Legends

Fan films are a dime a dozen in this world, it’s actually one of the most rampant examples in the DIY filmmaking scene, with young nerds doing films on subjects like Star Trek, Star Wars, and comic book characters. Horror is no exception as there have been many on characters like Freddy and Michael, but when it comes to fan films, Jason Voorhees definitely gets the most love. With it’s camp setting and easy plotlines, it’s easy to see why they choose to make a Jason film, although for the life of me, I don’t understand why they want to make fan films to begin with. They can’t make any money off them, and are not as creatively satisfying as making your own stories with your own characters.
Legends is a Jason fan film that includes elements of Nightmare On Elm Street, and it’s one of the worst I’ve seen. The plot deals with a screenwriter named Michael, who has been hit with a bad case of writers block. His sister Laurie and 5 of their friends decide to take him out camping for the weekend. Their hope is that the fresh air will do him good. But what starts out as a fun trip turns into a terror when they discover they are all trapped in what they thought was only a movie. That’s right, Jason shows up and starts butchering them all, but sadly not quickly enough. For the positive, I have to say that the cinematography is excellent, especially for a shot-on-digital film. The colors are beautiful, the locations are great and the lighting runs from realistic to surreal. The makeup effects are also pretty damn good, and when Jason showed up I really cheered since his appearance is similar to that in Friday VII, with his huge bulk and skeletal rotting flesh.
Sadly that’s just about it when it comes to the positive. The acting is atrocious on every level, trying to act like ‘typical guys’ to the point where it’s too obvious. Didn’t the director ever think about saying ‘pull it back”? The actors even flub their dialogue repeatedly and it’s all left in the shot. Bad acting is coupled with bad dialogue, and the most horrifying example is a sequence in a campfire where they start talking about their favorite horror films. Like it wasn’t a cliché already to talk about old horror movies in horror films today (hello Scream), they have to get themselves into an argument about who’s better, Freddy or Pinhead. So let me get this straight, the movies exist in the film’s universe, but the characters are real as well? What kind of blatant lack for storytelling is this? As they argued all I could think was “Who gives a shit?!?” There is no suspense, no terror, and no point. Legends is the worst example you could find in the world of fan films, which most are pretty good. Legends however, is the antithesis of cinema and should be burned and buried to the ground.