Friday, May 30, 2014

Friday the 13th Part III (1982)

Despite being hacked, stabbed, and beaten over the head with any number of things, Jason Voorhees just won’t quit. As big of a confusing, non-engaging, and technical mess that Friday the 13th Part II turned out to be, it actually gets worse with Part III. That’s right; there was room under the lowest of bars set by Part II for this piece of cinematic garbage to slither underneath.

The day after the ending of Friday the 13th Part II, Jason Voorhees is on the hunt- for some clean clothes and a place to lie low while recovering from his injuries. After seeking refuge in a barn near Crystal Lake, a group of rowdy young adults show up to stay at the neighboring cottage. The vacationers manage to make enemies with a local biker gang, who show up at their cottage to exact revenge. Jason starts with the bikers and works his way through many of the vacationers as one girl realizes she encountered the masked menace before.

Part III has many of the same issues as the original and Part II. No-talent actors exchange unoriginal banter and make incredibly horrible decisions thanks to the work of no-talent writers. The film’s lone attempt at creating any kind of interesting backstory winds up as more of a ‘so what?’ moment than anything else. It even recycles a series of false endings used in the previous installments, adding their own unique and confounding twists.

The big draw of this film was that it was shot in 3-D, so fans could watch people get stabbed, eviscerated, and hunted down in sequences involving stuff that looks like it might fly out of the screen at you! The problem with this is that 1980s 3-D was a fad that passed (though 3-D has certainly reared its often gimmicky head in recent years) and cannot be experienced in at-home viewings. When you take away the 3-D gimmick, the sequences utilizing 3-D effects stick out like sore thumbs due to their clunky nature and drive home just how pointless the gimmick really was.

Few, if any, likeable characters are to be found here, and you should know by now that that is a cardinal sin for me when it comes to horror films. Even the bad guys are disappointing simply because a multi-ethnic biker gang roaming rural New Jersey makes absolutely no sense to me. These disposable ne’er-do-wells are the first time audiences are actually encouraged to cheer on Jason Voorhees’s brutality. Once you start cheering for a mass murderer, you a pretty far down the slippery slope. The series will have to go to great lengths to recover from this.

The lone good thing about this film is that it is the one where Jason finally acquires his trademark hockey mask. It suits him much better than the potato sack he was running around in during Part II. Other than that, everything about this film has ‘loser’ written all over it.

RATING: 0.25 out of 5

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