Review: Friday the 13th: Part III

Director: Steve Miner

Screenplay: Martin Kitrosser and Carol Watson

Year: 1982

Another Friday the 13th that brings another review of the popular Friday the 13th franchise. This time it is the turn of “Friday the 13th: Part III”, one of the movies that fans of this series remember with nostalgia as it is the one in which Jason Vorhees acquires for the first time his iconic hockey mask that will turn into an icon of this series.

After surviving the wounds suffered, Jason Vorhees finds refuge in his cabin in the premises of Crystal Lake. A group of teenagers goes to a close-by area to enjoy a few days at the lake, but they soon discover that Jason is thirsty for vengeance. 

“Friday the 13th: Part III” starts with a reshowing of the ending of the previous movie, as what happened in “Friday the 13th: Part II”. Director Steve Miner, who also directed the previous sequel, decides to spend a good 6-7 minutes to revisit the ending of the previous movie before the awful credits do their best effort to jump out of the screen, reminding us that in the ‘80s the 3D technology was used unsuccessfully and in this movie, it is thrown at our face in multiple occasions without much relevance to the plot. This initial retelling is detrimental, as it accentuates some of the problems of the movie.

After the initial scene, an adult couple is introduced that serves to place the story from a temporal perspective, as the news that the woman is watching indicates that the events that took place on “Friday the 13th: Part II” happened only a day before the events on “Friday the 13th: Part III”. With this in mind and once Jason Vorhees physic is revealed, it is surprising to see that in one day he manages to gain about a foot (0.3 m) of height and about 50 pounds (23 kg) of weight, as well as losing all of his hair; continuity problems that are too evident and that show how little care was put into this movie.

Once Jason dispatches the couple for no apparent reason, the group of protagonists teenagers are introduced. As expected, they are all uninteresting and only respond to the stereotype that they represent and are nothing more than material to give way to the wave of killings in the hands of Jason and even the main protagonist checks all of the final girl tropes. The talent of the cast is an echo of the little care that was put into this movie and offers the worst acting I can remember of a movie of this level.

The truth is that nobody sees a Friday the 13th movie because of the acting but rather for their deaths, that in this movie starts to go over to the absurd area and has plenty of originality but not a good execution. The deaths compared to the last movie are more brutal and graphic, a tendency that continues through the following sequels and has become the main attractive point of this saga. However, the execution of the special effects in about half of them is shameful and brings back the topic of the little care put into it.

It is evident that the focus of “Friday the 13th: Part III” was to make the most out of the popularity that Jason Vorhees generated in the previous sequel and give him violent and graphic killings, as the story is nothing more than a mashup of what we have already seen in the two previous entries and even the ending is a repetition of “Friday the 13th”, showcasing the lack of originality in the story. The deaths, which are the real attraction of this movie are fun, although many suffered from poor execution of the visual effects. Besides the deaths and the moment in which Jason acquires his iconic mask, not much more can be saved from this movie.