JASON UNIVERSE: SWEET REVENGE (short film, 2025)

New playing on YouTube!
Directed/written by Mike P. Nelson.
Check out the trailer here!!
Check out the whole short film here!!

A quartet of campers decide to not heed an old guy’s advice and head to Crystal Lake to hang out, party, and drink some Angry Orchard hard cider. Soon enough, our favorite hockey masked killer shows up to murderize them all.

This is the first official Jason Voorhees film, I mean, short film, that we’ve had in sixteen years. It’s got corporate backing, a sponsorship by a popular adult beverage, and a whole lot of fan expectation riding on it. And…well…it was ok.

SWEET REVENGE is light on plot, but what do you expect from a thirteen-minute short film?
Basically, it follows one camper Eve (played by Ally Ioannides) who looks a little too much like Jared Leto for my comfort level. Eve is engaged to another camper, but feels she’s not worthy of him, despite her friend tell ing her she’s a force of nature—blah, blah, blah. When her fiancé chooses to go fishing instead of hanging with her by the lake, she heads to the lake to sulk and then is attacked by Jason. It’s basically a bare bones version of a longer story without a lot of the filler and false scares one usually runs into in a typical Friday the 13th film, which I’m completely fine with. I mean, who watches a F13 film for character development, outside of reoccurring characters like Jason, Tommy, and a very select few others?

Now had the trailer not ruined the Jason leaping from the lake scare, I think I would have been impressed at the way director Mike P. Nelson tosses in a legit scare that serves as a callback to the original. But what is not ruined by the trailer is the solid amount of gore the short sports. Nelson cut his teeth on the WRONG TURN series, which owes quite a lot to the FRIDAY THE 13TH franchise. His handling of this short is capable visually, though writing-wise it’s very bare bones. While much of the carnage is only seen after the fact, Jason is very brutal in this film. While he is not the hulki ng brute we’ve come to know in his past few incarnations, he is quite savage and swift, brandishing his trademark machete with ferocity. While the film comes to somewhat of a non-ending with the protagonist and Jason facing off and then a cut to black, the film does manage to give us a lot of Jason, murder, mayhem, and blood. And though I really wasn’t a huge fan of the mask, with the proper mix of light and shadow and a lot of aging on the hockey mask, it turned out ok. I’m still not a fan of the square eyes though.

So, does this mean Jason is finally in the right hands? Possibly. While the film lacks any kind of gimmick like going to space, going to New York, or taking on other icons in horror, the film really doesn’t bring anything new to the table. And I didn’t really expect that from this short film anyway. Still, I think had this been a full-length release, I don’t know if I would have been interested in a straight return to form with the series. As much as I want to see Jason safeguarding his lake from trespassers, I do think that in order for this new franchise to work, the property has to evolve and go a bit deeper in order to succeed. That doesn’t mean I want to dive into the origins of Jason or even understand more about his own POV. But I do think that a film that looks into the land of Crystal Lake and the lore we do know about its history would make for a fun new angle to approach the franchise. I don’t want to learn more about Jason, the mentally delayed kid or anything like that. But maybe more details about this curse that seems to almost leap from one person to the next. Being a hater of JASON GOES TO HELL; I don’t want to see a physical representation of this curse like a slug from THE HIDDEN. Nelson does touch upon the regenerative power of Crystal Lake in this short, giving it a bit of depth, any more and I’m venturing into spoiler territory, and I’ve spoiled enough of this fifteen-minute short already. Nelson goes with this resurrection angle adding an interesting wrinkle to the mythos, though I have no idea if they are going to explore that at all. But something expanding the mythos, offering up new mysteries, and exploring new avenues with existing characters like Pamela, Ralph, the Christy family, Tommy Jarvis, and even Creighton Duke would be interesting to me. Maybe that’s exactly what we will get in the new CRYSTAL LAKE series on Peacock. I don’t know.

Back to SWEET REVENGE. While everyone seems to have issues with the Angry Orchard sponsorship, it really isn’t that intrusive in the story. We actually get to see the wrapper on the alcoholic beverage the campers are drinking. So what? That’s the least of my worries. It’s not like they showed Jason popping open a bottle of cider after a long day of killing. SWEET REVENGE wasn’t an Angry Orchard commercial at all. It simply set up a few disposable characters for Jason to stalk and kill. Which turns out to be a nice reminder for fans as to what we’ve been missing for the last 16 years. I just hope when a new Jason movie does come out, it will give us what we have missed, and maybe a bit more meat on the bone than your usual slasher. I mean, in my book, Jason is the king of slashers and deserves to be taken seriously for once. I do know that they need to work on their branding. JASON UNIVERSE is not a good title to go with. I hope if a movie is in the works, it will brandish a FRIDAY THE 13TH in the title. Isn’t that what the whole agreement between Victor Miller and Sean Cunningham is all about? If they really want to excite the fans, use the FRIDAY THE 13TH logo to unite the TV show with the films. This Jason Universe title just doesn’t work.