Harefooted Halloween: Friday the 13th Part III

What I Liked: That devil disco banger that plays during the opening and closing credits doesn’t fit with the movie at all but I still like it.

It took three goddamn films but we finally get Jason in the hockey mask and it’s a major improvement over the sack from the previous installment.  He looks and feels right now not only in his appearance but in his movements.  He acts with a drive that was missing last time.

The deaths have more of an impact in this one.  The cutting isn’t as quick as in Part 2 and some victims meet a particularly nasty end like getting sliced up through the crotch area and one guy gets a meat cleaver bluntly stuck in his chest.

There are a few creepy images that the movie leaves you with like Jason being hanged and of course the classic moment when he gets an ax laid in his head but still stumbles forward hands outreached desperately trying to grab for his target.

What I Didn’t Like: One of the biggest problems is there isn’t a plot.  A group of friends go to a cabin in the woods near Crystal Lake and get picked off one by one.  That’s it.  They attempt to establish a backstory between the protagonist (Dana Kimmell (Lone Wolf McQuade)) and Jason where he attacked her outside her home however long ago but it goes nowhere.  Originally he was supposed to rape her but thankfully they cut that shit out.  I have no idea what this encounter adds to the story or to the relationship between the characters.

A bunch of the acting is kinda bad.  Some of the actors have stiff deliveries and others put on melodramatic performances.  Richard Brooker (Deathstalker) who plays Jason does the best job.

You need to know going into this sequel that it was shot and meant to be seen in 3D because they push that angle hard throughout.  All the crap flying or being poked at the camera is incredibly unnatural and distracting.  That shit doesn’t hold up in the slightest.  And once you learn that shooting in 3D was the prime directive handed down by Paramount all the energy put into the stupid sight gags begins to make sense.  In fact it was such a grueling task for the cast and crew requiring dozens of takes to get any one gag right that the filmmakers basically gave it their sole focus and all other areas of the production were neglected to some extent.  Hence my comments above.

Overall Impressions: Ninety percent of this film is people investigating something they saw or heard.  It’s so much of people just wandering around various spaces with a curious look on their face.  The script must’ve been like five pages long.

Not only that but the entire cast is simply cannon fodder.  A bunch of characters are introduced only to be killed off minutes later.  And the ones that stick around for the majority of the run time are your usual annoying teens that are either sex crazed, stoned or playing pranks to misdirect the audience.

Another thing I don’t understand is Jason’s motivation.  Are these people invading his space?  That’s not made clear.  Does he wander around and kill anyone in the general Crystal Lake area?  Why?  We need something, anything to latch onto guys.  At least in the Halloweens Michael Myers was terrorizing his blood relatives so there was that connection.  Well, until that weird ass cult used him for assassinations and spawning a devil baby or whatever dumb fuckin’ bullshit they were up to.

While this is technically a worse picture than Part 2 (and kind of a clusterfuck in my opinion) I would rather watch this one because it definitely has some memorable moments.  Plus we get the final evolution of Jason making this another important film.  Without it we wouldn’t have this legendary icon of horror.