Best Fan Films

Fan films, at their heart, are creations of love. You have to have love to invest so much time and effort into something so ridiculous. So when three Mississippi junior high school students fell in love with Raiders Of The Lost Ark, they knew no other way to express that love than by remaking the entire film, shot for shot. Over the next seven years, Chris Strompolos, Eric Zala and Jason Lamb recreated almost every bit from Indiana Jones's first adventure, minus the explosion of the Flying Wing and the big fight scene at Tanis. It has screened a few times at festivals and was once rumored to be the subject of a motion picture itself.

One of the big attractions of fan films is that they don't have to deal with the insane licensing issues that plague actual moviemakers. So when Sandy Collora wanted to make a movie that pit Batman against the xenomorphs of the Alien series and the titular hunters of the Predator movies, he just buckled down and did it. Batman: Dead End was the result, and this flick (which made it debut at Comic-Con in 2003) is an excellent teaser for Collora's directoral skills. He went on to release a feature, Hunter Prey, in 2010.

Giacomo Talamini is a man with a vision. The 27-year-old Italian film student was so into the video games of Hideo Kojima that he devoted a sizable chunk of his life to embodying the character of Solid Snake in Metal Gear Solid: Philanthropy. This short film, which cost over $13,000 to make over the course of several years, takes place before the events of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons Of Liberty, and features Snake teaming up with an organization called Philanthropy that was chartered to take down Metal Gears around the globe.

Many fan films are made by prospective stars who want to get their talents out to a wider audience. Case in point: Dan Poole, the stuntman and director who was the motive force behind The Green Goblin's Last Stand, a 1992 film made in Baltimore for just $400. This flick works because Poole is a fearless performer, throwing himself into the role of Peter Parker with wild abandon and performing some seriously life-threatening stunts. He finished it after fourteen months of filmmaking so arduous that he contemplated suicide.