Friday the 13th Part 3
Friday the 13th Part 3 is considered by many to be the red-headed stepchild of the franchise. Perhaps the 3-D gimmick turns people off; perhaps it’s the characters, who are generally uninteresting; perhaps there’s no reason at all. It’s not nearly as bad as Part 9, which has its defenders, nor as dishonest as Part 8. Yet it’s the most neglected and least discussed of the franchise: reviewers tend to summarize it briefly by going through the kills and major plot points.
It starts off immediately from where Part 2 left off. The opening scene features a couple who run a grocery store close to the camp, who live just long enough to get on your nerves before Jason kills them in no spectacular fashion. There are only two interesting things about this prologue: there’s brief news story on the murders from Part 2, just in case you didn’t see it, and there’s a fire extinguisher on the toilet. It’s more entertaining to ponder why someone would need a fire extinguisher on the ready by the shitter, rather than follow the boring stalking sequence with an all too predictable end.
The move then follows a group of kids heading to Crystal Lake in a large van. They can be easily summarized: there’s a couple, one of whom is pregnant; the protagonist, Chris; a couple of potheads; and the Master Prankster himself, Shelly, and Shelly’s “date”, Vera. Shelly has brought with him a trunk of prank apparatus that could double as a murder kit for any imaginative serial killer. When a police car flashes its lights behind them, they panic and – with the exceptions of Chris and Debbie, the pregnant woman – eat most of the weed, and maybe some mushrooms too, which will make them high as balls throughout the movie although the movie promptly forgets this.
It’s a good thing they ate the weed too, because Shelly has some definite probable-causey stuff in that trunk, which – given that there was recently a massacre and then a double a homicide – would be more than enough reason for a cop to arrest them all, even without the van reeking like weed.
Once they arrive at the cabin, Chris re-acquaints herself with an old flame named Rick. The motives for this trip are never explicitly stated, but from what I gather, it’s a therapeutic get away for Chris, who moved away because of some past trauma. This is getting to close to Antichrist for my comfort. Anyway, Shelly pulls a prank by pretending to be dead; he has a prosthetic that fixes a plastic knife over his head, which is certainly custom made because the hair perfectly matches his afro. This means that Shelly grew out his afro, then shaved it to make a prosthetic, then let it grow to the very same length so it would match, all in perfect calculation with the camping trip. Shelly might very well be a psychopath.
Shelly and Vera go grocery shopping, and ill-fated mission that will inadvertently cause the deaths of three more people. While checking out, Vera is bullied by a gang; the gang is hard to categorize, part biker, park punk, all 80s cheese. While leaving, Shelly backs into their motorcycles, which enrages the leader of the gang – Ali – who smashes the window of the car with 3-D fury. This drives Shelly over the edge, so he runs over the motorcycles again. This act gives him a little depth, but he doesn’t get laid because of it. No nerd will ever get laid in any of these movies.
The gang follow them back to the cabin, where they take revenge by siphoning the gas from the van. One of the gang members, Fox, gets distracted with the barn and is killed by Jason, with her fellow gangster Loco soon following. Ali looks for them and is beaten half to death. The lesson here folks, is not to fuck with people you know nothing about for the simple flex of being a public ass. True, they could not have calculated that Shelly and Vera were staying at a cabin randomly being stalked by Jason Voorhees, but had they simply left the poor dork alone, they could have lived to be in Michael Jackson video later.
After a few other random scenes that seem to exist simply for the 3-D gimmick, Chris and Rick hike off into the woods, where Chris elaborates on the trauma she experienced. Years ago she had a fight with her father, wandered off into the woods, and was attacked by a young Jason. This scene is bizarre, as it keeps fading back and forth between her narration and a flash-back, at entirely random moments, which I originally thought was the movie trying to decide whether Chris’s narration or the events themselves were less painful to film. But upon reflection, I realized that this scene is actually quite brilliant: the scene is actually shot form Rick’s perspective, and the arbitrary fade-ins and -outs are really expressing, after having his car wrecked because of Shelly’s antics – among other things – his deep ambiguity over whether he want to pick up with Chris or not. “And then something … came out of the woods.” (It’s not so bad. I mean, she is really hot and all.) “Blah blah blah, yada yada yada” (Ok I’m losing interest and she’s frigid it’s gonna cost two grand to get those windows fixed…).
The rest of the movie is a typical stalk-and-slash sequence, with Shelly pulling more pranks. One of which involves a SCUBA suit and a fully-functional harpoon; I know it’s fully functional because Jason uses it to kill Vera whereas Shelly merely flirted with the idea. (Vera’s rejection of Shelly, by the way, is so predictable you can time it perfectly right down to the second.) It’s a good thing Shelly dies, seeing as he could just as easily have been framed for the murders with his multiple masks and knives and harpoons and what not. One prop Jason appropriates as his own and became the trademark of his persona: the infamous hockey mask. So Jason owes his iconic design not to the mysterious menace a hockey mask connotes, but because Shelly thought it would be a funny gag.
The most brutal kill is reserved for Debbie’s boyfriend. After they make love in a hammock, which was the best sex they ever had and that I hope the baby can hear them talk about, he walks on his hands to get Debbie a beer. He hand-walks right into Jason, who cuts him in half in the most compromising position he could be in. Since he just literally had the best sex ever, I’m sure it was a sensitive blow. Debbie herself is killed in the magical sex hammock, which is a two-for-one for Jason that the pro-choice YouTube countdowns of murders tend to forget should be dinged twice: DOUBLE KILL.
The third act, it must be admitted, is quite long and boring. Chris tries to hide in the barn, where she faces-off with Jason and eventually kills him by hanging him and putting an axe through his dead: take your pick, the movie didn’t. She floats off in a canoe and has a fever dream similar to Alice’s, and then the movie ends with the obligatory crime-scene cleanup scene. Must be quite a thing to have two mass murders within 24 hours, on top of finding such weird murder weapons like harpoons lying around. And the toxicology reports from later would surely raise some eyebrows.
All in all, Friday the 13th Part 3 isn’t all that bad, or that good. It’s neutral, worth watching for a few hilarious kills and bad acting. It’s far better than the sluggish counterparts in other slasher franchises, and manages to maintain interest without being too silly. The end result is a standard slasher movie: it’s not bad enough to hate nor good enough to love.
I give it three and half stars.
Friday the 13th Part 3 is considered by many to be the red-headed stepchild of the franchise. Perhaps the 3-D gimmick turns people off; perhaps it’s the characters, who are generally uninteresting; perhaps there’s no reason at all. It’s not nearly as bad as Part 9, which has its defenders, nor as dishonest as Part 8. Yet it’s the most neglected and least discussed of the franchise: reviewers tend to summarize it briefly by going through the kills and major plot points.
It starts off immediately from where Part 2 left off. The opening scene features a couple who run a grocery store close to the camp, who live just long enough to get on your nerves before Jason kills them in no spectacular fashion. There are only two interesting things about this prologue: there’s brief news story on the murders from Part 2, just in case you didn’t see it, and there’s a fire extinguisher on the toilet. It’s more entertaining to ponder why someone would need a fire extinguisher on the ready by the shitter, rather than follow the boring stalking sequence with an all too predictable end.
The move then follows a group of kids heading to Crystal Lake in a large van. They can be easily summarized: there’s a couple, one of whom is pregnant; the protagonist, Chris; a couple of potheads; and the Master Prankster himself, Shelly, and Shelly’s “date”, Vera. Shelly has brought with him a trunk of prank apparatus that could double as a murder kit for any imaginative serial killer. When a police car flashes its lights behind them, they panic and – with the exceptions of Chris and Debbie, the pregnant woman – eat most of the weed, and maybe some mushrooms too, which will make them high as balls throughout the movie although the movie promptly forgets this.
It’s a good thing they ate the weed too, because Shelly has some definite probable-causey stuff in that trunk, which – given that there was recently a massacre and then a double a homicide – would be more than enough reason for a cop to arrest them all, even without the van reeking like weed.
Once they arrive at the cabin, Chris re-acquaints herself with an old flame named Rick. The motives for this trip are never explicitly stated, but from what I gather, it’s a therapeutic get away for Chris, who moved away because of some past trauma. This is getting to close to Antichrist for my comfort. Anyway, Shelly pulls a prank by pretending to be dead; he has a prosthetic that fixes a plastic knife over his head, which is certainly custom made because the hair perfectly matches his afro. This means that Shelly grew out his afro, then shaved it to make a prosthetic, then let it grow to the very same length so it would match, all in perfect calculation with the camping trip. Shelly might very well be a psychopath.
Shelly and Vera go grocery shopping, and ill-fated mission that will inadvertently cause the deaths of three more people. While checking out, Vera is bullied by a gang; the gang is hard to categorize, part biker, park punk, all 80s cheese. While leaving, Shelly backs into their motorcycles, which enrages the leader of the gang – Ali – who smashes the window of the car with 3-D fury. This drives Shelly over the edge, so he runs over the motorcycles again. This act gives him a little depth, but he doesn’t get laid because of it. No nerd will ever get laid in any of these movies.
The gang follow them back to the cabin, where they take revenge by siphoning the gas from the van. One of the gang members, Fox, gets distracted with the barn and is killed by Jason, with her fellow gangster Loco soon following. Ali looks for them and is beaten half to death. The lesson here folks, is not to fuck with people you know nothing about for the simple flex of being a public ass. True, they could not have calculated that Shelly and Vera were staying at a cabin randomly being stalked by Jason Voorhees, but had they simply left the poor dork alone, they could have lived to be in Michael Jackson video later.
After a few other random scenes that seem to exist simply for the 3-D gimmick, Chris and Rick hike off into the woods, where Chris elaborates on the trauma she experienced. Years ago she had a fight with her father, wandered off into the woods, and was attacked by a young Jason. This scene is bizarre, as it keeps fading back and forth between her narration and a flash-back, at entirely random moments, which I originally thought was the movie trying to decide whether Chris’s narration or the events themselves were less painful to film. But upon reflection, I realized that this scene is actually quite brilliant: the scene is actually shot form Rick’s perspective, and the arbitrary fade-ins and -outs are really expressing, after having his car wrecked because of Shelly’s antics – among other things – his deep ambiguity over whether he want to pick up with Chris or not. “And then something … came out of the woods.” (It’s not so bad. I mean, she is really hot and all.) “Blah blah blah, yada yada yada” (Ok I’m losing interest and she’s frigid it’s gonna cost two grand to get those windows fixed…).
The rest of the movie is a typical stalk-and-slash sequence, with Shelly pulling more pranks. One of which involves a SCUBA suit and a fully-functional harpoon; I know it’s fully functional because Jason uses it to kill Vera whereas Shelly merely flirted with the idea. (Vera’s rejection of Shelly, by the way, is so predictable you can time it perfectly right down to the second.) It’s a good thing Shelly dies, seeing as he could just as easily have been framed for the murders with his multiple masks and knives and harpoons and what not. One prop Jason appropriates as his own and became the trademark of his persona: the infamous hockey mask. So Jason owes his iconic design not to the mysterious menace a hockey mask connotes, but because Shelly thought it would be a funny gag.
The most brutal kill is reserved for Debbie’s boyfriend. After they make love in a hammock, which was the best sex they ever had and that I hope the baby can hear them talk about, he walks on his hands to get Debbie a beer. He hand-walks right into Jason, who cuts him in half in the most compromising position he could be in. Since he just literally had the best sex ever, I’m sure it was a sensitive blow. Debbie herself is killed in the magical sex hammock, which is a two-for-one for Jason that the pro-choice YouTube countdowns of murders tend to forget should be dinged twice: DOUBLE KILL.
The third act, it must be admitted, is quite long and boring. Chris tries to hide in the barn, where she faces-off with Jason and eventually kills him by hanging him and putting an axe through his dead: take your pick, the movie didn’t. She floats off in a canoe and has a fever dream similar to Alice’s, and then the movie ends with the obligatory crime-scene cleanup scene. Must be quite a thing to have two mass murders within 24 hours, on top of finding such weird murder weapons like harpoons lying around. And the toxicology reports from later would surely raise some eyebrows.
All in all, Friday the 13th Part 3 isn’t all that bad, or that good. It’s neutral, worth watching for a few hilarious kills and bad acting. It’s far better than the sluggish counterparts in other slasher franchises, and manages to maintain interest without being too silly. The end result is a standard slasher movie: it’s not bad enough to hate nor good enough to love.
I give it three and half stars.