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Friday The 13th Part 3
[Paramount]
1982; color
Directed by Steve Miner
Starring: Dana Kimmell, Paul Kratka, Richard Brooker, Nick Savage, Rachel Howard, David Katim, Larry Zerner, Tracie Savage & Jeffrey Rogers
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In traditional slasher sequel fashion (and maintaining the tradition started in the first sequel), Friday The 13th Part 3 opens with footage from Part 2. Unfortunately the footage that's shown is the dummy first ending in Jason's shack, completely ignoring the part where he bursts through the window of the cabin with a machete lodged in his shoulder. Instead we see footage of Jason lying on the floor, the machete falling to his side and him crawling out of the frame after Ginny and John escape. Before we go any further into the review I should probably mention that this installment was originally released in theaters in 3-D. The 3-D doesn't quite translate on the DVD version, but it still does provide for some amusing moments. Fast forwarding to the following evening, reports of the slayings of eight teens and the lone survivor, Ginny, are on the local news. (Which is a total continuity gap from the footage we've just seen; if she and John both ran from the shack how did she become the sole survivor?) The police warn this may be only the tip of the death count iceberg and, sure enough, the woman watching TV and her husband are soon to become the film's first victims. We're also treated to the first obvious instance of 3-D in this sequence; a snake jumping out at you. (As I said earlier, the 3-D does not work and, in this format at least makes it seem like the director was forced to find ways to write extra—and unnecessary— shots around the effect. I did like the way the usage of the effect is built up from innocuous and incidental to violent and grisly though. It's also a nifty little coincidence that there are as many 3-D bits as there are victims: 13. And for my final tidbit of parenthetical trivia, this is also the movie where Jason first dons the hockey mask that's become the trademark of the series.) Meanwhile, at some other unspecified location, a group of teens, possibly early 20-somethings, are getting together to spend the weekend at one girl's family's farm located at... you guessed it... Crystal Lake. I'm not quite sure how Jason was able to recover in less than 24 hours from the machete wound he got at the end of Part 2 but I guess it's something in the Voorhees genes. At any rate, once the kids get to the farm, the body count begins to rise in ever more gruesome fashion. From your basic machete-ing and impalement to the more creative head squeezing (which features the movie's best 3-D effect, a guy's eyeball popping out of his head in an oddly Tex Avery-like fashion); there's even the additional subplot of an interracial three person biker gang who also become victims of Jason's (newest) killing rampage. Oh and the girl who used to live on the farm, Chrissie, apparently had an encounter in the woods with Jason two years prior to all this—from which she woke up in a hospital bed with no memory of anything other than being chased through the woods. Obviously this sets her up to be the lone survivor and thus have a "final" showdown with Jason, which she of course does. Afterwards, even though the camera pans across an apparently dead Jason as the local cops sort out the bloody mess, Chrissie—who's now traumatized to the point of insanity—dreams she sees him standing in the window of the house. Or is this dream reality? Beats me. Either way, this is one of the strongest entries in the series.
—the Kommandant
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Cause Of
Jason's Re-Birth:
n/a
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Setting:
A farm abutting a portion of Crystal Lake.
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Body Count:
13
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Methods Of Death:
cleaver (1);
icepick to the head (1)
stabbing (3 - 2 with pitchfork, 1 misc.)
machete (3)
harpooning (1)
throat slitting (1)
electrocution (1)
impaling via red hot poker (1)
head squeezing (1)
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Cause Of
Jason's Death:
hatchet
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