Rotten Tomatoes Is 100% Wrong About The Worst Friday The 13th Movie

The films of this franchise all follow the same basic story arc. They open with a murder (or two), segue into a jarring opening title sequence, then follow a group of young adults as they’re slaughtered one by one in murder scenes that are equally brutal and creative. What Friday the 13th Part 3 offers by way of storyline is no different, though the third installment does offer some of the franchise’s most memorable characters.

Friday the 13th Part 3 begins where the second film ends. After being severely injured at the end of the second film, a mask-less Jason Vorhees staggers his way into a store near Crystal Lake. This sets up the first two kills of the movie, as Jason uses a meat cleaver to the chest to kill store co-owner, Harold, and plunges a knitting needle through his wife Edna’s head.

Arriving at Camp Crystal Lake the next day are Chris Higgins (Dana Kimmell), her boyfriend Rick (Paul Kratka), and six of their friends. Two of Chris’s friends, Shelley (Larry Zerner) and Vera (Catherine Parks) go to a local store for supplies and incur the wrath of three members of a motorcycle gang in Friday The 13th Part 3. In their scramble to leave, Shelley accidentally knocks over the bikes and further enrages the bikers.

Bike gang members Ali (Nick Savage), Loco (Kevin O’Brien), and Fox (Gloria Charles) discover where Shelley and Vera are staying and plot a revenge. The trio go into the barn with gasoline and are about to burn it down when Jason uses a pitchfork to kill Loco and Fox and beats Ali presumably to death. With his kill count up to five and his face hidden from camera, the screenwriters are about to give audiences a film prop that will forever be associated with Jason Vorhees.

Shelley gets romantically rejected by Vera, and decides to scare her while wearing a hockey mask. Vera runs away angry, but Shelley is spotted by Jason and Killed off-screen with his machete. Friday the 13th Part 3 sees Jason Vorhees pick up Shelley’s hockey mask and secure it to his face, and the rest is history.

The rest of Friday the 13th Part 3 shows the guests stalked and killed one by one until the film’s “final girl,” Chris, has a brutal showdown with Jason. On the surface, nothing is really standing out from the majority of the films in the franchise until several points are considered.

Friday the 13th Part 3 is the first time Jason is associated with the hockey mask, certainly worth elevating the film a bit above some of the others. Shelly, in the role of the prankster film trope, is arguably the funniest of these types of characters in any of the franchise’s entries. It’s also important to point out that Chris’s backstory is one of the most compelling of any “final girl” in the series of films as she is presented as a character with a complicated history and serves as a rare example of a fully developed Friday the 13th protagonist.

Friday the 13th Part 3 was also shot in 3-D, the first horror film to offer this feature in a nation-wide theatrical release. The studio didn’t want to lose out on non-3D revenue, so the film was converted by Paramount so it could be watched in the traditional format.

GFR SCORE

The 7% aggregate score on Rotten Tomatoes is an injustice to a film that is leaps and bounds better than many of the others in the franchise. The installments after part 5 are among the worst of any horror franchise, getting progressively more ridiculous as they wear on.

Friday the 13th Part 3 went for the gore and the jump scares without the hokey dialogue and the insistence that it make fun of itself along the way. If you’re intrigued, you can stream Friday the 13th Part 3 with a subscription to Max or rent it On Demand with Vudu, Google Play, and AppleTV.