Friday the 13th Part 3 (1982)

The ending of Friday the 13th Part 2 is somewhat ambiguous. After driving a machete into the shoulder of her assailant, the undead and pillow-cased Jason Voorhees, final girl Ginny Field escaped the woods of Crystal Lake with her final-boy boyfriend, Paul Holt, by her side. However, after returning to a cabin, a still-alive (and now unmasked) Jason suddenly came crashing through a window and grabbed a screaming Ginny, pulling her out. The following morning, an ambulance carried Ginny to safety on a stretcher, but Paul was nowhere in sight, leaving Ginny to call out his name in panic. Was he killed or already taken to a hospital? His fate is left uncertain. 

In continuing the story for a third go-around, two potential drafts were conceived and subsequently dropped: one sounds like it would have been a rip-off of Rick Rosenthal's Halloween 2, in which Ginny is confined to a psychiatric hospital, and Jason, having naturally recovered from his shoulder injury, tracks her down, slaughtering the staff and fellow patients along the way; the other also revolved around Ginny, who begins learning self-defense and returns to college to pursue her degree in child psychology, which she had used so expertly to disarm Jason in the previous climax. After discovering Paul's corpse inside her dormitory, confirming his fate in the most asinine manner imaginable, she and Ted Bowen, a fellow survivor who made the life-saving decision to stay behind at a bar, prepare to track Voorhees down and face him in a final confrontation. Due to her commitment to other projects, Amy Steel declined the opportunity to reprise her role, resulting in drastic script changes. 

While Steve Miner would return from the first sequel to direct this second one, Part 2 screenwriter Ron Kurz would be replaced by the husband-and-wife duo of Martin Kitrosser, who served as a script supervisor on the previous two installments, and Carol Watson. At the suggestion of Martin Jay Sadoff, who had a working relationship with producer Frank Mancuso Jr., Friday the 13th Part 3 was filmed in 3-D. The result is a fun, undemanding, comfortingly familiar teen slasher that accomplishes a few major achievements: solidifying Jason Voorhees' now-iconic wardrobe, particularly swapping out the pillow case that had disguised his facial deformities in his official debut for a Detroit Red Wings hockey mask, and surpassing its immediate predecessor, without even trying to recapture the atmosphere of suspense or genuine fright of Victor Miller and Sean Cunningham's inaugural 1980 campfire classic.

After regaining consciousness in his makeshift cabin, Jason Voorhees (Richard Brooker, filling in the shoes of previous actor Steve Daskewisz) leaves his pillowcase behind and makes his way to a mom-and-pop grocery store run by married couple Harold and Edna Hockett (Steve Susskind and Cheri Maugans), where he scavenges a set of cleaner, unassuming clothes before murdering the couple in their home. Later in the summer afternoon, a van full of dope-smoking, sexually famished teenagers led by Chris Higgins (Dana Kimmell) drives to Higgins Haven, Chris' homestead which she's avoided for the last two years after being attacked by an unidentified, deformed man in the woods. It's no spoiler to reveal that that man was none other than an unmasked Jason, who has decided to seek refuge in the barn on his surviving victim's property, stalking his fresh batch of unsuspecting prey from the privacy of the nighttime shadows and waiting patiently for them to wander off alone, so they may meet the bloody end of a machete or pitchfork.

Aside from supplying its antagonist with the costume that has made him a Halloween commodity, the plot of Friday the 13th Part 3 offers two wrinkles that distinguish it from its predecessors: firstly, it's the first Friday the 13th to take place on Saturday the 14th (which would've made a more distinctive title than Friday the 13th Part 3), picking up the morning after the events of the second installment, and the first to feature Crystal Lake campers as opposed to would-be counselors. Beyond those basic differences, this third installment adheres openly and proudly to the formula established by the first two: a group of teenagers assemble near Camp Crystal Lake, smoke dope, drink, engage in premarital sex, wander off alone in response to mysterious noises, get picked off one by one at the tip of a machete or pitchfork, leaving the final girl to face off one on one against Jason, whom she succeeds only in temporarily incapacitating. 

Miner and his writers are clearly passionate fans of the original, although they occasionally express their love through thievery of an impalement from under a bed and a jump-scare nightmare in which the decomposing corpse of Pamela Voorhees emerges from the lake and pulls Chris out of a canoe in music-accompanied slow motion. The story takes a little long to get going, a hindrance suffered by its predecessor as well. In the opening of Part 2, Miner sought to recap the ending of the original by parceling out tidbits of archival footage, passing them off as fragments of a nightmare experienced by a traumatized Alice Hardy. This time, he dispenses with any such pretense of psychological exploration and simply replays the entire climax of Part 2, beginning with Ginny stumbling across Jason's shack and ending with her and Paul escaping. 

When casting for the third heroine of the Friday the 13th franchise, Miner clearly favored looks over dramatic acting talent, evidenced by Dana Kimmell's sporadic struggle to convincingly portray horrified realization and trauma-fueled mania. However, in a welcome departure from the drama-free final girls portrayed by Adrienne King and Amy Steel, Chris Higgins is at least provided with a traumatic history with Jason, initially hinted at in brief conversations between Chris and her best friend, Debbie (Tracie Savage), then fully fleshed out in a confessional flashback. Smartly, writers Kitrosser and Watson utilize this traumatic event as a psychological impetus to bring Chris and her friends to Camp Crystal Lake. She isn't escorting them to their doom merely for the sake of having a fun summer weekend; she has her own personal desires as well, seeking to overcome her trauma and prove to herself that she's stronger than she thinks, and rekindle her relationship with her boyfriend, Rick (Paul Kratka), from whom she's been estranged for the last two years. 

Once Chris finds herself pursued by the man responsible for her trauma in the first place, she ably accomplishes her first goal, proving to be more resourceful and ferocious than even Jason could have anticipated. She locks herself in a closet, pulls a knife out of the back of her deceased best friend, and stabs it into the hand of Jason as he reaches for the inner knob. Not content to sit in place and hope Jason runs away, Chris comes to him, emerging from the closet and brandishing the knife in his face before jamming it into his knee. This woman may be more of a badass than either Alice or Ginny combined. After her van runs out of gas on a bridge, Jason reaches an arm inside the open driver-side window and clutches her throat, so Chris ingeniously rolls up her window, simultaneously freeing herself and pinning Jason by both arms to the outside of her van. Hiding inside her barn, Chris wraps her limbs around a rafter before allowing herself to fall onto Jason. She whacks the back of his head with a shovel, and while he lies unconscious, ties a noose around his neck and pushes him off the upper floor to his supposed hanging. After Jason allows himself to get distracted with a previous victim assumed to have died, Chris uses the opportunity to slam an axe into the right side of his forehead.

Aside from Chris, the characters fulfill the roles of stereotypical slasher-movie fodder, albeit bestowed with glimmers of personality and likability. Rick is the patient, understanding, masculine boyfriend, strong enough to pull haystacks into the hayloft (with Chris secretly wrapped around the bottom of the rope) while shirtless. Andy (Jeffrey Rogers) and Debbie are the oversexed, hot couple who refuse to let Debbie's pregnancy interfere with their hot and heavy sex life. Speaking of which, you'd expect a character's pregnancy to significantly increase the emotional stakes of the story, but as presented, it carries neither emotional nor physical weight. It's relayed in exactly two lines of offhanded exposition by Debbie, once to justify her repeated stops to a bathroom, then as an excuse not to ingest weed. Physically, Debbie remains conveniently flawless and stunning, sporting nary the slightest beginning of a baby bump. Furthermore, at no point do she and Andy even have a discussion about their forthcoming baby regarding their name or gender, nor do they express their own excitement or anxieties about approaching the turbulent waters of unwed, teenage parenthood. As a result, Jason's simultaneous homicide of Debbie and her unborn child lacks the added layer of tragedy that should be felt. The writers might as well have scrapped the pregnancy element altogether because it serves no narrative or emotional purpose. 

On the plus side, Tracie Savage enriches Debbie with a dry, sarcastic sense of humor. When Andy questions how they're supposed to have sex, meaning in a hammock, Debbie matter-of-factly retorts, "Well, first we take our clothes off, and then you get on top of me, or I could get on top of you." Andy possesses a trifecta of talents: juggling fruit, handstanding, and yo-yoing. Shelly (Larry Zerner) is the obligatory single Pringle of the group, an overweight, insecure wannabe actor and legitimately talented makeup artist whose last name, of course, happens to be Finkelstein. Equipped with the complementary Jew fro, Shelly hides his shame behind a psycho-killer mask and continually plays horror pranks on his increasingly irritated friends in a desperate ploy for attention. He feels like an amplified version of the far less pathetic and obnoxious Ned Rubenstein from Part 1, however his low self-esteem ("Being a jerk is better than being a nothing.") and self-awareness (when asked why he isn't at the lake with everyone else, he pitifully replies, "They said they were going skinny-dipping, and I'm not skinny enough.") garner a degree of sympathy. Plus, when pushed too far by the leader of a motorcycle gang, Shelly flashes an unexpected backbone, turning his car around and speeding toward his intimidator to scare him into backing away from his motorcycle, which he proceeds to run over. Ultimately, he commits the same mistake three times too often to sustain the goodwill he generates beforehand. 

Chuck and Chili (David Katims and Rachel Howard) are a fun couple of hippie burnouts whose favorite activity is smoking pot together. Chili is more of the "man" in the relationship, courageous and mischievous enough to pick up an axe and sneak into a barn in an attempt to give Shelly a taste of his own medicine, while Chuck is the jumpy and timid one who suggests they leave. Endearingly, it's Chili who assures Chuck that she wouldn't let anything happen to him. The trio of antagonistic motorcyclists -- leader Ali (Nick Savage), his girlfriend, Fox (Gloria Charles), and second-in-command, Loco (Kevin O'Brien) -- are plot devices whose central purpose is to prevent Chris from simply driving away from Crystal Lake via siphoning gas from her van in an act of petty, self-righteous revenge. In terms of distinguishing features, Loco has one cigarette dangling between his lips and a spare on hand behind his ear. To show how "edgy" and "dangerous" he is, he has a skull design on the front of his black muscle shirt and back of his jean jacket. 

As the opening victims, Edna is the crotchety, lonesome bitch of a wife who unattractively wears curlers in her hair, knits in front of the TV, refers to one of her own rabbits as a "filthy animal," nags her husband about overeating or knocking down a clothesline pole, and mutters criticisms to herself about how Harold does his own laundry then leaves the rest for her. By contrast, Harold is the kindhearted but milquetoast and moderately overweight husband who loves animals, stuffs his face behind Edna's back, and shrugs pathetically when caught rather than speaking up for himself. (In those last four ways, he reminds me of my father, right down to the thick, black hair, Italian-looking mustache, and indented chin.)

The characters have a stilted habit of saying aloud what's on their minds and calling out into the air to their friends after they've already been axed from the story. While alone, Chris and Debbie both ask to themselves, "Where's this coming from?" While walking up her spiral staircase, Chris finds water from the running shower flooding the upstairs and says, "Hey, come on, you guys. You're wrecking the house." Searching her now-empty homestead, she asserts, "I don't know what kind of game you guys are playing, but I don't like it." After being rejected by his blind date, a sulking Shelly decides that, rather than take some time to himself to decompress, it'd be more fun to check in on Chuck and Chili inside the barn. "Chuck? Chili? Hey. What are you guys doing in there?" he asks. What does he think a couple would be doing if alone in a barn? "Are you guys doing something I shouldn't see?" Why? Does he want to watch them doing something he shouldn't see? Or be invited for a three-way? 

Steve Miner's pacing is taut. As in the previous installments, Friday the 13th Part 3 transpires over the course of one day, and under Miner's direction, it doesn't feel as though it stretches beyond that. He quickly transitions from the morning his characters arrive at Higgins Haven to the night they either check out permanently or make their escape without lingering too long on their hangout activities. However, Miner relies a tad too much on false scares via harmless characters sneaking up on their friends for no logical internal reason other than to elicit a cheap jump from the viewer -- Edna grabs Harold's shoulder to stop him from gorging further on a chocolate donut, Shelly grabs Chris' wrist from inside her van when she grabs his suitcase, Rick playfully ambushes Chris from behind and begins kissing her in a borderline creepy surprise attack, Andy sneaks up on Debbie outside a shower curtain in an admittedly playful homage to Psycho, Shelly grabs Vera's (Catherine Parks) ankle from underwater while she sits on a dock and emerges in a hockey mask, wielding a trident. 

As the first actor to portray Jason in his visually complete, hockey-masked glory, Richard Brooker bestows his vengeful teen slasher with humanizing characteristics and vulnerability. When a bookshelf is emptied onto him from above, or a knife is jammed into his knee, he falls down and grunts in pain. Unlike Michael Myers, this pre-zombie Jason doesn't lumber steadily toward his victims, he sprints, albeit with a limp that demonstrates susceptibility to bodily injuries. Like his ultimate target, Jason is resourceful enough to smash his own head through the driver-side window of Chris' van to free himself, and exhibits a streak of sadism in the way he toys with Chris, lifting up his mask to show his deformed face, smiling at her petrified astonishment that he's the same man who nearly killed her two years prior.

Prior to the money shot in which Jason emerges from the barn in his freshly stolen hockey mask, cinematographer Gerald Feil conceals his grotesquely disfigured visage in a combination of wide shots, shadows, and backside angles. For the majority of the movie prior to Vera's arrow-in-the-eye kill, Feil films Jason in silhouette, slinking between suspended bed sheets, so we catch a glimpse, or from behind as he stalks his prey through a window or inside the barn. When he jumps down from the hayloft, Feil captures him only from his legs. Knee-level shots show him walking up the spiral staircase. His presence is once implied through a wide shot of the barn doors opening and closing imperceptibly, making Chris question whether what she's seeing is real or a figment of her paranoid, traumatized imagination. 

When Fox enters the barn, Jason emerges from behind a closet door in the background, his face blocked by a rafter. Her corpse, pitchforked through the throat to a rafter, is presented in the background on the right side of the frame, while Loco enters the foreground on the left. To keep Jason's face out of the frame, Feil instead pins his camera on a close-up of his pitchfork as he thrusts it into Loco's stomach, with editor George Hively cutting to a gruesome glimpse of the tines protruding from his back. As Chris stands outside on her porch on the left side of the frame, calling out to Rick, Feil pans the camera to the right to reveal a shadowed Jason gripping him from behind. 

Being the first and currently sole Friday the 13th filmed in 3-D, Miner neglects to take maximum advantage of the technology, assaulting his audience's vision with visuals that are mostly innocuous: a snake jumping out from its cage at Harold, a yo-yo repeatedly falling into Debbie's face, a joint extended to Andy. Fittingly, the most eye-popping 3-D visual is a close-up of Rick's eyeball literally popping out of its socket and freezing in the air after Jason crushes his skull between his hands. It's laughably fake-looking -- Rick's body has visibly been replaced at the last second by a life-sized dummy whose head is constructed from foam latex and plaster, and his exploding eyeball is a rubbery prosthetic attached to a wire -- yet memorable nonetheless, embracing the unintellectual, gore-natured fun of a dead teenager romp. 

Miner forewarns his fascination with the inherent grossness and vulnerability of the human eye early in the proceedings with a portentous scene in which the characters, en route to Higgins Haven, nearly run over a bearded, senile vagrant. After they help the man to his feet, he holds a severed, squishy eye to the camera and ominously proclaims, "He wanted me to warn you. Look upon this omen and go back from whence ye came. I have warned thee. I have warned thee." After debuting his trademark hockey mask, Jason aims a spear gun at Vera, who assumes it's Shelly behind the mask, and fires an arrow straight into her eye, a makeup effect Miner doesn't spare us the detail of. It's brief, brisk, gruesome, and viscerally shocking.

The simplicity and relative presentability of Jason's getup contrast sharply with the grotesquerie of his makeup lurking beneath. Shielding his hideously deformed face is a vanilla white hockey mask with bright red chevrons on either cheek and between the eyeholes. Brooker wears a collared button-down, olive green shirt and light blue jeans. Miner withholds a close-up of Jason's face until the final reel, showing only a bald head behind the mask. The makeup artists remain faithful to the look originally designed by Tom Savini for Ari Lehman as 11-year-old Jason, gifting Brooker with jagged teeth, an enlarged skull full of bumps, a cleft lip, and a sagging left eye. Blood covers the right side of his face, having leaked from the axe wound. For Chris' next-morning nightmare sequence, the corpse of Pamela Voorhees features worms drooping through the pores of her decomposing face.

When Chris divulges the reason for her two-year hiatus from home, editor George Hively dissolves from her face to a flashback depicting the night she was attacked by Jason in the woods without erasing her face entirely from the frame, visually blending the attack with Chris' distress at reliving the memory in full for the first time. In the creepiest off-screen kill, Hively cuts from Fox joyously swinging from a hay pulley rope at the top of the barn to Loco ordering her to get down to the rope swinging by itself in the blink of an eye. As Ali lies unconscious on the floor, his head blocked by a barn door, Jason slams his machete down repeatedly beside his left arm to simulate hacking, a visual subtlety that exacerbates the later shock of that same machete tearing through the chest of a pregnant woman in bed. 

For the opening and closing credits, Harry Manfredini and Michael Zager compose a disco synthesizer earworm that's energetic and distinctive, but not the least bit scary. A screechy string score accompanies the chase scenes to imbue them with added urgency and augments the suspense as Chris searches for her friends throughout the house or hides in the barn, dangling over Jason from a rafter. The music is exciting and propulsive. 

The final two static shots -- first, a seemingly deceased Jason lying motionless in the barn with an axe protruding from his skull, followed by the placid lake -- indicate that the nightmare is finally over, the curse of Crystal Lake broken. Keep dreaming.

6.5/10