Friday The 13th Blog

So this post was originally going to be how Trent Duncan’s Freddy Vs Jason Vs Leatherface fanfilm was an expertly-shot, flashily edited but all-in-all plotless wank. I had all my zingers lined up. But due to good timing, he recently came back with Freddy Vs Jason Vs Ash. Running at the magic 13-minute mark, it’s safe to assume Duncan has addressed story matters this time round. Let’s take a look.

Basically a bunch of girls (including Nancy’s cousin, in a throwaway line) get stuck in the middle of nowhere and begin to be offed by Jason and Freddy who work together within their respective worlds of reality and dreams to open a portal that will drop Ash at their feet. Why do they want revenge on him? Hmm, I guess this is a loose sequel to the Wildstorm mini-series. Don’t ask me which one. As expected, the short brings in the Necronomicon to link the Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street and Evil Dead franchises. There’s a brisk pace to it, packing in as much action as possible while allowing time to build scenes of the antagonists tormenting (Freddy) and stalking (Jason) their prey.

The acting is uniformly above acceptable standards of the usually sub-amateur fanfilmverse. The girls (Maddie Bright, Ashley Brooke and Erica Lea Shelton) all do fine, running the range of exposition, expressing concern, creeping around, being chased through woods, and being doused in watery blood formula. With Jason (Cheyenne Hess) having perhaps the easiest acting job (though the most physical), he does a good impression of Kane Hodder’s “heaving chest” Voorhees method.

The guys playing Freddy (Danny Zetwo) and Ash (Adam Henrickon) had the biggest challenges, as they were portraying roles synonymous with known actors/faces. Freddy was hilarious, and I’m not sure how much was intentional. What do you expect? It’s a dude in a Freddy mask! But the repeated voice-distorted references in dreamland to “bringing back the Ash” sound like “the ass”, which made me chuckle, while his voice fares much better in ‘reality’, achieving close to Robert Englund voice duplication. As for Ash, there is obviously no replacement for Bruce Campbell. I will say this, he hits all the right beats to make the character noticeably Ash, so that’s a job well done.

A few negatives would be the usage of F13 and NOES scores which are so different they have the opposite effect of unifying the different worlds in this, I would have preferred a less loyal score that went for the middle ground. After so many fanfilms I’m starting to get Manfredini Indigestion. The ‘shaky-cam’ style of filming went a little overboard at times. Choreography was quite well done, but too often Jason is given poor ‘aim’ in order to allow sustained battles to occur. It just makes Jason look a little chumpy. I dug the portal they summon Ash through, basically a rustic version of the Phantasm poles. And the ending sets up the return of Leatherface, which begs the question: what will the next matchup be and how damn long and full of ‘vs’ will the title be?

The Freddy Vs Jason Vs Ash short has a website, and you can watch the entire fanfilm below.