Horror Movie Review: Friday the 13th – Part 3 (1982)

Wait…it’s a 3D movie? Excitement levels have reached new highs! Ok, I couldn’t actually watch it in 3D but I was at least guaranteed fun moments of trying to spot the sections that are supposed to be in 3D.

Starting straight after the events of the 2nd movie (with another lengthy recap as well) Jason, injured makes his way to a local store where he dispatches an elderly couple with a cleaver to the chest & knitting needle to the head. Any chance of a more urgent story quickly disappears as the story flips to the latest group of teens arriving at a farm house in the Camp Crystal Lake area.

Guess where Jason went to recuperate after the events of the 2nd movie? Yep, the exact same place…the barn to be more specific.

Happily though the group of, soon to be Jason victims, have more personalities then series viewers are used too. Some of the group are more likable & you can actually tell them apart for once. Special mention has to be made for Shelly, a tubby average looking dude who thinks he has no chance with any girl ever but loves playing pranks. Sure, it’s obviously going down ‘the boy who cried wolf’ side of things but his declaration that he was only playing after shitting everyone up never gets old.

Early on we get to see a few scenes where the 3D should be; a spliff being pointed in the viewer’s direction, an extended yo-yo scene…its laughable stuff but must have looked amazing in 1982!

So Shelly & one of the girls (Vera) go off to the local store & run afoul of a local biker gang. Oh, this gang is just amazingly bad…cheesy lines, zero real threat & after having their bikes run over by an escaping Shelly & Vera their revenge involves burning down the barn. Yep, the barn where Jason is…

So the gang are killed & night comes which means one thing…its Jason rampage time!

One of the most significant moments in the entire series occurs in this movie. Jason finally gets his famous hockey mask after stealing it from Shelly. We are then treated to one of the dumbest moments in all of horror as Vera confuses the hulking beast that is Jason in the hockey mask for Shelly. I mean she had to be half-blind to not notice the clear difference but at least she gets one of the many 3D deaths with a harpoon bolt through the eye.

Imaginative deaths, plenty of gore & fun use of the 3D makes for a more enjoyable final third compared to the first 2 movies. Jason turns it up a gear & a large cast is dispatched in record time leaving our usual final heroine (Chris) to run, scream & escape his clutches on numerous occasions.

Thankfully these movies are getting used to the idea of people fighting back & it is refreshing to see someone actually come up with a plan to take him down! Sadly Chris is the least interesting of the trio of heroines we’ve had across the movies so far. An attempt to give her a bit of a back-story with Jason falls a bit flat & it mostly forgotten by time he is stomping after her.

It’s interesting to know that this version of Jason would become the standard bearer for all the Jason’s that will follow afterwards. I’m pretty glad about this as he should be a larger than life beast with inhuman strength, something that really comes across well here.

Once again though the creators felt they had to redo the first movies ending. Chris having bested Jason gets into a boat & floats out into the lake. She awakes in the morning & sees Jason sitting up in the barn but it turns out to be a hallucination. Relax…or not as the decomposing body of Pamela Voorhees comes out of the water to drag her down.

It’s just another dream though, something that is cleared up instantly as we see Chris being wheeled out of the farm clearly having lost her mind. These fake-out, jump scare endings have been overdone by this point & all it will elect is a deep sigh.

I can only hope that this is the last time it’s attempted because Friday the 13th: Part 3 is a pretty fun flick for the most parts. The ground it rethreads (and there is a lot of that) is handled better & the characters are much more interesting.

3 down, 7 to go…something needs to change though because this same story is getting old quickly. It’s nice to see the last of Jason’s iconic items (the mask) turn up even if it does result in one of the most laughable scenes so far.