Friday the 13th Part III (

1982

)

Every couple of decades, Hollywood tries to convince audiences that 3D is the next big innovation in cinematic storytelling on par with technicolor and talkies. Of course, those of us with memory spans longer than goldfish know that it's all a scam and that 3D movies are just a way to tack a couple of extra dollars onto the price of admission. Every time they try this it goes more or less the same, initially, audiences are excited by the novel experience but quickly they realize there is little benefit to watching your films in bas-relief. At least the first time they tried this in the early 1950s, creators were genuinely excited about the artistic possibilities of the new technology and were trying their damnedest to realize it. As a result, you got such classics as House of Wax (1953), Hondo (1953), Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), and Dial M for Murder (1954). Sure, very little of what makes these films great can be traced back to the 3D technology used to produce them but at least there was a genuine effort being made with each film. When the second 3D boom hit in the early 1980s, the filmmakers working with 3D had no such illusions. They understood that they were making disposable dreck that would sell on novelty and novelty alone. As a result, the films from the 1980s experiment in 3D are of a markedly lower quality than the ones from the previous generation. You have such crap as Parasite (1982), Jaws 3D (1983), Zombi 3 (1984), and today's film: Friday the 13th Part III. Personally, I really think this movie missed an opportunity by not titling itself as Friday the 13th Part IIID. Now, to be fair, Friday the 13th Part III is a long way from being the worse of these films, but it's also a long shot from anything halfway decent.

This film is also of special note because, finally, after two full installments of the franchise, Jason Voorhees has assumed his iconic form! After not showing up in the first movie at all (save for a scene that might have been a dream at the end) and spending the whole run-time of the second movie with a sack over his head, in this entry he finally dons the famous hockey mask. To put this in perspective, imagine if the main antagonist in the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) was The Cook and he occasionally made references to his lost son, Leatherface. Then in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986) the main monster was Leatherface but instead of his signature mask made of human flesh he wore a creepy clown mask instead and he didn't get the famed leather mask until Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990). Obviously, the filmmakers and produces behind Friday the 13th (1980) had never expected their simple horror movie about a spree killer terrorizing a Summer camp to be so damn successful, and they certainly didn't plan on spinning off two sequels in as many years. However, from here on out at least, the series was on an even keel. It took them a few tries but they finally had their series boiled down to a simple, repeatable formula complete with an iconic antagonist.

We begin, as is now the series tradition, with a flashback to the previous movie. At least this time the presence of the previous film doesn't create a mess of confusing questions that the film is unable to answer, as was the case in Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981). Jason is a psychopathic killer who is out to avenge the death of his mom by killing any teenager or young adult dumb enough to wander into his woods. No need to ask why Mrs. Voorhees was killed or why she was trying to get vengeance for her son was very much alive and well. That's fine but the problem is that between the flashback to Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) and the interminable opening scene where an annoying married couple are very slowly stalked and killed by Jason, there is a good 15 minutes before the film begins in earnest. There is no reason to have both these sequences here, well no reason aside from padding the film's run time up to feature-length that is.

After the annoying married couple is finally dispatched, the film introduces us to a group of young people heading up to a cabin in the woods around Crystal Lake for a relaxing vacation. We have Deb and Andy, a horny young couple that are constantly screwing; Julie and Chuck, a pair of pot-toking stoners; Shelly, an annoying fat-ass whose main purpose is to give us a constant barrage of fake-out scares; Vera, a Spanish girl who the rest dragged along to give Shelly someone to bother; and Chrissy our designated Final Girl. Once at the cabin the group is joined by Rick, a country boy and old-flame of Chrissy. Their exact relationship is a bit murky; were they going out for a while before and then split up when Chrissy moved away or do they have a sort of seasonal relationship, hooking up whenever Chrissy heads back to the cabin? I'm not sure, though it's pretty plain that these two are quite a bit more than friends. Indeed, despite being the final girl I'd say, judging by her interactions with Rick, that there's a good chance she's no virgin. We also learn, in short order, that Chrissy has had a previous run-in with Jason where she narrowly escaped with her life only to find that nobody believes her about it (I guess if a teenager told me they had a run-in with a mutated man in the woods I'd just roll my eyes and take away their comic books too).

After settling in at the house, Vera and Shelly will go out to the local general store to get a few things, where they run afoul of a trio of biker goons. They make a break for it, but Shelly accidentally puts the car into reverse and backs into their bikes causing Ali, the leader of the bikers to smash his windshield in retaliation. After that, Shelly has had enough so he circles the car back around and runs over the biker's hogs before speeding off. Obviously, the bikers aren't about to take this offense lying down, so they track the kids back to the cabin, siphon all the gas out of their van, and promptly get massacred by Jason. The biker goons seem wildly out of place in this sleepy little general store. It doesn't even seem like this is something just off the main highway either. There is, as far as I can tell, no reason for these bikers to be here or for them to suddenly accost Shelly and Vera. Well, no reason other than that we need a few mooks for Jason to kill before he moves onto the main cast. They also give us an excuse to have the van be unusable as a means of escape at the film's climax so at least they serve a narrative if not a logical purpose.

From there, night falls and the film moves into the familiar pattern of all Friday the 13th films up to this point. The young people are stalked and murdered one by one until only the final girl remains. Somehow she remains ignorant of all the homicides happening around her until the last couple of scenes where she starts to stumble upon the bodies in increasingly contrived locations. She defeats the killer through a combination of luck and guile, before paddling her canoe into the middle of the lake. Then, in a full rip-off of the famous ending of Friday the 13th (1980), Chris is attacked by the desiccated corpse of Mrs. Voorhees, before it's revealed that it's all a dream... Or is it? This is just a franchise that simply cannot decide if it is going to have a supernatural angle or not! Though seeing as its principal antagonist got a machete to the brain in the climax of this installment, I don't see how they're going to avoid it for the next entry in the series!

The 3D effects are just embarrassing, being on par with the carnival barker sequence from House of Wax (1953). There's even a bit where one character throws a yo-yo at the screen again and again. I can forgive House of Wax (1953) for these same sins because that was a goofy mid-century horror movie starring Vincent Price, audiences were expecting a degree of campy fun when they walked into the theater. Friday the 13th, while not exactly a grimdark series, has been up to this point a much more serious affair. There are no cheesy villains here, just a deformed psycho with a machete he likes to use to cut up any stupid teens who wander into his woods. The same attempts at 3D humor that worked in the 1950s felt dated and intolerably silly thirty years later in this new context.

The absurdity of the 3D effects is at odds with the subtly with which the film delivers a few of it's scares. Sure there are plenty of moments where a spring-loaded corpse will catapult into the screen to give the audience a good jolt, but this is not the film's only method of generating chills. There are multiple instances where Jason appears in the background of shots, far from the center and slightly out of focus. He's a looming menace waiting to strike on the poor victims arrayed before him. There's no fanfare or musical cue to warn the audience, just the implication of impending doom. It's a rare instance of a cheap horror movie trusting in the audience's intelligence rather than their stupidity.

I'm mostly shocked by how prudish this movie is. I mean for god's sake this is a slasher from the 1980s and we only see one naked chick in the entire run time, and that one only comes right before the end. It's not like the film doesn't have the opportunity to show us a little be more skin either. When the kids first get to the cabin we're told, by Shelly, that the first thing they do is go skinny dipping. Yet we don't see anyone skinny dipping, which just seems like a missed opportunity. Indeed, the film is strangely conservative in other ways, the horny young couple that is constantly screwing is explicitly said to be married as if out of wedlock sex is taboo for a film series that regularly has people disemboweled.

Oddly enough, the character that makes for the most interesting figure in this film is the one whose archetype I usually find the most annoying: Shelly. Normally I hate the forced comic-relief character who is always “pranking” his friends by jumping out at them in a Halloween mask and yelling “booga-booga-booga!” The whole concept suggests that the filmmakers were not confident with how scary their script was and felt the need to add in a few fake-out scares in the most heavy-handed way possible. The difference here though is that Shelly, despite being solidly in this category, is an interesting character with motivations more complex than just merely being a shit-head. He's the ugly duckling of the group to be sure, far fatter, and far less appealing than any of the other guys (even the smelly pot-smoking hippie Chuck). He pulls these pranks as a way of getting attention, by the same infantile logic of a grade-school bully: If he's a jerk, at least he's not a nothing. There's a great deal of resentment simmering under the surface of Shelly's personality, an aspect best illustrated in one scene where Vera rejects a pass he makes at her and then goes outside, Shelly plainly disappointed, mutters “bitch” under his breath. There is a surprising amount of substance to Shelly, and even though much of it his personality is repulsive, he still feels genuine. Like the sort of person you'd run into, maybe even the sort of person you once were.