Friday the 13th Part III (1982)
★★½ — Friday the 13th Part III (1982)
There's a moment early in Friday the 13th Part III where the fog rolls in over Higgins Haven and everything feels genuinely unsettling. It's quiet, it's grimy, and it promises something. Then the rest of the film happens, and that promise is only half kept.
This is the one where Jason gets the hockey mask. That's its legacy, and fair enough, because the image is iconic. The problem is that the film around that image is frustratingly average. It does what it's supposed to do: bodies pile up, the practical effects do their job, and a spear through a wall earns its moment. As slasher mechanics go, the kills here are among the more inventive in the series. But inventive kills can only carry you so far when everything else is running on fumes.
The 3D gimmick is the elephant in the room. In 1982, I imagine it was a riot in the theatre, things flying at your face, cheap thrills and screaming crowds. Watching it at home in flat 2D, you're left with blurry, awkward compositions that were clearly designed for a different experience entirely. Eyeballs and yo-yos lurch towards the camera like a fairground attraction that's broken down mid-ride. It doesn't ruin the film, but it does make certain scenes feel more like a party trick than a horror film, and it dates the whole thing badly.
What bothers me more, though, is Jason himself. He's got the look now, but he hasn't got the weight. He gets knocked about, outmanoeuvred, even seems uncertain at times. There's a hesitancy to him that doesn't belong on the shoulders of a horror icon. Compare him to what he'd become in later entries and you can see this is still a character being workshopped, which is an odd thing to say about a third instalment. I wrote about similar growing pains in Friday the 13th Part 2, where the formula was still finding its feet, and Part III is very much a continuation of that unfinished business. The mask is legendary. The menace, not quite yet.
The characters are the usual collection of faces you struggle to name five minutes after they've been dispatched. The story is, generously speaking, a framework. A group of young people go to a remote location and get killed. That's it. That's the pitch, the script and the runtime all at once. Between kills, the pacing sags in a way that even fans of the franchise's grindhouse charm will notice. There's no tension being built, just time being killed until the next kill.
None of this makes it a bad film exactly. By the standards of early-80s slasher assembly-line filmmaking, it's solidly constructed. The location has atmosphere when the film remembers to use it. The practical effects hold up well enough. And there's something genuinely appealing about the grimy, low-budget energy of it all, the sense that everyone involved was just getting on with it, no pretensions, no grand ambitions, just horror product delivered on time and on budget. There's an honesty in that, even if it's not the same as quality.
Two and a half stars. Watchable if you're working through the franchise and can appreciate it for what it is: a middle chapter that coasts on formula, banks on a gimmick, and gives us one piece of iconography that the series would rely on forever. Jason's look arrives here. The legend would have to wait a little longer.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 1982 | Watched: 2025-09-29
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Steve Miner: Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)
More from the 1980s: Nightmare City (1980) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Style Wars (1983) · Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)
More thriller: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Angst (1983) · The Long Walk (2025) · Punishment Park (1971)
