a bit interesting, as that was my goal. I REALLY like the mentality of Joe Zito (who directed Final Chapter), in that if you make the characters likable, and real, then anything you have Jason do to them will be just that much more horrible.

There are a lot of very cool deaths and the special effects works perfectly into the execution of the film. Check out some of the death scenes below. My favorite is Katie being sliced in half and Jason still holding her in the air! (The screen caps are not the best quality as the video is of a lower quality itself. However, that did not deter from the viewing experience.)

Yep- I wasn’t too thrilled with the WMV file we put out there. It was horribly low quality, and I can’t wait to get it back on line.

Thanks for the compliments on the deaths! I tell ya, it was a bitch doing all the stuff I did for this- actor, director, writer, FX, editing, scoring, producing, and so on. FX would probably have been better handled by someone who was doing JUST that, rather than trying to juggle a bunch of stuff. Still, we managed to get done the things we wanted to do. Many of them were pretty pleasing to have pulled off as well as we did. Katies and Pam’s are two of my favorites. Roger and Jackie, to me anyway, leave a bit to be desired.

Probably the biggest shortcoming, for me, was our Jason makeup. Having a person who knew what they were doing would have been a big difference on that- but I was trying to do so much that I think it was hard for me to really make the makeup for Jason look awesome. Still, there were some beautiful sculptures done by my wife for his face.

Jason himself gets his own share of damage as only the tradition of Friday the 13th should allow. He gets a knee to the growing, machete to the neck, beaten to a pulp with a baseball bat to the head, whacked numerous times in the head with what I think is a hammer, and then at the end he is …….. I think you should watch the movie!

Absolutely- I wanted Jason to absorb some serious damage, but to still seem human throughout. As far as your hidden spoiler, you know I took some flack for that! HOW DARE I? Ha ha!

As for the homages to the original three films, the first is obvious. Jason’s look is the classic look from Part 3. Although, I swear in the beginning when he washes up on shore, he is wearing the flannel shirt and overalls from Part 2. Later he is wearing the green shirt and grey pants from Part 3 and 4. Maybe I missed something there? Anyways, other classic scenes involve counselors talking under an overhang on a side of a cabin ala Steve Chrsitie talking to Alice while she is trying to hang a gutter in the original. And my favorite, the alter with mother’s head and victims on the floor in Jason’s home away from home.

Homage was very important in this one. Our costumes were a bit different than you described, but again, I probably would have paid far more attention to what he was wearing if I hadn’t been doing so much. The shirt he wears for the majority of the movie was terrible for a summer shoot! It was this green/gray checked flannel thing that is very brightly colored in the daytime scenes, and looks very dark later on. Weird. Those pants are enormous. The outfit at the beginning needed to be dark, and so it’s some kind of black plaid shirt and pants. Oddly enough, it was the shirt we later had Mick Thomson from Slipknot wear to play a zombie for our terrible zombie flick “The Wait”.

One thing I was immovable on while writing the script was- we are going to see Jason’s hut in the woods again. Mama is only a skull at this point, but he’s still carrying the torch, and bringing victims to her. In order to set that place up, we had to battle pissed off birds, bumblebees, etc. Still, it looked nice by the time we were shooting in it.

So, overall I thought it was an awesome fan film that deserves a lot of praise for the hard work the film makers put into it. I had fun watching it and really enjoyed the kills. For some viewers, it may be hard to get through the first two thirds of the movie if you cannot stomach some of the drawn out dialogue scenes and akward editing in certain scenes. But hey, it’s free and it’s Friday the 13th. What else could you want!

Oh my goodness, the awkward editing! Poor me, I had no idea what I was doing with editing at that time. I’m not planning to go back and re-edit the whole thing, but it would likely look far different now. The other major, major flaw was our tremendous inexperience at night lighting and fixing focus, which would have made a lot of those night scenes a LOT better.

Thanks for the great review. I think everyone involved had a great time making the movie, and I look forward to revisiting the franchise again at some point.

Josh
JAB Entertainment