04/15/10 - Friday the 13th Part III

Friday the 13th Part III (1982, 95 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083972/

I continue watching the Friday the 13th franchise with Friday the 13th Part III. As it turns out, this is the first film in which Jason dons his now iconic hockey mask. At least that made me hope this would be better than the last one.

The film again follows a group of kids as they go near Camp Crystal Lake. The heroine this time around is Chris Higgins (Dana Kimmell) while Jason Voorhees is played by Richard Booker. While the film was filmed in 3D I didn't watch this version.

The plot is typical so the movie gets no bonus points there. I guess it tries to be original when it brings in a biker gang to the camp area as well as the original group. I mean, they ultimately die one by one just like the main group anyway so it doesn't really add anything. I guess one of the ways I'm going to start judging these slashers is how they set up kills and all that. Sadly in this film, it pretty much focuses on who is going to die, plays the standard Jason theme music, and then kills the kid. There's really no variation whatsoever to this motif and it really gets boring in this film. At more than ten kills, it becomes really predictable. So now we turn to how interesting the kills are. Well, in this film, they're mediocre. Unfortunately, a lot of the kills are parallels to those in the first Friday the 13th so again this film loses points there. And I didn't get the feeling they were similar "in homage" to the original, just more a copying feeling.

The next big point is how well the final battle between the main character and Jason is. This one is actually pretty good, at least better than the previous two in my opinion. Chris fights and struggles and does a good job at holding her own against him. There's one stupid part where one of the guys that was thought to have died earlier shows up and hacks at Jason. However, Jason disposes of him so quickly it really just seems pointless. It adds nothing to the final battle and almost makes this one guy seem more important than anyone else when he isn't. As for the characters themselves, there's only one likable guy and he's killed in a pretty pathetic way. Though as has been said by the creators of Friday the 13th: the series isn't about making memorable characters but rather to force the audience to question why they feel nothing when these characters are killed. So I won't dwell on this point.

Overall, I gave this film a 3/10. So far we have a decreasing trend in the series which isn't a good thing. Anyway, this film gets points for a good final scene but that's about it. Nothing else is really noteworthy. There were a few times when the film made use of the 3D feature (which I wasn't able to experience) but even this didn't make up for its lacking in the "interesting" department.