Review #392: Friday the 13th: Part III (1982)
October 2026 Horror Reviews #20 - Friday the 13th: Part III (1982)
Friday the 13th: Part III is the THREE-DIMENSIONAL third entry in the franchise revolving around Crystal Lake and the Voorhees family. It picks up (ostensibly) immediately after Part 2, but gives no resolution to any of those characters (apart from just slapping six full minutes of the previous movie into the beginning of this one). This one follows an entirely new group of teens going out to the Crystal Lake area, centering mostly around a woman named Chris, whose family owns a farm by the lake. But Chris hasn't been back in a long time, after she was "attacked" (she was clearly sexually assaulted, but the movie skirts around saying it directly) by a physically deformed stranger. Well, it turns out that stranger is named Jason Voorhees, and he's back to kill everyone he comes across, as is his wont.
I've heard a lot of people say this is their favorite Friday film, and frankly I just don't see it. I have my own favorite which is still to come, but even just comparing this one to the previous film it feels incredibly lacking. The characters are almost all made of cardboard, and the dialogue is simply atrocious, with most scenes involving the characters blurting out expository dialogue without prompting and then never referring back to it later. (For example, one character ham-handedly mentions being pregnant, more or less out of nowhere, and then this never comes into play, is never relevant to the plot, and nobody ever mentions it again.) Chris' romantic counterpart in this movie spends almost his entire screentime complaining about how horny he is and overtly telling Chris she should just give in and have sex with him, despite Chris obviously having some kind of trauma that she's working through. (Now, granted, it becomes clear he doesn't know about her assault. But still, he spends every scene being told that she doesn't want to have sex with him right now, and his response is always some variation of, "Come on, you would feel better if we just went and had sex anyway.")
Speaking of which, I mentioned last review that the writers were still figuring out what they were doing with Jason, and how unrecognizable he was from what he would eventually become. This one is the same- they've gotten the look of Jason nailed down (casting a huge, muscular man in the role instead of just an average dude, as well as giving him the signature hockey mask in this entry), but it's very, very clear that the backstory of this film involves Jason raping Chris. (It's never said or shown directly, but in the one or two instances of nuance within this script, on multiple occasions Chris gets reminded of her assault when the other characters are talking about how much sex they want to have.) The fanbase has gotten very weird about this detail- I have personally argued with many a person over the years who insists Jason didn't rape Chris, but the only reasons they can give are "Jason wouldn't do that". It seems people are fine with their favorite villain being a murderer, but a rapist? Eww, that's crossing a line. I definitely acknowledge that the rest of the series paints Jason as more of a mindless drone motivated only by murder and sexual desires seem completely absent from his characterization, but I think the biggest factor is that Jason spends the majority of the series as a walking zombie, and not because he was written to be asexual or to have any particular moral lines he wouldn't cross. Again, he's a mass-murderer, morality clearly is not a part of the equation.
There's a few interesting parts of this movie, where the dialogue seems to be gearing up for a serious, hard-hitting exploration of the characters' views and goals (like the ongoing subplot of Shelly being upset that nobody likes him, including the girl his friends were trying to set him up with), but every time it ends up falling flat because nearly all of the characters are written as one-sided assholes. (Shelly has a heartfelt moment where he complains to Vera about why he would rather be thought of as a jerk than as a nothing, but when she politely but firmly tells him she isn't interested in having sex with him, he calls her a bitch. If I was supposed to empathize with this guy, it went right out the window.)
The action is good, the setting is good, but the characters really kill it for me (no pun intended). Nobody seems like they're having a good time in this one, which is a huge change from the previous two where everyone was having a blast right up until the kills started.
But I'm pretty sure that will be different next time, so stay tuned!
Overall Rating: 5/10 Objects Thrown at the Camera
Horror Easter Egg: In one scene, a character (Debbie) picks up and starts flipping through an issue of Fangoria, the horror-enthusiast magazine. On-screen we see her flip past an article about Tom Savini, who did the special effects for the first Friday the 13th movie!
Next Up: Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)!
Comments
Post a Comment