Friday Week: You are indeed, all of you, kind and generous young people

FRIDAY THE 13th PART III

1982

Directed by Steve Miner

Written by Martin Kitrosser, Carol Watson, and Petru Popescu

Spoilers: high

Friday the 13th Part III is one of its franchise's lowest-rated entries, for fairly good reasons, mostly involving how it's a kludged-together, frequently-annoying mess; as of tonight, it's also the one I've seen the greatest number of times.  Fittingly, that number is three.  Its alternative title, you understand, is Friday the 13th Part 3 3D.  3-D had gotten a brief but memorable revival starting in 1980 thanks, in largest part, to a startlingly successful re-release of a 3-D straggler from the first 3-D craze, never previously shown any way but flat, Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 masterpiece, Dial M For Murder, and the technology had never entirely gone away, though its use throughout the 1970s was limited mostly to pornography.  (Sounds like its highest use to me—take that, Avatar.)  But Paramount chief Frank Mancuso Sr. had reportedly missed the format ever since the first time it had faded away, and now he had the chance to honor his affections as a small wave of 3-D productions made their way into theaters, invariably in spectacles marketed towards the youth.

By far the best-known and, I suppose, despite it all, the best-loved of these were three third movies from three ongoing horror franchises, Jaws 3-D, Amityville 3-D, and, preceding both of them by a year, 1982's Friday the 13th Part III, and apparently no one had had the inspiration for that wonderfully kitschy, "3... D" title convention yet, but at least we've got Roman numerals now.  Steve Miner, director of Friday the 13th Part 2, returned for this one, and with only fifteen months separating Parts 2 and III, I can't imagine he ever contemplated not doing so, though I don't suspect that Miner had any influence over Mancuso's directive to make it in 3-D (Part III was produced, incidentally, by Frank Mancuso Jr.).  It's hard to tell from the movie itself, which one could variously interpret as an expression of Miner's childlike wonder at 3-D's possibilities, or of borderline-parodic contempt for having 3-D foisted upon him, and either interpretation would be equally valid:

Accordingly, I watched the terrible one twice in twenty-four hours, once "normally," the other in its anaglyphic 3-D presentation after I realized 1)holy moly, it's on the disc and 2)hey, I own a pair of red-and-cyan glasses, because of last year's 3-D release of Robot Monster.  Now comes the twist: I like Part III, I've always liked Part III, and the worst thing about my day with Part III is that anaglyphic 3-D takes about ten minutes to (barely) get used to, before my vision stops flickering red-blue-red-blue ten times a second.  I'll have some more to say about the usage of 3-D, but the actual presentation I would recommend... once.  It obviously ruins the colors, but, while it's gimmicky as hell and intended to be, there's a lot of neat dimensionality to a lot of these images exploring the depths of barns and country homes, plus it goes a long way towards explaining why Miner (who'd just made the gorgeous Part 2) and his cinematographer Gerard Feil err on the side of overlighting their horror movie.  And, if anything, this perilous repeat viewing helped confirm why (and that) I enjoy this hunk of junk.

Now, I'm not here to talk you out of thinking it sucks, but, if you like Fridays in the first place, I could suggest experimenting with starting it at around the fifteen minute mark and see if that improves it.  See, we begin in (2-D, reframed) footage pulled from the last film, on behalf of another "previously on" prologue.  Miner made a similar opening move last time, but it was for the much better reason that Part 2 actually did feature the original Friday the 13th 's Final Girl, with a surprise in store for her and for us.  Part III, meanwhile, starts with the ending of Part 2 mostly because it's Part III, so the most valuable thing about it is, at least if you dig my whole "the Friday the 13th franchise is a consistently-inconsistent rendition of in-universe folklore" approach, that it's so enormously visually disconnected from Part III, in ways as subtle as the lighting strategies or the fact that they were filmed on separate coasts, to as obvious as our plainly-different Jason performer (in this film, Richard Brooker) and a completely-different Jason design.  The brief new appended footage does tell us that Jason Voorhees got back up; though I'm not sure we needed to be told that.

At least we have the actual movie now... except it's another prologue, a mechanism to get in some early murders that seem a little more free-roaming than they ought.  It involves a pair of punishingly declasse married shopkeepers (Cheri Maugans and Steve Susskind), as well as a completely superfluous 3-D gag with a snake, along with a little bit of effective Jason-based horror as he skulks through a bunch of laundry drying on a line, and, finally, a weird, imparsable beat about defecation—I think the snake "scared the shit out of" the guy—except there's no shit in the toilet, and my complaint is that if you're going to be this gross and obnoxious, commit.  This is, so far, awful and pointless.  But, eventually, Jason does kill them.

So now the movie can start, and it's total Slasher 101: literally a bunch of doomed kids (though some of them might be in their late thirties) go to a cabin in the woods, without even the structuring notion of "they're camp counselors."  On this go 'round, they number eight: Rick (Paul Kratka), whose property it is, and who's already out there waiting for them; coupled sex-enjoyers Debbie and Andy (Tracie Savage and Jeffrey Rogers); coupled marijuana-enjoyers Chuck and Chili (David Katims and Rachel Howard); Vera (Catherine Parks), who's impoverished and Hispanic, neither of these biographical data points mattering beyond the scenes in which they're introduced; and of course there's Goddamnitshelly, or "Damnitshelly," or just "Shelly," for short (Larry Zerner), the loser whose friends are generously trying to help by hooking him up with Vera, yet he keeps compulsively playing assholish pranks on everyone; and finally there's Chris Higgins (Dana Kimmell), who answers my rhetorical question from last time, "if a slasher movie makes its Final Girl obvious, is it really so terrible that a movie is just clearly identifying its protagonist?", with, "well, it can be."  Storywise, Chris is in some kind of relationship holding pattern with Rick: she absconded from these parts a couple of years ago, something to do with a not-very-artfully-foreshadowed traumatic backstory, leaving Rick to wonder why; now that they're back together, sort of, he's hoping for more than she's ready to give, due to the length of their separation and her general unease about being back here.

So, for the first time, a Friday is playing into the one-who-doesn't-put-out trope that is barely a real scary movie rule, to the extent that semi-academic fanon exists about what Chris's traumatic backstory entails; however, I'm more pragmatic about it.  Miner and his screenwriters decide to treat Chris's backstory as a reveal—rather perversely, considering that the whole shopkeeper thing indicates Miner likewise perceived an intense need for a prologue, and he had one, right here—but I trust you'll not be staggered to learn her backstory involves Jason, who randomly attacked her one night and she fought him off... somehow.  (Even she doesn't know.)  The key fact is that Miner initially developed his Part 2 sequel as an actual sequel to Part 2, and everything about this just feels like the desperate recovery that the project was forced into when Amy Steel said no.  There was a more cerebral version of Part III that Miner originally envisioned, involving sanitariums and mysteries; but no Ginny was to be had, and they still needed a movie.  Thus they continued, retreading the same fundamental scenario as the first two films, but, out of inertia or haste, they stuck with their traumatized heroine, whose prior encounter with Jason now had to be arbitrary and anonymous, amounted to a confusing stalemate, and, astoundingly, doesn't really play into her rematch with him now.  (I'll throw it out there, forty-two years too late: she could've just been one of Part 2's "Extra Counselors," Steve.)

Well, to finish summarizing the plot: Jason kills them.  Nonetheless, the movie manages a somewhat distinctive lead-up by virtue of an inclusive biker gang (Gloria Charles, Nick Savage—no relation to Tracie (presumably)—and Kevin O'Brien), whom they throw at Shelly and Vera during a shopping venture out to town.  That means that, for a while, we have three mutually-antagonistic parties in this slasher movie.  It doesn't amount to much besides "for now, please enjoy Jason murdering bikers instead."  Even so, their attempted feud with the kids does play into the Final Girl sequence in a small but satisfying way, making it all the harder on unlucky Chris when the time comes.

The rest of the lead-up is standard Friday larking, but with a few wrinkles: sex comedy here, the addition of stoner comedy there, and of course the new albeit quixotic attempt at some kind of depth with a male character in Shelly.  Let's get down to it: for virtually all viewers of Friday the 13th Part III, their most persistent problem is Shelly.  Let us not pick on Zerner, especially since the movie essentially already picks on him for us.  (The story goes he was pulled off the street.  Somehow the come-on, "I want you in my movie, you'd be perfect for the fat asshole virgin," failed to result in a fistfight.)  In fact, let's not pick on anyone: a big headwind on Part III was that 3-D production, which led to Miner ignoring everything besides ensuring all the shit he planned on throwing at the camera would look right.

Yet, notwithstanding Shelly, I think everybody here is enjoyable enough.  The sex couple has likeable Z-comedy sex banter; the stoner couple has likeable Z-comedy stoner banter (and get the funniest 3-D-assisted gag in the movie, regarding addle-brained Chuck attempting to eat popcorn as it launches itself out of a pan); Chris and Rick aren't pursuing a searing romantic drama, but they have an adorable scene involving a hayloft that's probably the best piece of non-death-related direction Miner's getting up to here (and, as obligatory as it is to slag this screenplay, it's even been set up with a piggyback-ride-prompted tease about Chris gaining weight, the hayloft beat being her cute way of avenging herself on Rick for that).  Shelly, the special case, I don't even hate, though his swerves between tiresomely-manipulative sadsack and attention-seeking dickhead might've been the kind of thing to save for an 80s movie with the possibility of a character arc.

I can appreciate Shelly: his pranks, frequently involving jump scares and special effects makeup (the latter function on Part III performed by Doug White, the former performed by many things, including, eventually, a mallard), seem to point towards some kind of idea.  And, infamously, it's Shelly's hockey mask that's transferred, forevermore, to Jason.  Along with Brooker's ideas about Jason's movement, Part III now completes the icon in all his essentials: a big, strong man who virtually never runs, and moves more by way of discontinuous editing than ambulation, who kills teens in the woods while wearing a hockey mask.  To set the scene for Jason's inheritance, we have Vera sitting on a (rather nicely crookedly production-designed) dock on the shores of Crystal Lake, irritated by the quandary of wanting to be nice to Shelly while also needing to make it clear to him that he needs to stop his shit whether it'll give him a shot with her or not, and composer Harry Manfredini is doing a jokey-rather-than-merely-plagiaristic-this-time Jaws homage, whereupon Shelly pops out of the water in a hockey mask.  She upbraids him, he sulks off, and somebody a lot larger returns in the mask and with the speargun that Shelly (because Shelly is an idiot) was wielding as a prop.  Thus does Shelly, the original Johnny Slasherfan, symbolically become Jason Voorhees, and that's sort of slasher movies altogether, isn't it?  I mean, the gendered nature of the violence, that too—but also the creation of a safe venue for all these antisocial tendencies and geek compulsions, where, rather than only creeping people out and annoying the piss out of them, they get a good time too, maybe occasionally even a little catharsis.  Now, I doubt their plan with Shelly, or even Shelly's hockey mask, was so big.  But their plans with Jason must've been getting that big: there's a bit of the ol' metacinema where Debbie flips through a back issue of Fangoria, scanning an article about Tom Savini, and turns the page to a big spread celebrating the already enormous-ass legacy of that most-franchised of all horror icons, Godzilla, that feels like a bold statement of intent.  Especially when Debbie's perusal is cut short by a big stream of blood splattering all over the article.

But as for making entertainment out of this reminder of death, the other thing Miner wants to remind you of is that his movie's in 3-D, so it's just this constant imposition of every conceivable object into the foreground to poke you once more right in the eyes.  It speaks to a disappointing restraint that no tits are thrust at the camera in 3-D.  But as a fan of gimmicky filmmaking, I get a chuckle of it, even when it's in 2-D (hell, maybe moreso), and this might be the format at its all-time hokiest, something like ten aggregate minutes of the ~90 minutes of actual new movie being jokes about things being flung towards the camera, most effectively as cinema (your mileage may vary) with a yo-yo, most effectively as narrative with a corpse's eyeball, wiggled around for fully twenty seconds (at nobody who diegetically exists in this universe, even, just us) by Part III's prophet-of-doom figure (David Wiley).  I'll say something completely asinine now, and suggest that if Friday the 13th and its earlier sequel get at a sensation of folk legend, Part III is where the folk legend got picked up and paraded around as the modern equivalent of the old time traveling show, everything real about it now made phony, and the action rendered so stagey they're literally gesturing to an audience beyond the proscenium, in part to render such savage material safe for consumption.

It's a fun way to read Part III, anyhow, and (like Manfredini's disco credits theme) the 3-D silliness does a lot to encourage that: many of the kills are themselves goofy-as-shit 3-D gags, notably that aforementioned speargun death (right in the eye!) and above all Rick's transformation into such a blatant dummy it might really be on purpose, whose eyeball pops out on a visible spring.  There's not necessarily rhyme or reason to this beyond my wishful thinking, but the best "kills" are instead corpse discoveries, including an ungodly baroque arrangement of Andy's parts in the rafters above Debbie's hammock, and a genuinely mordant farewell to biker chick Fox, which even utilizes that 3-D for something slightly less gaudy, with her body pinned by the throat to a crossbar in the barn by a pitchfork, and the camera tilting in its morbid fascination to demonstrate that's all that's keeping her up there.

I have, I know, described a movie that's still mostly bullcrap.  But!: Miner is still almost as strong a director of violent thrillers as he was back in Part 2, with the elimination of the bikers in the barn involving some good suspense and nice classically-horrifying framings of Jason just out of sight.  Frankly, everything about Jason qua Jason here is great.  (Consider, further, a squirmily-predictable basement scare when it turns out Jason has been looming behind you in the dark the whole time.)  But I mainly mean that Miner, who directed one of the genre's supreme Final Girl sequences in Part 2, is still directing a fucking great Final Girl sequence in Part III.  It has a lower ceiling: Chris has been a cipher, despite all her Final Girl signposting, and her Final Girl sequence was never going to grow so naturally out of her characterization as Ginny's intellectual approach to battle in Part II.

But, mechanically, it's almost as pristine as Ginny's run through hell, kicking off with a superbly-timed body flung through a window and a strong 3-D gag with the upstairs bookcase, and it's almost as creative.  As purely-experiential chase horror, between its varied geography and confident construction, it's surely in the same league.  (The major demerit is the deus ex machina of a character who definitely died but apparently didn't, returning to get hacked up again and distract Jason at a crucial juncture.)  At least Chris gets a character now: she must be one of the single most out-and-out aggressive Final Girls in slasher history.  She has the same problem many do with not pressing advantages, but the sheer amount of bona fide counterattacks she makes, where she takes physical risks to bring the fight to her adversary directly—not even counting the several times she ambushes Jason from a place of safety—make her extremely remarkable.  And she eventually does get up the nerve to finish the job, utilizing that hayloft with macabre determination, and it pays off—for us—with an outstandingly well-built (even surprising!) not-dead-yet beat when Jason un-nooses himself before her horrified eyes, and an arguably-even-better not-quite-dead-yet climax after that, which, anyway, is definitely the film's single finest use of 3-D.  All this, and I, personally, get a huge kick out of the remix garbage of the denouement, which goes to confirming what Friday the 13th is all about for me, but which I think I can make some objective claims about, too.  It is, after all, an endlessly-discussed film series, despite everybody knowing it's "bad"; but there's something vital about the legend in its very incoherence.

Score: 7/10