A crime scene team cleans up after the last movie's partying. A group of teens drive out to Crystal Lake for times wild 'n' fun. A young family welcomes them as they drive up to the house next door. A studly young man turns up with a tent and claim to be a bear hunter. Jason kills some people.
The young boy in the family is a budding effects and movie makeup artist, building ghoulish heads with moving parts. Trish gets in with the teen crew. Jason has made his way back home. The teens throw a party. Cool and normal.
And then what you expect to happen happens. By this stage it had become lore that slashers punished the promiscuous. The horny teens that had led to Jason's fate in the first film and their later counterparts were all killer fodder, whether Jason, Michael or whomever popped up in a mask to find them. Because of this slasher films were considered conservative. Here's the problem with that: it doesn't work. Not all horny teens get butchered. Some virtuous maidens do.
There are a lot of kills in this one you could attribute to punishment: pervy teen gets stabbed through a screen while watching stag movies, another gets a harpoon to the crotch and so on. No one in the target demographic munching up a storm of popcorn as the blood was splatting on screen was turned off sex by any of the kills of these movies. Most '80s slashers were knock offs of Halloween and, if a trend like death-sex was perceptible, it made it to the timeline. Not even that made them moral majority mastodons: the movies are wild, the killers are the puritans.
The cast includes one of the decades Coreys (Feldman) and future go to weirdo Crispin Glover. The latter as a girl-shy teen who instantly grows into a young sophisticate with a single event. The former, the one who makes the masks but also comprehends the true meaning of Christmas (or Friday the 13th) finds a way to confront the killing machine very effectively in a climax that develops the one from Part II. It is in this stroke of canniness that this entry in the franchise distinguishes itself. The slasher film that uses both the bluntness of the sub genre and figurative thinking to turn horror cinema to the mirror might well have been the final chapter and be respected for that. You will not be surprised by the final shot but that, too, is reflection. Then they just went ahead and made more.
Viewing notes: I saw this on Blu-Ray boxset but it is available through Stan (all F13) or to hire from Prime, Apple, Google etc.
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