Friday the 13th: Part III
The creators of Friday the 13th: Part III believed so strongly in their heaping pile of suckiness that they even added a third dimension of suckiness: depth. Woooo. Yes, Friday the 13th: Part III was released to audiences in glorious early 1980’s 3-D. “You too can be stabbed in the gut by a forest-dwelling lunatic named Jason!” was their tagline. How could a moviegoer possibly turn down that opportunity?
Unfortunately, the filmmakers forgot to add the most important dimension of all: a point. Yes, the movie had the familiar group of sex crazed, 1980’s-looking 1980’s youths causing mischief in the forest. Yes, it had three local “gangsters” who must have filmed their roles after walking right off the set of the Beat It music video. Yes, it had the same maniacal, deformed killer roaming the woods in silence, stabbing or crushing to death anything that moved. Yes, it featured a death scene in which Jason embeds a machete in the face a wheelchair-bound youth and sends him crashing down a flight of stairs. But why?
Why is Jason killing everyone? He never had a relationship with his mother, who, in Friday the 13th Part I, killed everyone “in Jason’s honor” because she thought he drowned as a child. But he didn’t drown. If he and his mother had been in contact throughout his life, one might infer that Jason’s bloodlust is an expression of grief after his mother’s death. However, he and his mother didn’t know about each other until somewhere between Friday the 13th I and II. I can understand him being upset to have his mother die shortly after being reunited. However, the reality is that his mother was also a barbarian, and she deserved to have her head lopped off by a machete.
Why are his face and head so deformed? He nearly drowned but didn’t. Somehow, he survived by himself in the woods through adolescence and into adulthood. That may account for his warped views of the world, but it doesn’t explain why he can’t speak or why he looks like a cross between the soldier who opened the Arc of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Arc, Sloth from The Goonies, and Fire Marshall Bill from In Living Color.
Why does Jason wear the hockey mask? If he is going to kill everyone who sees him, it shouldn’t matter whether they see his face or not. In fact, his strange appearance might actually scare them more, which would help in killing them. Let’s take a step back and examine why there was even a hockey mask in the first place. It makes no sense that a character would have packed an ice hockey mask to attend a summer camp.
Why didn’t they make a spin-off series for the prankster character who originally brought the hockey mask? I thought his staged death pranks throughout the movie were actually more frightening than the death scenes involving Jason. Update: it might have been his hair and acting that frightened me most.
Why has Jason progressively grown in size and developed a set of specialized killing capabilities? If Jason was left to raise himself in the forest, how did he nourish himself to such excess that he grew to be 8 feet tall and have super-human strength? In one scene, he crushes picks up a grown man by the head and crushes his skull. In another, he stabs one of the 80s gangster characters with a pitchfork so hard that the character dies while hanging on the wall. One of my favorite scenes is when Jason shoots some kind of harpoon from 50 yards and nails his victim right in her eye. How would he be that accurate of a shooter? Why would they have a harpoon at a summer camp?
What’s the deal with the opening scene? In the opening scene, we are introduced to an entirely unlikable old couple. The situation completely deteriorates when the man decides to make a #2 run to the bathroom. As the man is doing his business, he sees something move outside, and without taking the generally accepted sanitary steps, he decides to investigate. Let me remind you at this point: this is all being filmed. It’s part of the movie. From an aerial perspective, the camera then flashes back to the toilet, which is completely empty–not even water! Why was this part of the movie????
So many questions, so few answers. That doesn’t mean I was totally unsatisfied. After all, I finally found out the origins of the hockey mask–Jason picks it up randomly and puts it on toward the end of the movie. It’s not at all important to the plot, and the hockey mask’s place in popular culture was obviously unintentional. I can’t imagine the writers saying, “Hey, we got this terrible movie–how can we ensure another 20 years of crappy but lucrative movies, games, and accessories? A hockey mask! It’s almost too easy.”
This movie was a total disaster. Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter is up next. We know it’s not really the final movie, but it stars both Crispin Glover and Corey Feldman. Quite the duo.