Director: Steve Miner
Written by: Martin Kitrosser & Carol Watson
Starring: Dana Kimmell, Paul Kratka, Nick Savage, Rachel Howard, David Katims, Larry Zerner
Music by: Harry Manfredini
Taglines: “A New Dimension In Terror…”
“Camp Crystal Lake’s bloody legacy!”
“A new dimension in terror… there’s nowhere to hide. We dare you to try.”
STORY
After the fight with Ginny that closed Part 2, Jason is not actually dead and manages to slip away unnoticed from the crime scene. After killing a middle-aged couple who live near the camp, he makes his way to a nearby farm to continue his vengeful killing spree. A group of teenagers, among others, have the misfortune of staying there that night to become his latest victims.
OPINION
So, here we are with the first movie I’m reviewing from the 3D revival cycle of the early 1980s. 3D first came about in the 1950s, with a number of horror and B-movies adding to their thrills by having things launch directly at the audience. The most notable of these was House of Wax, starring Vincent Price and directed by Andre De Toth – this is interesting as De Toth only had one eye, meaning that he could never experience the effects he way creating!
Eventually, that fizzled out as colour movies became more popular (the primitive 3D technique using red/blue glasses worked best on black and white films) and the gimmick wore thin. A slightly improved technique was first used in a low budget movie (a Western, of all things) entitled “Comin’ At Ya!“. This was successful enough for Roger Corman to use the technique for productions such as Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone and Parasite, and soon the studios followed suit. In fact, in 1983 it seemed that any movie with a 3 in the title was contractually obliged to be in 3D (e.g. our current subject, The Amityville 3 and Jaws 3).
This trend soon fizzled out, and after a silly attempt to revive it for the climax of Freddy’s Dead – The Final Nightmare, it’s recently re-emerged again. Now, I’m personally unconvinced by the longevity of the current wave of 3D movies and I don’t think that it’s the industry’s saviour from the spectre of piracy that it’s mean to counteract, especially as the movies are either 2D or use inferior effects on DVD. However, the polarised glasses do work really well in cinemas, and it’s nice to see My Bloody Valentine 3D and Final Destination 4 use the technique in amongst the kiddy animations and Avatar.
Friday The 13th Part 3 also marks two other important landmarks – it’s the movie where Jason finally gets his now-infamous hockey mask, and it’s the point where the series really starts to suck. OK, some people really enjoy this entry, but I find myself going from moderately interested to outright bored during this one, and the movie suffers from a serious amount of pointless padding. This might be because director Steve Miner was limited by the 3D camera (his direction certainly seems less confident this time out, and he left the series afterwards), or it might be a simple lack of ideas in what was becoming a silly series of movies. Either way, it’s a long slog to the climax.
We start, as with Friday the 13th Part 2, with a lengthy recap of the climax to the previous movie. While it’s nice to be reminded of Ginny’s clever thinking that wins the day over brute force, this goes on for far too long. It’s at least 6 minutes (some prints are reported as long as 12 minutes for this sequence!). OK, I do accept that audiences in the early 80s were much more limited – the VCR hadn’t proliferated as much as it would later do, so it’s possible that some audience members hadn’t seen the previous movie since opening night – but it’s a long haul that has relatively little to do with the following movie other than reminding us how Jason was defeated.
After this, we go into the main action, right? No, first we have to suffer through the credit sequence, or Disco! The 13th! For whatever reason, several years after the infamous downfall of disco in the US, Harry Manfredini has remixed his theme into a disco track. Not only is it a very strange and silly way to open a horror movie, it’s jarring after the serious opening, and isn’t a particularly good piece of music anyway. However, accompanying this is a title sequence that gives us a taste of what’s to come – the credit fly in and out of the screen toward the audience. Even if you’re watching a 2D print, this promises a movie with lots of things pointing toward the camera.
So, now we start the actual story, right? Again, no. For whatever reason, we now get a 10 minute sequence involving some totally superfluous characters who serve no real purpose other than to clue us into the fact that Jason is now at large (indicted by various news reports in the background) and no longer particularly fussy about who dies. It also shows us that everything is going to be pointed at the screen (washing on a line, for example). It’s not a bad sequence in truth, but it serves no real purpose except helping the movie pass a 90 minute running time.
OK, so 16 minutes into the movie and we finally meet our main cast. It’s a typical bunch, and to be honest the first time that the series really presented its cast as disposable meat rather than actual characters. In the previous two movies, although I don’t think they’re as good as other examples of the slasher film, the script at least made some effort to make the teenagers feel like people rather than cyphers lining up for the slaughter. Here, not only do we get annoying stereotypes, we get both characters who are clearly on the screen in order to be slaughtered, and characters we really want to see dead. So, we have the stoner couple, the practical joker, the tough Latino girl, etc.
On top of that, we also have the movies least-advised character, a girl who had a previous encounter with Jason. Now, this is bad for a couple of reasons. First, it highlights the incredible number of continuity errors that plague this movie – during a flashback sequence to what’s presumably months or years ago, both her and Jason look exactly the same (even though Jason had hair and a bag on his head last time out, he’s bald and wearing the same outfit as the rest of the movie, while she’s even wearing the same clothes). What’s more, her encounter with Jason didn’t end with a Ginny-style manoeuvre to outsmart Jason and escape his clutches – he just ignores her for no apparent reason after she’s been knocked to the floor.
So, we follow these non-entities as the comic relief jerk fakes his death to try and impress the girl he fancies for some reason (guess how this turns out?), while the stoners get stoned and the others talk and bicker. At one point a couple of the girls go to a local store, only to be confronted with a multiracial biker gang who decide to gatecrash their farm (and, of course, meet Jason instead). The body count is relatively high, but it’s hard to empathise with these characters, as the writers clearly don’t care about anything but the murder sequences.
With those, the movie is partially redeemed. There’s two sequences in particular that are fondly remembered in this movie. First, the hockey mask sequence, where Jason gets his mask and then harpoons an unfortunately bystander. The 3D is cute here, and it’s a pretty cool scene. The other memorable scene is where Jason squeezes a guy’s head until his eyeball pops out straight at the camera. It looks a bit silly but for an effective jump gore shot, it works.
…and that’s it really. The climax is rather dry – not bad, but it repeats a number of things from previous movies while leaving Jason unconscious. Yeah, he’s supposedly dead with an axe through the head, but by this time, we’re all expecting Jason to return. So, this is an OK entry in the series, nothing special but not a complete waste of time if you don’t have anything better to do. The biggest problem is the lack of originality (down to an attempt to recreate the original’s shock ending, itself ripped off from Carrie), and the by-the-numbers approach to what should have been a superior series to the many imitators being produced at the time.
As for the 3D, it’s kind of fun, though a lot of the effects are extremely cheesy, leading to lots of silly shots going on far longer than they should (such as a few death scenes and early sequences involving a joint being passed around and various other things being waved at the camera). Being the old blue/red technique, it’s not totally convincing and can cause some people headaches, but it’s worth a look if you can see it that way.
CENSORSHIP
While this movie didn’t suffer quite as much as part 2, most of the gorier deaths were trimmed to some degree by the MPAA for an R rating. As far as I know, all prints of this movie currently available are this R rated version, although additional cuts made to the UK VHS print were waived when it was re-released on DVD.
Having said that, the BBFC site curiously lists 3 home versions, all through Paramount: the original VHS release (cut, rated 18 at 91m 3s), the DVD release (18, uncut (probably the R rated version), 95m 7s) & a new release (rated 15, 91m 17s). The discrepancy between the first 2 running times could be explained by the BBFC having reviewed an NTSC copy instead of PAL for some reason, but as far as I can tell no 15 rated release is currently available to buy despite that rating having been granted in 2008.
TRAILER
Rating: 
