Review #367: 'Friday the 13th Part III' (1982)

Carrying on the Friday the 13th tradition, Part III is yet another re-run of the events of the first film, only using different actors and character names. The action picks up just a day after Part 2, with Jason surviving the attack and fleeing to a nearby lakeside resort called Higgins Haven. Amongst the group of naive machete-bait is heroine Chris (Dana Kimmell), obligatory horny couple Debbie (Tracie Savage) and Andy (Jeffrey Rogers), annoying and self-loathing prankster Shelley (Larry Zerner), and hippy stoner couple Chuck (David Katims) and Chili (Rachel Howard). Some little one-dimensional character building later, Jason Voorhees (Richard Brooker) is soon hacking them up in various entertaining ways.

After the blandness of the first two Friday the 13th movies, I was expecting more of the same here, which I indeed got (it even replaces Crazy Ralph with a demented religious fanatic they meet on the road). There's precious little in ways of scares, originality or surprises, but it does have a couple of decent deaths that don't seem to suffer given Tom Savini's absence. The most memorable being someone being hacked clean in half whilst hand-standing. The third entry into the long franchise is better remembered for being the film that introduced Jason's hockey mask, which is now a well-recognised piece of pop culture. I was never expecting anything great here, and while it is formulaic, predictable, and often very dull, it's still an easy 90 minutes of slasher entertainment.


Directed by: Steve Miner
Starring: Dana Kimmell, Paul Kratka, Tracie Savage, Richard Brooker
Country: USA

Rating: **

Tom Gillespie