Yes, 3D movies in the 1980s were not good movies that were specifically fitted out for 3D -- or failing that, retrofitted, the way they were during the form's return to prominence earlier this century. They were movies that existed only to make their audiences recoil from the screen so they were not hit by a spear that appeared to shoot right out at them.
I remember two very terrible ones in particular that came out very close to each other, only the first of which I saw: The Treasure of the Four Crowns, and Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn. Both of those movies came out in 1983, just one year after the 3D Friday the 13th entry. (I definitely saw Treasure of the Four Crowns in the theater, and I remember being shocked by some of the deaths in it. I was only nine when I saw it. Then again, the body count must have been way worse in Raiders of the Lost Ark.)
The funny thing about such movies is they have basically no life after their initial moment of 3D presentation is gone. As I was watching Friday the 13th Part III, I was wondering: would there be any way to recreate the experience of watching this in 3D nowadays? Just to see if the 3D effects were any good? Would having one of those 3D TVs, which we used to have in Los Angeles, be enough? (The internet is a bit unclear on that. The answer seems to be "maybe.")
The other significant thing about Part III, the second consecutive film in this series directed by Steve Miner, is that it's the other movie in the series that I have always given myself credit for having seen. I knew for sure I'd seen the original, but then this one was sort of "I'm pretty sure I saw another movie in this series. Let's just say it was Part III."
Well, that would have been so long ago -- before I saw the original I'm pretty sure -- that I cannot, now, look at this movie and say with any certainty whether I'd already seen it. But just to be on the safe side, I'm not going to add it to my list of rewatches. It's just now a confirmed one-time watch.
One of the things that makes judging this so difficult is that this is yet another movie in this series that has essentially the same structure, essentially the same setting, and essentially the same dramatis personae as every other movie in the series. I know this series at least has to diverge by the time of Jason Takes Manhattan, but I'm expecting several more carbon copies of the same movie before we get to that point.
But at least Jason finally gets his mask. It takes until the 57-minute mark of the movie for this mask to appear, and the actual manner of its first appearance is, I suppose, of some historical interest.
At least the last two of these movies have featured a prankster, a guy who scares all the other teens by pretending to be Jason. I suppose this is a trope across all slasher films where the characters know that such a slasher exists, and the mere act of pranking his friends is surefire proof that this guy is going to die, likely with extreme prejudice.
This time the guy tries to punk his friends about three times, and the last involves him emerging from the water with a hockey mask. How did he get the idea to use a hockey mask, given that this is not one of the known things about Jason? Who, you may remember, ran around in the previous movie with a burlap sack over his head?
Well I suppose we can just credit this guy -- let's call him Shelly, because that's the character's name -- with a little bit of ingenuity. I don't know where got this hockey mask in a summer camp setting, but that's for wiser minds than mine to ponder.
When we see Jason wearing the mask a few minutes later, having finally assumed his finished form after nearly three movies, it's our clue that Shelly is no longer with us. Though I do wonder at the choice to have Shelly die off screen. I suppose you benefit somewhat from the "surprise" that one of the characters you thought was alive is actually dead, since one of his cohorts has to stumble across him. I guess it's meant to be a bit of a prank on the audience, because we've seen Shelly crying wolf so many times that we're initially supposed to think the gore on his neck is more makeup. But no, this time he actually got his throat slit. Still, in a slasher movie with a limited number of characters, I wouldn't think you'd want to waste any kills off screen.
So the origin story of Jason's mask is that he got it from a kid who looks like this:
A bit more disappointing than if Jason had reached down into the depths of hell to pull it up through a pool of molten rock, but what are you going to do.
I don't have a lot more to say about this movie from a plot perspective. There are more teenagers in basically the same lakeside setting as the first two movies. Some of them get killed while having sex. Others die in other ways. One survives until the end, just as one survived until the end in each of the previous two movies. And yet again, someone jumps out at this Final Girl in the final moments of the film, this time it being the mother, Pamela Voorhees, who somehow has her head attached again in order to fully inhabit the form of a decomposing corpse in a lake. Which was never her final resting place, but whatever.
And I'll be curious to see how the hockey mask makes a comeback, given that it got a machete part of the way through it.
I should mention that once again this movie starts with footage of basically the whole ending of the previous film. For a series that is not very interested in making its mythology more complicated -- at least compared to what was happening at the same time in the Halloween series -- these movies are sure determined for you to be fully caught up on what happened in the most recent one.
Oh yeah, before I go, I do need to tell you a bit about the things that appear in 3D. I should have scribbled them down at the time. There's a pole at one point. There's a crazy drifter who holds a very fake-looking eyeball at the camera. Nothing struck me as particularly clever, nor were they present in the quantity you'd think they should be, given that the 3D was the movie's whole gimmick. (And maybe the reason they thought they could take another movie off before getting more clever with the story?)
One thing I did note is that I am definitely becoming an old softie. Since I had already said I'd seen this movie, that means the movie already had a Letterboxd rating from me, which was 1.5 stars. Without knowing my previous judgment until after the fact, I was prepared to go as high as two this time.
Then again, considering that I can't prove my first viewing ever actually happened, that 1.5 stars doesn't mean a whole lot.
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