Jason Voorhees in old-fashioned 3-D

FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 3, 3-D (1982)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Seen one Friday the 13th flick, seen them all. I have not had the pleasure of seeing all ten sequels to the original 1980 shocker, which also had its own remake. Jason Voorhees has not been my favorite psycho killer either. "Friday the 13th Part 3" has the distinction of being the only sequel in the series to be in 3-D. That is a bit of a blessing because it has its shock value when you see bats, axes and other weapons thrust at the audience in three dimensions. Other than that, same old, same old.

Aside from a brief recap of Part 2 where poor Amy Steel survived the throes of the hooded Jason, this sequel finds more hormonal teens at Camp Crystal Lake. There are some hijinks of the low grade variety involving some old drifter who holds a severed eyeball, and the teens smoking weed and eating it after assuming that the cops are going to stop them. The most memorable character of this bunch is Shelly (Larry Zerner), a Seth Rogen-crossed-with-Jeff-Ross lookalike, who scares people because he is unable to communicate in any other way. He has a goalie mask and this is where we discover the advent of Jason's most iconic visage. And one of the other sympathetic teen characters is Chris Higgins (Dana Kimmell), who had survived Jason's attacks once before.

This "Friday the 13th" flick has its laundry list of slasher film ingredients. Axes, pitchforks, hot pokers and knives are thrust into bellies and heads. Sometimes someone is attacked in showers and in barns with plenty of haystacks cued with that creepy Jason Voorhees instrumental score. Best moment has Jason firing a spear from a spear gun at one unlucky victim. The ending is a creepy reprise of the original and it works as a shock moment yet "Part 3," which has got shocks galore and some gore, has little to differentiate it from the norm. The 3-D process is more of a tactic to make couples embrace each other and turn away from the screen, or at least the girl so she can be shielded from the screen as long as the cardboard 3-D glasses are not crushed.

I am not easily recommending this flick to anyone but it has an, albeit extremely slight, innocence to it. It is not the torture porn of the 2010 horror flicks, and it is hardly as gory as any of the other Friday the 13ths. It is not boring but it is also not much of anything other than using humans as slaughter slabs in more than three dimensions with two dimensional characters. I saw this on video back in 1983 in 2-D, and it is fun seeing it in 3-D and for that reason alone, it is hard to resist for Friday the 13th completists. Interestingly enough, this was supposed to have been the last installment but you can't keep a blood-stained goalie mask down for long.