Friday the 13th: Part III (1982)

This film kicks off by literally splicing in the last five minutes of the previous movie.  This does serve a narrative purpose - it allows them to change the last few shots to show that psycho killer Jason Voorhees wasn't as dead as he appears.  It also serves a metatextual function, because this whole film is a lazy rehash of its forerunner, which was in and of itself a rehash of the series progenitor.

So what you're going to get here is Jason stalking and killing a whole bunch of people, because people being stalked and killed is pretty much the raison d'etre of slasher films, right?  I mean, sure, none of the motivations for killing that Jason was previously ascribed continued to apply, but surely the audience won't care if you throw enough victims and variety of kills at them, right?  And hey, if that's not enough to keep 'em distracted, let's give it to them in 3D!

Because oh boy, this movie was made during one of those sporadic spurts of enthusiasm the film industry seems to have for the tiresome trickery of this technique (most recently due to the inexplicable success of the decidedly mediocre Avatar), and it sure finds a lot of opportunities to have stuff come flying at the screen.  A rake!  An axe!  The spear from a speargun!  Popcorn!

I wish I was joking about the last one, but I am not.

Anyway, after 80-some minutes of killing off thinly-drawn characters you probably won't care about, for reasons the film never bothers to explain, Jason once more encounters the situation's (obvious from the get-go) Final Girl and has his rampage brought to an end.  At least until the inevitable sequel rolls around.

This is a lazy, lazy film - even by the standards of slasher movies - and frankly the most entertainment I got out of it was savouring how gloriously stupid all the jammed-in 3D-exploiting sequences look when you're watching a 2D print of the film.  Watch it only if you're a slasher tragic, or if you want to experience the true horror of knowing that, stupid and tawdry though it is, this is far from the nadir of the franchise.