After a prologue which is a truncated reprise of the end of Part II we meet a group of young friends as they head off to a holiday house by Crystal Lake. It's the usual mix of couples and third wheels and this time for reasons never revealed, a significantly older hippy couple (are they chaperones?) who bong so hard that the others look back a the van and think it's on fire. A few arcs are introduced: Shelly is a prankster and needs to do something about his low self esteem, Chris has escaped alive from a violent attack two years before and is returning to do something about her PTSD.
This is a horror sequel so we need to get everyone separated as fast as possible. That happens. Shelly and his imposed and uninterested date Vera go into town for supplies and run afoul of a tough biking trio from the early '70s during which Shelly impresses with a pushback. Chris recounts her attack and why it might be getting in the way of a smooth reconcilation with hunky Rick. Debby and Andy are expecting and happily. They have no problems beyond the invisible target label on their foreheads.
Anyway, this is a horror sequel so we want to see the bad guy do his stuff as fast as possible. After the replay of the end of the last movie we get a fresh double kill at a service station before we zip off to meet our gang of teens (to forty-somethings) and we're off. The bikers follow Vera and Shelly back to the house and set up a payback but Jason has found them, too. And everybody except the final girl gets dunned in. The end ... or is it?
But hang on. While this plot is a pro forma for '80s teen shlashers there yet beeze meat on the bone afore its cracked by the machete. F13 III fits into another trend from its time in that it's a 3 sequel in 3D. That gave the keepers of Amityville Horror, Jaws etc the opportunity to add a little sugar to the ticket price and a generic suffix to their titles which could go like Title 3D. If you, as most have, watch F13 III in 2D you might wonder at so many shots where the focus pulling suddenly makes things like the end of a rake handle or a spear stand out against a progressively blurred background. When you saw it with the glasses those things were coming at you. There are many strewn throughout this film including the infamous head squeeze and eye pop in which the 3D effect of the eyeball pinging from the screen would have distracted from the mannequin head into which it had been spring loaded. In 2d this just looks goofy and is the source of why many fans of the franchise dismiss the entire film. Once you know it was meant for a 3D experience you start to notice every opportunity they took to milk it.
The other aspect of this one that gives it genuine cred in the lineup is the mask. In F13 there was no mask (no spoilers as to why). In F13 II Jason wore a bag with an Elephant Man style eyehole which did look creepily folky and naive. In F13 III he finally finds the thing that makes him one of the main icons of the genre for evermore: the hockey mask. But it's not just any mask. It belongs to the self-doubting annoyer Shelly who, in his defence when chided for a gruesome trick, refers to himself as an actor. He assumes the persona of the costume, prosthetic makeup of the prankster to fill his own void. When Jason assumes the mask he is both covering his deformity, strangely honouring his own victim who'd just used it for a prank) and allowing him a further level of control over his victims and us in the audience. He's not just the raggedy yokel with the knife, he's JASON. He's not the first masked killer by a long shot, he's just the latest but this adoption consolidates the franchise and puts it beside all the others and the timeline of its adoption becomes part of the series' lore. From this point the hockey mask goes with the killer and the killer's movies.
Mild spoilers ....
Slasher movies need final girls and F13 conforms. In the first, we got a thrilling jump scare. In the second, an ingenious use of resourcefulness. In the third revenge fuels a prolonged and determined change from self defence to violent offence as the FG faces off her resident trauma and fights the hell back, delivering a spectacular final (or is it?) kill. This is followed by a strong jump scare and an escape simliar to the end of the first one but with a clever twist. The ending is one of the best of the franchise in that it returns the source of the character's trauma in a nightmare in which Jason peers out at her, unmasked as he was the first time they "met". There is a queasy emotional blend that happens between knowing Jason's untamed malevolance and pity at what brought him to this pass. It's too elongated a sequence to count as a jump scare and we are allowed to linger on it before the clean-up scene and the final image of apparent peace.
And yet I still think of the goofy head squeeze moment first.
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