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

Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)

Before there were Saw and Paranormal Activity movies coming out every year, there was the Friday the 13th franchise- cranking out abysmal films on the cheap that were guaranteed to rake in a sizable profit off the bloodlust of 1980s teenagers. This, the first of many sequels, is no different from any other paint-by-numbers slasher flick. It also sets the bar quite low for the installments that followed.

While only 87 minutes long, the first ten minutes of this film are a re-airing of the final ten minutes of the original Friday the 13th. Flashforward two months and the lone survivor of the Camp Crystal Lake murders discovers Mrs. Voorhees’s head in her refrigerator and then bites the dust at the hand of an unseen killer.

Now flashforward again five years into the future and a new batch of idealistic wannabe camp counselors are setting up shop on the banks of Crystal Lake, not too far from where previous horrors occurred. Fueled by curiosity over Mrs. Voorhees’s exploits and local legends that her son, Jason Voorhees, is actually still alive and avenging his mother’s death, some of the young adults start down a slippery slope of bad decisions that dooms everyone at their camp.

Everywhere you look in this film, there are signs that it was made for a quick payday. It may have had twice the budget as the original, but its qualitative return on investment is dismal. The acting is even worse this time around and the gore makeup barely comes off with a passing grade. Also, I must beat a dead horse and complain about the dearth of likeable characters. I am open to having a few immoral disposable teenagers in a film to be the first couple knocked off, but the core characters have to be developed and see growth during a film for audiences to get emotionally attached to them.

Interestingly enough, Jason Voorhees himself is Part 2’s biggest problem. It’s called retroactive continuity, or retcon for short. Audiences are led to believe one thing and then later events erase part or all of what was assumed to be historical fact. It happens a lot in soap operas and lousy sequels (I’m looking at you George Lucas).

In Part 2, Jason is the retcon. In the original Friday the 13th, Jason drowned in the 1950s due to inattentive counselors, which explains why his mother would go to such bloody lengths to keep the camp closed years later. Now we are to believe that he did not die. In fact, he’s been living in a shack in the woods and saw his mother get snuffed out in the first film. Jason appeared as a nightmare at the end of the first film- disfigured and scrawny. Well, now he’s the size of an NFL lineman and all muscle.

If I am to believe this scenario, I have to understand a few things. Why, if he did not drown in 1958, didn’t Jason seek out his mother immediately after surviving his near-death experience? How does he find food to eat in the back woods? Where does he acquire clothing from? Why didn’t he reveal himself to his mother in the first Friday the 13th when she showed up at Camp Crystal Lake? Part 2 never even approaches answering these questions, which are necessary to make the whole thing make even a lick of sense.

One interesting thing about Jason is that he doesn’t waste any time on killing people. Most other horror films let their protagonists linger in whatever immoral shenanigans they partake of before paying the price. Jason’s victims barely get into the act of anything before he clobbers them with whatever is handy. Unfortunately, Part 2 contains a closing scene similar to its predecessor, all but assuring us of another sequel.

RATING: 0.5 out of 5

SECOND HELPINGS: Friday the 13th (1980)

This is the first of what will be many Second Helpings reviews that I write over the years. I just want to explain to you all what to expect from these things from here on out before we lay into this silly horror film.

Essentially, there will be two types of Second Helping reviews. First, there will be reviews for films that I previously rated but did not write a first review for. Reviews for these types of films will be similar to a first-time review you are accustomed to seeing. They will also include a dash of informal content.

The second kind of Second Helping review will be for films that I already wrote a review for. These will be very informal and compare my initial review with how I felt about the film the latest time through. Consenting opinions will be brief and only elaborate so far. In those instances where I have changed my mind about a film, expect a more in-depth breakdown of the film that provides my justification for changing its rating.

Now for the film at hand…

Friday the 13th begins with the murder of two camp counselors in 1958. Flashforward to 1979, and a group of aspiring camp counselors have gathered to re-open Camp Crystal Lake. The locals are nervous because they remember the murders and feel the camp is cursed. All warnings aside, the young folk forge ahead with their plans. Unbeknownst to them (for a while at least) they are getting picked off one by one by an unseen killer who is determined to see Camp Crystal Lake remain closed.

There is a good reason why this film series gets picked on, spoofed, and referenced so much. The series as a whole is terrible but this franchise-opener actually has some promise buried in the reels. Horror films have almost always stuck to the formula of starting with a moderate sized cast and thinning the herd gradually down to a lucky (or unlucky) few. While that is certainly in play here, I like the reason for the killing, which is oftentimes not very convincing in slasher flicks. The killer has a unique and powerful motivation for keeping Camp Crystal Lake on ice. Everything surrounding this motivation, however, is deeply flawed.

Let’s start with the basics- Friday the 13th offers up little in the way of likeable characters. Instead of building up characters that we care about, we are expected to care simply because someone is trying to kill them all. Most of the would-be counselors in this film take any chance they can get to smoke dope or have sex. Maybe I’m just a prude, but when you do stupid things, expect consequences for your bad decisions. Since this is a horror film, bad decisions flow almost as freely as the blood.

Compounding our misery is the fact that the acting is, on the whole, very poor. Deliveries are unrealistic, poorly timed, and sometimes just don’t make much sense. The main female good guy (Adrienne King) does some good screaming and looks good and terrified when necessary. Aside from this, the only notable thing about the acting in this film is that Kevin Bacon is in it.

I will say that some of the special effects makeup work looks pretty good. Unfortunately the makeup artists’ work is squandered by surrounding realistic-looking wounds with ridiculous spurts, spatters, and a number of anatomical and physical inaccuracies. To top it all off, the director chose to throw in a lot of POV camerawork, even when it can’t possibly be from the killer’s POV. If you are going to make the camera bob and weave to avoid the main characters, it darn well better be the killer. As this is not (or should not) be the case many times, I have to knock this film for an unnecessary effect.

Overall, Friday the 13th is about as silly and unappealing as I remember it. The best part about this film is that the dim-witted, lumbering Jason Vorhees is not the killer. His inclusion in the final reel ultimately takes away from the film and opened the door to a number of inferior sequels. It’s a shame, because this could have been a quality stand-alone horror flick. Everything just went wrong for it though.

ORIGINAL RATING: 1.25 out of 5

NEW RATING: 1.25 out of 5