Day 3 of the Friday the 13th series and we're logically on to the third film in the series. With the continued box office success of the first two films, the makers of Friday the 13th Part 3 decided to add in a new dimension to the film - 3-D films were making a comeback from the 1950s and it seemed only logical to have the third film in a series be in 3-D as well (see also Jaws 3-D and Amityville 3-D). Of course, trying to get hold of a proper 3-D copy of the film now, and have the glasses and equipment to watch it, is somewhat more difficult than the filmmakers might have planned, and so some of the 3-D effects look more comedic than terrifying now. But you can't fault them for trying.
Part 3 picks up straight after Part 2 ends, which means that the events of the film take place over a Saturday the 14th and a Sunday the 15th rather than the titular Friday the 13th this time. Jason Voorhees escapes capture and heads down to another part of Crystal Lake, Higgins Haven. There another group of teens are having a weekend getaway there, and they and a group of bikers who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time end up adding to Jason's bodycount.
There is one part of Part 3 that I've always found particularly awkward, and somewhat at odds with the rest of the film which seems almost comedic in places. The female lead, Chris, grew up in Higgins Haven but left two years previously after a traumatic event; this is the first time she's been back in those two years. The traumatic event turns out to be that Jason Voorhees (pre-Part 2) attacked her in the woods one night and... Well, the film doesn't outright say it but it's strongly implied that Jason raped her (and years later this was confirmed to have been in earlier drafts but ultimately scrapped as being just too much for the audience to take). Yeah. That's a dark turn that I don't think many people would have expected. A large draw of the slasher movie is that, as filled with blood and guts as they are, there's still a level of fun to them, and just dropping a brutal rape in there would have been a jarring tonal shift that I don't think the film would have survived. As it is the suggestion is still there and it's enough to make a person feel mildly uncomfortable, but at the same time at least you can just ignore it if you choose to.
Canonically, Part 3 is particularly important because it is the first film to feature what we all know now as the classic "Jason look" - dirty work shirt and pants and a hockey mask. Before Part 3 we'd had Burlap Sack Jason and, well, no Jason at all and so this is the film where the Jason Voorhees identity really starts to be cemented. On the other hand, it's also the first movie where the series' strange habit of falling back on toilet scenes first appears (and will sadly come back in a major way in Part 5) and is also a film stuffed chock-full of fake jump scares, to the point where the actual scares just aren't that scary when they occur. Some of these fake jump scares are due to the 3-D gimmick, so we get snakes on springs, pitchforks being thrust at the camera and even popcorm flying up at us. If you were to ask me, I'd say they severely overused the 3-D and should have kept it for just a few key moments, but I might just be bitter because I'm one of between 2 and 12 percent of people who are stereoblind, or unable to perceive 3-D in TV or movies. But disregarding the 3-D, there are still far too many false scares. "Something is blocking this door!" a character exclaims as they try to open a door that we saw 30 seconds earlier had at least one dead body on the other side of it. But when the door opens, it's just a chair and not a corpse in sight. It's a cheap trick and an annoyance.
Overall, at this point the Friday the 13th franchise was still going strong. Of course, at this point the plan was for it to be a trilogy, which explains Chris' dream ending with a waterlogged Mrs Voorhees emerging from the water, to bookend the first and third movies. But as we all know, things never go quite as planned in Hollywood...
Comments