It’s a pity that Friday the 13th Part 3 3-D – Deluxe Edition doesn’t come with a fold-out theater with dual projectors where you can watch it as it was intended, and not with the goofy anaglyph red-blue cardboard glasses that are packaged with the DVD instead. Because about the only thing this film had going for it was the novelty of seeing a bunch of randy teens getting killed in increasingly creative ways in three dimensions. A television screen – no matter how high-definition it may be – just doesn’t do it and unless you have your TV’s settings just right, about all you can expect from watching the film with the glasses on is one giant headache.
The film starts with Jason Voorhees stalking and murdering a couple who owns the general store. This introductory scene has no real purpose except to maybe show the audience that it is, in fact, the day after the events of Part 2. And, of course, to prepare the audience for all the cheap 3-D frights and sight gags coming their way for the next 90 minutes. Young Chris and her friends decide to visit her parents’ country home for a weekend of relaxation and whatever else young adults do when not under the watchful eye of any figures of authority. Did we mention it’s also two years after Chris was chased through the woods by a deformed, deranged man (could it have been?….no, it couldn’t have, could it?)? Of course, Jason finds them and begins to take them out one by one with various instruments that one normally wouldn’t use to kill somebody except for the fact that it would make for a super-cool 3-D effect! And the 3-D effects aren’t reserved for just the kills, folks. There’s a bird’s eye view shot of two kids juggling, an ant’s eye view of a yo-yo, even popcorn popping on the stove. No 3-D cliche is left untouched in this film. And you can probably guess how this one ends, considering the producers meant for it to be the final installment in the series. But it went on to outgross Part 2 in theaters and so a franchise was kept alive by the novelty of 3-D.
Obviously, the focus was on the 3-D aspect of the film and any other part of the creative process seems to have been an afterthought. Through no fault of their own (we wouldn’t want people’s attention diverted from the 3-D horror by an actual plot or any character development, now, would we?), writers Martin Kitrosser (who also wrote Part 5, which wasn’t all that bad) and Carol Watson, along with director Steve Miner have come up with a film that is nothing more than a loosely tied together string of grisly death scenes. Of course that does actually make for an entertaining slasher flick, but it’s hard to get past the fact that Jason is nearly twice as big as he was in Part 2 and he is now bald where not 24 hours earlier he had a whole mess of hair. It’s these little things that jump out at the viewer, not the actual effects that were designed to do so…at least on TV, anyway.
Apart from the theatrical trailer, there isn’t one single special feature on the disc, and we don’t even get the unrated cut on this so-called “deluxe edition”. At least they saw fit to include both the 3-D and 2-D versions of the film for those of us who couldn’t make it through the entire 90+ minutes with the headache-inducing glasses on our heads. The new 5.1 Surround mix is pretty cool too, especially for the strangely outdated disco-fied theme song in the opening credits. One half-expects Jason to pop out wearing a leisure suit and challenging his victims to a dance-off.
As bad a film as it may seem from reading this review, there’s no denying the cultural impact of the Friday the 13th series and this one definitely is a must for fans of the films not because it is in 3-D, but because this is the one where Jason first dons his infamous hockey mask, and it is arguably the one where the series starts to accept its role and not try to take itself seriously.
