Don’t you judge me!!

I was not five minutes into this movie when I wondered about my life choices. Why am I here again? Why am I watching another 1313 movie? What is this movie even about?

Luckily, 1313: Haunted Frat jumps right into the 1313 routine without giving us a moment to ponder the consequences of starting another one of these blasted projects. Immediately after the very brief title sequence, a kind of hunky pouty young white twunk is having a horrible nightmare while shirtlessly writhing in his sheets. What is he dreaming about? He seems to be dreaming of himself walking around the 1313 house very very slowly wearing nothing but a pair of tighty whities. Why is this happening? What is going on? If you really want these answers, you’ll have to wait for the whole 75 minutes. As we well know by now, the 1313 series is usually less about story development than about guys walking around in various states of clothing before intermittent attacks of plot descend on the unwilling participants.

In the past, I’ve compared these movies to Andy Warhol’s avant garde art films and Jean Luc Godard’s deconstructionist cinema. The 1313 movies are exercises in near-naked barely-homoerotic barely-horror genre filmmaking existing purely as a lie or a casting call. In this case, the first 15+ minutes are literally the same twunk walking around in underwear or writhing in a bed, and that’s before he wakes up to do a shower scene. There’s no words. No plot. Just some vaguely ominous music that accompanies neither scares nor events. This is par for the course.

The plot slowly comes into focus when more buff young men eventually show up to swim, tan, play shirtless football, workout without a shirt, rub themselves in bed, and hose themselves down while a strange woman in a black nightie lightly runs the tips of her fingers over their skin and shorts while tense music plays. You see, all these cliched examples of “hetero” masculinity belong to a fraternity that has mostly left the house to party down for Spring Break (forever). The only reason these walking statues are still at the house is because some game got moved? Who knows. The intelligent one of the bunch has to write a paper about the history of the fraternity and discovers that the house is built on the grounds of an insane asylum that burned down like 25 years ago (possibly with some patients inside it). That’s the plot. Spoilers and all.

Despite a thin plot and terrible dialogue, I still managed to finish this movie (unlike last night’s attempt to watch Wonder Wheel). I’m sure the near naked men helped, but I am genuinely intrigued by these movies. They’re not sexually arousing. They’re more like anti-movies. The lack of dialogue is almost refreshing compared to the modern indie movies that rely on wall to wall dialogue. The lack of plot is almost interesting. 1313: Haunted Frat is almost like a modern Edward Muybridge study in motion. Except nobody moves like a human. The camera and underwear change the way they walk and shower and writhe around in bed. It’s almost a sociological study. But, yet, its none of these things. The 1313 series is almost like a found object d’art.