Friday the 13th Part 3

Even though the 3D in this movie is pretty funny, I opted to watch the 2D version (mainly because the mere thought of wearing those blue-and-red 3D glasses gave me a headache). This movie features two of my favorite kills in the entire series.  However, this movie also features Shelly, who is one of the more obnoxious characters in the series.  It should also be noted that it is in this movie that Jason gets his signature hockey mask. 

I will be sitting back with a beer and watching this movie.  Join me, won’t you?

The movie begins with the end of Part 2.  Ginny runs into Jason’s shack, imitates his mother, and stabs him with a machete.  But then there’s a twist we don’t see in part one.  Instead of following Ginny and Paul as they make their way back to the cabin, we see Jason’s hand move, then he slowly gets to his feet.  So, where the end of Part 2 kind of left you wondering, “Was that part a dream?”, the beginning of Part 3 shows that Jason is still alive, if wounded.

A woman in a trailer is watching a news report of the events of Part 2.  The newscaster says that eight bodies were found, which seems to imply that Paul survived, although his whereabouts are unknown. 

Let’s meet our characters.

Chris: Our survivor girl.  She had a terrible experience when she was younger.  She had a fight with her parents, so she ran into the woods to hide.  She fell asleep under a tree.  When she woke up, a man with a messed up face (she uses words like “hideous”, “grotesque” and “inhuman”) attacked her with a knife.  She tried to get away from him, but wasn’t able to.  She blacked out.  When she woke up, she was in her bed.  Her parents never mentioned a word about it.  Since she grew up in the area, she’s a little jumpy about noises throughout the movie.  Anyway, she’s kind of bland.  I’ll chalk some of that up to her nervousness of being back in the area where that incident occurred, but, really, there’s not much to her character.  Which is a shame, because Ginny was such a terrific survivor girl.  So, while I don’t want Chris to die, I’m also not very invested in her character.

Rick: Chris’ love interest.  He lives at the cabin in the woods they all go to visit.  He seems much older, and has virtually no personality.  All he wants is to have lots of sex with Chris.  From what I can tell, it’s the only reason he exists.  On numerous occasions, he threatens to leave or break things off completely if she won’t sleep with him.  Within 3 minutes of meeting him, Chris asks to take things slow, to which he replies, “Okay, but there’s only so many cold showers I can take.”  Then he calls her fat almost immediately after.  It’s a good thing Shelly is in this movie, or Rick would be the most unlikable character in the movie.  He’s a real creeper.  But he has a fantastic death, so that helps to make up for some of his shortcomings.

Shelly: Fancies himself an actor.  Apparently that means he’s remarkably anti-social and has a very low self-esteem.  He breaks out masks and fake blood at terrible times.  He whines.  He leers.  His idea of flirting is hiding under a dock with a mask and a spear gun and grabbing legs.  In short, he is about the most annoying person you can imagine.  In his own words, “Being a jerk is better than being nothing.”  Wise words, Shelly.  Unfortunately, he doesn’t die first.

Vera: Shelly’s date for the weekend.  They set her up before they left.  She thinks she’s heading out for a great weekend with a fun date.  Instead, her first impression of Shelly is him wearing a mask and apologizing for his looks.  They never really hit it off.  Bless her heart, though…she really tries.  She’s Hispanic, which brings up a moment of racism in the movie.  When she checks out at a grocery store, the clerk looks at her and says, “We don’t take no food stamps here.”  If you can’t avoid racism in a little dirt-road town, where can you avoid it?

Andy: Shelly’s roommate.  He’s the one that brought Shelly along for this little trip.  He seems like a jock.  Nice guy, for the most part.  Not a jerk, which separates him from most of the guys in this movie.  He likes to walk around on his hands.

Debbie: Andy’s girlfriend, and Chris’ best friend.  Early in the movie, she makes mention of being pregnant, but it doesn’t really have any bearing on the movie or her character.

Chuck & Chili: Two potheads.  They’re both older than everyone else.  The movie never explains why they came along on the trip.  Far and away the most confusing part of this group.  Seriously.  What are they doing there?

Ali, Loco & Fox: Three leather-clad bikers who – for some reason – live in podunk county.  They harass Shelly and Vera at a grocery store, then follow them back to the house to get revenge after Shelly ran over their motorcycles with a car. 

The killer:

Jason Voorhees: Although he starts the movie out maskless, he eventually gets his  hockey mask from Shelly.  He seems different in this movie.  He’s still slow, but he’s not quite as clumsy.  He’s also not nearly as slow to get up from a blow.  He gets stabbed in the leg, pulls it out, throws it at the person who stabbed him, and stands up with barely a limp.  He feels pain, but it doesn’t affect him too much.  He’s able to bounce back in a way that he wasn’t able to in Part 2.  The persona of Jason that lasts through the entire series gets its real start here.

The Deaths:

We follow a Harold & Edna, an unhappily married couple who own a little country store.  We see Jason lurking around the store.  They don’t ever really get a good look at him, but they see glimpses.  Harold goes outside to look around and gets a meat cleaver in the chest.

Edna hears a noise and goes out to investigate.  Jason grabs her, and she gets a sharp object in the back of her head and it comes out through her mouth.

Fox goes into the barn.  She hears noises, and walks around to investigate.  She ends up being killed off screen.  Loco finds her with a pitchfork through her neck, dangling from a beam.

Loco goes into the barn to find Fox.  He finds her dead, sees Jason, and gets a pitchfork through the stomach.

Ali goes into the barn to find Loco and Fox.  Loco’s body falls from the rafters onto Ali.  Jason jumps down.  Ali grabs a machete to fight, but Jason knocks him out cold with a wrench.  He proceeds to bludgeon Ali with said wrench.  He is presumed dead, but he shows up a little later to meet his true demise.

Shelly – hockey mask and fishing spear in tow – hears a noise in the barn.  He goes to investigate.  He thinks it’s Chuck and Chili having sex, but, for some reason, that doesn’t make him leave.  He enters the barn, and the next time we see him, he is stumbling to the door of the cabin with a slit throat.  It is here that Jason gets his hockey mask.

Vera is sitting on the dock by the lake.  She sees a figure approaching with a hockey mask and a spear.  Thinking it’s Shelly, she tries to talk to him.  It is not Shelly, and she gets a fishing spear through the eye.

After having sex, Debbie goes to take a shower while Andy stays in the hammock.  Andy is walking on his hands with his feet straight up in the air.  He looks up, sees Jason, looks shocks, and gets a machete through the crotch (although, when we see him dead later, he is cut in half across his stomach).  This is one of my favorite deaths.  When Jason hits him with the machete, the sound is like a minor explosion.  I can’t figure out what it’s supposed to be.  But every time I watch this movie, I laugh really hard, and watch the scene at least 3 more times.

Debbie goes back to the hammock to find Andy gone.  She lays down to read a magazine (an article on Godzilla in Fangoria), and blood starts dripping on the magazine.  She looks up and sees Andy – chopped in half – above the hammock.  She gasps.  A hand grabs her head from under the hammock, and forces a machete through her chest.  This is basically the same way Kevin Bacon’s character (Bill) dies in the first movie.  Except, while Bill got an arrow through the neck, Debbie gets a machete through the chest.  It’s worth noting that both of these deaths occurred directly after sex.

After the electricity goes out, Chuck goes to the basement to check the fuse box.  He fixes the fuse, and Jason immediately throws him back into the fuse box, electrocuting him.

Chili opens the door to find Shelly with his throat cut.  Thinking it’s a joke, she replies with a simple, “Stop fooling around, man.”  Then she realizes he’s actually dead, and runs screaming through the house, looking for the others.  She gets a hot poker through the stomach for her troubles.

Chris and Rick – having been out in the woods, sitting by a fire and talking – return to the cabin and find it dark and quiet.  They split up.  Rick goes outside.  Debbie follows shortly after, but doesn’t see him.  While she stands at the door, he is just on the other side of the wall from her, getting his head compressed by Jason.  This is my other favorite death.  They show Rick getting his head smashed by two hands.  They show a shot of Rick’s feet being lifted off the ground, then they go back to his face…and it is painfully obvious that it’s a mechanical head.  It looks nothing like Rick.  And Jason finishes the job by compressing Robot Rick’s head to the point where his eye pops out.  If I were watching in 3D, it would be coming directly at me.  Either way, I always laugh at this one.  Like Andy’s death, this is one I rewind a few times every time I watch this movie.  It’s glorious.

Just for fun, here's a gif of his death.  Fair warning: you may spend the next hour staring at this.

Chris is now the only one left.  Looking for Rick, she goes into the house.  She finds a bathtub full of bloody clothes, but no people.  So she goes out to the barn.  Then the dead bodies start showing up.  Loco is hung upside-down from a tree.  She runs back inside.  Rick’s body is thrown through a window.  Jason – wearing his hockey mask and wielding an axe – chases her through the house.  She hides in a closet and finds Debbie’s body.  She pulls the machete out of her dead best friend and uses it to attack Jason.  She stabs him in the leg and runs into a nearby room.  She climbs out of the window (on the second floor).  Jason grabs her before she can get completely out of the window.  After struggling with Jason, she is able to drop safely to the ground. 

As he exits the house, she hits him with a log and runs to the van.  She takes off, but gets stuck when the van runs out of gas (the bikers siphoned most of it).  Jason catches up with her, but she is able to escape.  She runs through the woods and into the barn.  Jason chases her.  She gets to the loft in the barn.  She hits him with a shovel, wraps a rope around his neck, and drops him out of the barn.  He twitches, and appears to die.

But, as she walks past his body on her way out of the barn, he starts moving.  He pulls himself up and out of the rope.  Then he removes his mask, and she sees that he is the same man who chased her through the woods all those years ago.  He grabs a machete and walks towards her.  She screams and braces herself for death…but Ali is still alive (he was sleeping in the barn all day?) and attacks Jason.  That doesn’t last long.  Jason lops Ali’s hand off and sets to work hacking up his body with the machete. 

But this gives Chris her opportunity.  She grabs an axe and embeds it into Jason’s head.  He reaches out his arms and tries to grab her.  She screams.  But, eventually, he drops to the ground, seemingly dead.

Chris goes outside.  She finds a canoe on the lake.  Just like Part 1, she pushes the canoe into the lake and falls asleep.  She wakes up and sees Jason in the second floor of the cabin.  She screams.  She tries to paddle away, but is blocked by logs.  He emerges from the house and runs toward her.  She looks down to get the logs out of the way.  When she looks back, he’s gone.  As she continues to look, the decomposing (and worm-infested) body of Mrs. Voorhees emerges from the lake, grabs Chris, and drags her into the lake with her.

The movie ends with cops on the scene.  Chris had apparently been talking about “a lady in the lake”.  So, basically, like the end of Part 1.  Except this makes even less sense.  Jason drowned in Camp Crystal Lake.  Mrs. Voorhees did not drown in this little lake.  Why was she there, and why did Chris see her?

The movie ends with Jason dead in the barn, axe still firmly implanted in his skull.

Following the survivor girl:

While the rest of the people in the van smoke pot, Chris refrains.

That’s pretty much it.  There really wasn’t much hedonistic behavior in this movie.  The pot-smoking scene in the van and the sex scene with Andy and Debbie was pretty much the extent of it.

As survivor girls go, there wasn’t much to Chris.  I liked her pretty well, but, compared to Ginny, she just doesn’t hold up.  Also, she didn’t seem to have much of a personality.  She had the whole backstory with Jason chasing her through the woods, but that only takes things so far.  I didn’t hate her, I just didn’t really like her all that much.

My favorite lines:

Debbie: Let’s go swimming.  There’s nobody down there…we can do whatever we want.

Andy: Sounds disgusting.  Let’s go.

Vera: I’m going to go outside, and when I get back in, we’ll talk.

Shelly: Sure.  We’ll talk.  [After she leaves] Bitch.

Overall, I like this movie, but it’s definitely my least favorite from of the first three.  The characters just aren’t as good.  However, the hockey mask makes its first appearance in this movie, and the Jason that we know from the rest of the series really starts in this movie.  So, even though it’s not a great movie, it’s an important movie for the rest of the series.

Here is Final Girl's chart of deaths in this movie.

Next week, I’ll tackle Part 4: The Final Chapter.  As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.