Though it wasn’t expected just yet, Adi Shankar’s fan-animated Judge Dredd series has been let out of the gates at YouTube. The links are locked, but somehow Film Divider found and tweeted a way in.
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The series is very episodic, with chapters relating to Judge Sydney, The Angel Gang, Judge Death, and Rico & Vienna respectively, then the last two episodes are very Death-centric once again, everything culminating in Dredd vs. Death.
As you’ll see from the very first scene, these Judges are aggrieved by what seems to be an imbalance in their justice system. At least there’s some attempt to engage with theme and meaning here and not just a bunch of muscled masked men blowing things up and doing Christian Bale impressions.
And, of course, though the original hype was leveraged to link this series to the 2012 Dredd movie, there’s almost no connective tissue at all. This is just another adaptation of the same source material.
Though most fan films are absolutely bloody dreadful, they do tend to come from a place of love and sincerity and that’s all very good. Superfiend shows a lot more persistence and attention to detail than many others, too, with a lot painstaking animation work in different media brought together. Hats off to The Junquera Brothers for putting so much energy into something they will never, ever be able to directly monetize. That’s completely not how the film industry typically works at all.
