Now available on DVD
Cast:
Amanda Brown as Sera
John Lansch as Andrew
Marc Hustvedt as John
Trant Batey as Priest
Directed by Pritesh Chheda
Review:
The problem with 13Teen isn’t so much that it sucks – okay, well, there is that – but that it is beyond predictable. Within the first 10 minutes, you know who the killer is and everything else is just a swerve up until the point where it is finally revealed that you are right in your assumptions.
First thing is first, 13Teen is a no-budget horror movie. It takes place in one location â a house â for the entire length of the film and stars only three actors you’ve never heard of and probably won’t again.
The film is a study on the thin line between sanity and insane as well as the tried-and-true being at the wrong place the wrong time. Sera (Amanda Brown) is an odd duck. Her emotions are limited, she seemingly lives alone in a house but says she’s married and loves to have confrontational conversations with strangers.
After leaving her house one night, Sera returns to find a stranger, Andrew (John Lansch), there waiting for her. Andrew is a real-estate agent answering Sera’s call to put her house up on the market. However, he just happens to be visiting during the worst storm of the year that is crippling roadways making it nearly impossible to move from one place to another. Of course, this doesn’t stop John (Marc Hustvedt) from making his way to the house after Sera’s security system goes down in the storm. For that matter, it didn’t initially stop Andrew from making a house call after dark.
Ordinarily, this set of circumstances might be just fine, albeit given the torrential downpour might be odd. But see there is a serial killer running about carving the number 13 into the chests of his or her victims. This becomes even more of a tinderbox as Andrew has serious anger management issues and Sera just loves to stir the pot.
Of course, she never kicks him out of the house but lets him stay there despite the constant fighting between the two. The fighting gets worse when John â a seedy-looking, yet completely boring, guy just trying to do his job in the middle of a monsoon â arrives and even more paranoia about the killer is put in place.
What’s funny is that the film tries to create this atmosphere of not just claustrophobia but of a situation of no way out because we know one of these three people is the killer. The trouble is, it fails miserably. The production values are so cheap and the acting so poor that they are laughable. It’s hard to be spooked while laughing.
Plus, as mentioned before, knowing the outcome of the events that are unfolding based on the predictability of 13Teen ruins any tension or atmosphere that is created. If you get that far, that is. Because with a constant barrage of dialogue, a complete lack of pacing and muddled plot points that mean nothing to the serial killer theme of the film, you may just give up on it altogether.
