Like its predecessor, Friday the 13th Part 3 begins with the last five or so minutes of the previous movie. Unlike its predecessor, it reinvents the ending just a tad, which leads us to the third part of this ever-growing saga. Director Steve Miner returns to the franchise with his second–and final–effort.  Being the third film in as many years, they had to pull out all the stops, so they made this movie in 3D! Makes sense, right? Part 3. Part 3D. Get it? Great, huh? And, because they wanted to really get the audience, they crafted the best script yet and hired the best actors the series had seen until this point.

All right, I’m lying. The extent of their efforts was in the 3D department. Oh! And the gore. This movie is gorier than its predecessors. Anyway, even though you can pretty much guess what I’m going to say by reading my last entry, let’s get into this.

The Day

I’ll give the filmmakers a little credit. They try a little to differentiate these movies. The first movie took place at Camp Crystal Lake. The second one happened at some other camp. This one takes place at a cabin/barn/house on the lake. The last two films featured blondes as the heroines, this one has a brunette. So at least it’s not happening at the same place…just the same lake. I’ll put this in the positive section, along with–

The gore. I know, this is base entertainment, at best, but like being happy with the nudity in the prior film, the gore in this one was upped. According to my sources (Wikipedia), most of the death scenes were edited down because they were too gory and the movie almost received an X-rating. Why the Blu-Ray I watched didn’t have it unedited is beyond me, but it didn’t.

I wonder if she knew that being hired onto this movie would mean…hanging around.

The 3D shots. I had the option to watch the movie in 3D. I didn’t. Why? Because I thought it would be more fun watching the way things came at the screen for no real reason, and I was right. It’s silly and it’s fun. Handles to pitchforks, yo-yos, popcorn, prongs from pitchforks, and eyeballs all come toward the screen, along with other things. Whee! F-U-N!

The origin of the hockey mask is told here. According to my sources (again, Wikipedia) the hockey mask was used because it was around. They wanted to change Jason’s mask from a sack to a mask and 3D effect supervisor was a hockey fan who happened to have gear with him. The director loved it and they made masks for Jason. Little did they know that the hockey mask would become his iconic look.

Oh, and Jason (Richard Brooker) runs some more. That’s good. He’s almost scary.

See? Jason is scary. Almost.

The Night

This cast is the worst cast yet. There is so little distinction between the victims that it’s puzzling. There’s the girl who owns the house, the pregnant girl, her boyfriend–who walks on his hands, the hippie guy, his girlfriend, the fat kid with the Jewfro and a penchant for doing the exact wrong thing at the exact wrong time, the Latina girl, and the main girl’s boyfriend. There are other victims, too, including a three-person-biker gang: a tall, bald black guy, a black woman, and a white dude with a dagger earring and cigarette hanging from his maw. There might be more, I can’t remember. This movie killed too many brain cells. The extent of their characterizations is exactly what you just read. Nothing is followed up and no one really comes off the screen despite the 3D (see what I did there?). These people exist only to get killed. And unlike the second movie, which at least killed the original movie’s heroine within the first fifteen minutes, the second movie’s heroine is mentioned in a news report at the beginning of the movie as being transported to a local hospital. Which reminds me, there are two people who die in that scene–an inept shopkeeper and his shrieking-stereotyped wife. Ugh, the stereotypes.

The writers (I use the term loosely) provide a script that is not so much story as graphically violent scenes attached with minimal story. In true Friday the 13th fashion, things are left unexplained. We never know what happens to the camp in the second movie and the main heroine in this movie (played by Dana Kimmell) has survived a Jason attack two years earlier. He attacked her and she passed out, to wake up later in her bed, unharmed. Huh? Why? Who knows? In this world, loose ends abound and the filmmakers don’t care because they know their audience: kids out for a good time and a few laughs. There’s a hippie guy who seems to be too old to hang out with the others. Why? Because. Why doesn’t Jason replace his sack until he finds the hockey mask from Jewfro? Oh, who cares?

Originality abounds…

The nudity. Or, rather, the lack thereof. Maybe things were getting tough in 1982, but there’s so little nudity that it’s a step backward. Prudish Americans.

Jason. In Part II, Jason is almost scary. He’s dressed like a farmer with a sack on his head, but he runs and is kinda creepy. In this movie, he’s larger, he’s lost his hair, and he’s…well…less scary. Not that he was really scary in the second movie, but was almost scary. In this one, he still runs, he still feels pain, but he takes a much harder beating. The makeup is pretty terrible, too.

Personality….

Saturday the 14th

By 1982, people knew what they were getting in a Friday the 13th movie: young people being picked off one by one by a killer with nearly supernatural strength. I imagine seeing it in the theater in 1982, with your friends, and wearing silly 3D glasses is the optimal way to watch this movie. Check brain at door and have fun. This third installment could’ve ended things and just let sleeping hockey-masked killers lie. But, of course, that wasn’t going to happen….

Boo!?