Even the Tagline ‘On That Day…We Are DEMON’ is Stupid
Main Cast: Trae Ireland and Erin Coker
Director: James Cullen Bressack
No one with any sense goes into an Asylum movie expecting good things, but holy crap, man!
The premise of 13/13/13 is intriguing if a bit–and by a bit, I mean a LOT–farfetched in that the idea of leap year, adding an extra day to the calendar every four years “violates” the Mayan calendar which was meant to add another month every 120 years. In fact, this particular day, the day this movie takes place, is, according to the Mayan calendar, the 13th day of the 13th month of the 13th year of the new millennium. 13/13/13.
And for SOME reason, on this day, everyone in the world goes crazy. Except, again, for SOME reason, people born on February 29th.
Let’s look at the logic of that. Suppose for a second it was possible for something this outlandish to happen. What the holy hell difference would leap year make? Are leap year and the Mayan calendar mortal enemies out to foil each other at every turn? Is the Mayan calendar turning everyone insane to spite those stupid leap year babies? Or are the leap year babies staying sane to spite the stupid Mayan calendar?
I’m thinking someone in charge of 13/13/13 thought he had a boss idea and then started writing without really working out the logic. Which makes sense, considering the movie that resulted.
Ex-cop Jack (Trae Ireland, About Last Night) comes back from a camping trip with his buddies to find his ex-wife is scratching away at her arm so hard she’s drawn blood. He rushes her to the hospital, leaving his buddies in charge of watching his 12-year-old daughter Kendra.
At the hospital, the receptionist tells Jack his wife has been taken to room 13. So what does Jack do? He gets on the elevator and rides up to the third floor, then asks a doctor where he can find room 13.
Downstairs, jackass, the doctor tells him.
Like he needed someone to tell him room 13 wouldn’t be on the 3rd floor? DER, Jack!!!
Later, when his wife wakes up, Jack quickly calls one of his buddies so he and his wife can talk to Kendra. He gets her on the phone and tells her your mom just woke up, she’s going to be fine–right at that moment, the ex-wife attacks and Jack has to throw her off him, then she leaps out the window and falls to her death. From the first floor, I’m guessing, considering she’s only in room 13.
Anyway, at this point, the phone call doesn’t even make sense because back at the house, Kendra has already attacked and killed one of the guys, then run off before the other two could run over her with their car. So when Jack calls home, he not only does NOT get an answer from his buddies–the two remaining ones are already insane and drawing the number 13 on the walls in blood–he sure as hell doesn’t get Kendra on the phone, because she’s already run off, quite clearly lost in the depths of her own madness.
Luckily for Jack he runs into Candace (Erin Coker, 11/11/11) at the hospital who had overheard him earlier when the receptionist joked that he was a minor because he was born on February 29th. She pulls him to safety in a locked room as he’s making his way down the blood-covered halls with the insane people all around him, then explains how she too was born on February 29th, and it’s only people born on the other 365 days of the year that seem to be “infected”.
Together they decide to make their way out of the hospital, get to Jack’s house and pick up his daughter, then find someplace safe to hole up until the world returns to normal.
All that is easier said than done, however, and they face obstacle after obstacle, not even being aware until later that Kendra too is “infected.”
See, the premise isn’t a terrible one. I was intrigued by the concept of a secret date like 13/13/13, and how something like that could possibly affect humanity on a global scale. I just…I wish it hadn’t been The Asylum who made the movie.
Ireland and Coker are clearly in over their heads with how terrible the script is (writer/director James Cullen Bressack’s only other full length feature by the time this movie was made, My Pure Joy, sounds completely unoriginal and ill-conceived), and appear through most of 13/13/13 to just be along for the ride, winging it with every line of dialogue and action they perform, and just hoping for the best.
The effects are easily seen as just that, special effects, and never once was I convinced of anything that appeared onscreen.
I did like the mood Bressack established early on, that eerie calm with an undertone of doom, but once things started really happening and the pace picked up, 13/13/13 seemed to switch into high gear and never paused for a moment of reflection or character development. I got only a brief hint of Jack’s life before the movie–kicked off the police force for excessive use of force–and it sure as hell didn’t endear him to me. Meanwhile all I know about Candace is that she had a nephew who was infected and is now dead–this is shown in a very brief few-second flashback lifted DIRECTLY from Coker’s previous Asylum movie from two years earlier, 11/11/11.
I like movies that play with certain dates and make them into something evil and dangerous, the idea of that interests me a lot. But, man, sometimes you gotta at least pretend to be trying to make the end product something worth experiencing, right? That was totally not the case with 13/13/13. As far as I could see, everyone in the cast and crew of this movie had a few parking or speeding tickets they needed to pay off, so they signed on to work on this movie and pay those debts. I really can’t see any other reason anyone got two days into production on this thing and then chose to stay on anyway. I love bad movies, but, damn, bad AND lazy, that’s not a combination I can support.
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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