3D FRENZY - FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 3 IN 3D (1982)

DIRECTED by Steve Miner.

SCREENPLAY by Martin Kitrosser & Carol Watson based on characters created by Victor Miller & Ron Kurz.

STARRING - Richard Brooker as Jason Voorhees,  Dana Kimmell as Chris,  Paul Kratka as Rick,  Tracie Savage as Debbie,  Jeffrey Rogers as Andy,  Catherine Parks as Vera,  Larry Zerner as Shelly,  David Katims as Chuck,  Rachel Howard as Chilli,  Nick Savage as Ali,  Gloria Charles as Fox,  Kevin O'brien as Loco, David Wiley as Abel, Cheri Maugans as Edna, Steve Susskind as Harold.

PLOT - It is one day since Jason Voorhees went on his killer rampage at Chrystal Lake, defeated and frustrated, his prey having escaped him, Jason Voorhees is looking for new victims...

Enter a bunch of out of towners looking to have a weekend break in Chrystal Lake. One of the group, a girl named Chris has been here before and survived an earlier encounter with Jason. An encounter that left her traumatised. Chris has returned here in an attempt to come to terms with that horrible experience and make peace with it.

However, that peace will be difficult to find. Jason is on the rampage again and the bodies are piling up even higher than before...

TAGLINE - A NEW DIMENSION OF TERROR...THERES NOWHERE TO HIDE...WE DARE YOU TO TRY !

PERFORMANCES  - Might as well start with the man himself. This time Jason Voorhees is played by Richard Brooker. In this entry we get the first appearance of what people regard as the "classic Jason". Finally, after two films, Jason gets to wear the iconic hockey mask and spends most of the movie carrying around a bloody huge machete. Jason's still not one hundred percent as we know him though - he's not got the slow moving, lumbering gait that he later develops. In fact Brooker plays a very agile Jason, he's running around everywhere, leaping, slashing and swinging about with gay abandon. This, coupled, with Brooker's round shouldered physical build gives Jason a monkey-like presence. That's what Jason is in this film...an evil monkey.

By this point in the series, the characters where all starting to become more interchangeable. They where all just there to raise the body count and nothing more. A few stand out though.

Dana Kimmell plays Chris, the main character/final girl. Kimmell gives a good enough performance but she's not as memorable as Alice or Ginny from the first two movies. Chris has a weird backstory in that she was attacked by Jason a few years ago and for some reason was spared by him, it implies that it was more of a sexual assault than a murder attempt (which seems really out of character for Jason, he's a killer NOT a rapist, besides I don't think he'd even have a clue what to do with a woman even if he did get hold of one for sexual purposes). This backstory doesn't really add anything (except make things a bit more confusing), all it does is lead to a bit of tension between Chris and her boyfriend Rick (Paul Kratka). 

Rick is a bit of a dick if I'm being honest. He spends the entire film trying to emotionally blackmail Chris into having sex with him. Come on, your girlfriend's been attacked and (possibly) sexualy assaulted and you're putting pressure on her for sex ???? Never mind, he gets horribly murdered by Jason anyway, so it all ends well.

Probably one of the most important characters in the entire series appears in this entry - Shelly played by Larry Zerner. Shelly is important only because it's from him that Jason steals the famous hockey mask that he wears for the rest of the series, but everyone's got to leave behind some kind of legacy right ?

Shelly himself is an annoying character. He's constantly playing practical jokes on everybody (which usually involve him pretending that he's been attacked/murdered in order to scare his friends), when his friends get angry with him he then flys off the handle and goes into a childish strop and starts sulking. His reason for this behaviour - he's overweight and insecure about his looks and he thinks acting like an utter nob will make people "notice" him. Funnily enough, when he does get fatally wounded by Jason everyone thinks he's just crying wolf again. Jokes on you dickhead...

We also get a group of bikers in this film - Ali (Nick Savage), Fox (Gloria Charles) and Loco (Kevin O'brien) - they terrorise the holidaymakers for a bit before being picked off by Jason. They're not in it for long but at least they give Jason a different type of victim to kill other than partying teenagers.

SFX - Aside from the 3D and the usual practical gore effects, we get another take on what Jason Voorhees looks like...

This time he's completely bald once again, gone are the flowing ginger locks that adorned his head in the previous movie. His face looks different too - he more closely resembles how kid Jason looked at the end of the original.

COMING AT YA  - If House Of Wax was an example of the cinematic equivalent of a carnival sideshow then Friday the 13th part 3 is a full on roller coaster. The 3D is 100 percent in your face at all times - in fact it's probably the ultimate 3D movie.

At the start we get lots of zooming letters proclaiming the movie's title and credits all accompanied by a stomping disco horror soundtrack...

We open on a shot of somebody's backyard, the washing is out and sheets billow into the screen, flapping towards us. Very soon there are two killings - Jason swings a meat cleaver right towards us, a great start.

There's quite a few establishing shots that fully utilise the 3D gimmick (my favourite is a kid holding a baseball bat into the screen as he's about to take a swing), we then get a scene with the campers travelling in a van to Chrystal Lake. There's quite a lot of dope smoking in this scene, characters pass joints to one another and of course these joints get "offered" to the audience...

Our happy campers then encounter a wandering hobo - I'm going to refer to him as Crazy Ralph 2, as he does exactly the same "You're all DOOMED" routine as Crazy Ralph does in the first two movies. Crazy Ralph 2 acknowledges the fact that he's appearing in a 3D movie by kindly shoving a random eyeball that he found into our faces...

Shelly pisses off some bikers and a bike chain gets swung at us, showering us with glass when it hits a car windscreen. The bikers then get murdered in spectacular 3D.

We then get a few more leisurely scenes, people juggle, popcorn pops in our faces and a yo yo gets dangled into the camera...

This being a slasher movie it takes full advantage of EVERY opportunity to have weapons being thrust, swung or thrown towards us...

Naturally, many of the death scenes also take advantage of the 3D to give us a more gorilly immersive horror experience, which leads us to...

SEX & VIOLENCE (in 3D) -  A local redneck couple get murdured a few minutes into the movie...

Following that we get the scene where Jason kills the bikers in the barn. This is the first kill scene to fully take advantage of the 3D. Fox enters the barn by swinging on a rope (all in glorious 3D), gets snatched off the rope by Jason and the rope swings back towards us. Loco enters the barn to look for her and finds she's been impaled in the throat with a pitchfork...

Loco then gets taken out by Jason brandishing yet another pitchfork at us...

It's not as gory as you'd think but the 3D works well.

Then we get one of the best 3D kills when Jason murders Vera with a harpoon gun...

Not only is it a great kill but its also the first time we see Jason in his full hockey mask get up.

Shortly after this Shelly is not long for this world, he bleeds out after having his throat cut and Chilli just thinks he's messing around again...

Then we get the "handstand kill". For some reason known only to himself, Andy thinks that walking on his hands everywhere is going to impress his girlfriend. Well Jason's not impressed  - he slashes Andy from crotch to throat whilst he's doing a handstand, Jason's blade swinging towards us in 3D like an executioner's axe...

We see the mangled result of this later...

Andy's girlfriend Debbie is then killed whilst she's lying on a hammock in a scene that recalls Kevin Bacon's death in the original movie...

Stoner couple Chuck and Chilli are the next to go. Chuck is thrown by Jason into an electrical generator and gets electrocuted in a not very spectacular fashion. Whilst Chilli gets murdured by having a red hot poker thrust into her...

Red hot chilli anyone ?

Next, that arsehole Rick gets killed. Jason crushes his head between his hands and Rick's eyeball flys out of his head and into the audience's faces in glorious 3D...

Okay, so it doesn't look very realistic but you've got to give them credit for having the balls to try it. 

Then Ali returns to have a second go at Jason (having barely survived his last encounter) Jason chops his hand off and then kills him...

Finally, in what was originally intended to be his final definitive death - Jason gets an axe in his head, he gropes his hands towards us as he "dies" for the "final" time...

RATING  - As I've already said Friday the 13th part 3 is probably the ultimate 3D movie. It never wastes a single opportunity to fully exploit it's 3D credentials. It's literally in your face in every sense of the term.

Whilst it lacks some of the atmosphere that made the first two movies so memorable and is a little more formulaic, it's still a hell of a lot of fun.

Overall 4 and a half hockey mask wearing killers (in 3D) out of 5.

POSTER/VHS/DVD ART  - As with House Of Wax, the movie posters take every chance to push the "new" 3D process to the max...

And finally here's the cover to the tie-in novelisation which uses COMPLETELY the wrong hockey mask...