FRIDAY THE 13th PART 3
By all means, go back in time to 1982  when you could have seen this in 3-D.  Be my guest.  Got room for one more?

Even with the soft spot I have for this one (the first I saw in the series), I have to admit it ranks low on the list. Its marginal point of interest - that it was theatrically released in 3-D around the time all those part 3's were in 3-D (Jaws, Amityville) - is lost entirely on video, and serve only to attract attention to what we're missing ("Aw man, that might've been cool in 3-D!"). 

A news broadcast we see on TV at the beginning of this one suggests that it takes place, apparently, the day after Part 2 (guess it's not Friday anymore). A houseload of partying young teens go off to Crystal Lake for a weekend of the kind of debauchery that I never got a piece of when I was that age (grumble grumble). Jason shows up, and they find much less to party about. 

This is the one where Jason gets his famous hockey mask - taken, unsurprisingly, from a fat prankster guy, who unsurprisingly is not believed when he dies. The gore here is better than in Part 2, but it's mostly for one scene, where this one unlucky bastard is cloven in twain. You can actually see the results of this on the back of the box! There was potential for a really awesome death when a pregnant chick is impaled by a hot poker, but they didn't go far enough (the fetus should have been twisting and twitching on the end of the poker when it came out the other side). 

Goofiest death: the infamously ridiculous "Jason squeezes a guy's head until his eye shoots out" scene. 

The conclusion is pretty much a carbon copy of Part 1's, except the Last Girl here doesn't get knocked off first thing in the next installment. Still, all this adds up to something pretty lame. There's a lot of comic relief and none of it works. Three bikers show up for no reason other than to introduce this series to some minorities (there are very, very few nonwhites in this series ' almost as few as the Halloween movies!). For years, I thought the white biker was Bill Paxton, for some reason. 

One of the weakest entries in this series, but strangely, one that I'd go out of my way to see - on the sole condition that it was on the big screen and in 3-D. I've seen novelizations of the first three films in this series...needless to say, they're all very, very thin.

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