Killtoberfest 6 – #6: Friday the 13th Part III

Shelly: “Bitch.”

Imagine being a native of Melanesia, the grouping of island nations which includes Fiji and Papua New Guinea, east of Australia, south of Guam, and looking up one day at a clear blue sky. It is 1946. The war between the Americans and the Japanese which touched your little part of the world is over. But you remember with excitement the food and goods both sides rained down on you from the sky, and which they often shared with you and your people. It was a time of great plenty and new friends. And when it stopped, when no more manna fell from heaven, you became convinced that there was a way back to that time of plenty. If you could only worship hard enough, build the right icons out of sticks and stones, runways in the sand and wooden planes with no engines, looking just like the ones the soldiers had used–you know their friendship would flow again. Imagine watching the sky for a cloud of exhaust, listening for the drone of a biplane, wanting so badly to see parachutes block out the sun.

Now imagine it worked.

Friday the 13th Part III is cargo cult filmmaking to the core. Its writers, its producer, and its director, Steve Miner, returning from Part II, were chasing the box office success of the original Friday the 13th and its sequel, which each made their budget back many, many times over. So like the Melanesians, they copied what had come before, hoping that to reproduce the formula, even blindly, even in a way where it made about as much as sense as wooden planes on fake runways, would once again bring manna from heaven. And it worked: Part III made $36.7 million against a budget of only $2.3 million, the equivalent today of a $6 million movie earning $100 million. It was supposed to be the end of the trilogy, but nobody got the memo. And why would they? The worship will continue as long as the cargo flows.

The difference between cargo cult filmmaking and simply repeating a formula is that a formula is applied with thoughtful intention. Every James Bond movie features a scene where Q gives Bond his gadgets not simply because every previous Bond movie has done so, but because the formula still works, providing a bit of comic relief and introducing (literal) plot devices that will be used later on in the story. But a cargo cult movie reproduces elements of a formula without understanding why, and often in circumstances where the elements are no longer motivated by the rest of the story. They exist arbitrarily. A guru climbs a pole. The pole is knocked down. What is he sitting on? Friday the 13th Part III hangs suspended in air, in defiance of all logical sense. There are aspects of the film that actually do work well, and some that are bad in a silly enough way to be amusing. But the question remains: why is any of this happening? Why are people being killed? In other words…

• Why is this night different from all other nights?

The original Friday the 13th had a lot of interesting answers to this question, each one considered by the film in turn. Maybe the kids were just unlucky. Maybe Mrs. Voorhees chose Jason’s birthday as a good night for revenge. Maybe in some cosmic fashion these camp counselors had earned death through their behavior. The film’s perspective was not strictly speaking objective; it had an emotional distance and level of irony to it that conveyed a complex set of ideas about who was responsible for the violence it observed. Even Part 2 had a kind of cock-eyed logic to it; as his mother confused one set of camp counselors for the ones who she believed killed her son, a grown-up Jason confused another set of camp counselors for the ones who killed his mother. It didn’t make sense, but it was still a reason.

Part III trades up to Roman numerals but leaves reasons at the door. Why is Jason killing this group of young people, who aren’t even camp counselors but just kids spending the weekend at their cabin? No explanation is ever given, or even hinted at. No directorial perspective exists to answer this question. We just assume now that Jason will continue his killing spree forever.

The movie’s prologue makes more sense along those lines than anything else that happens. Jason stalks (and stalks, and stalks) a couple who live in their roadside store, eventually killing them so he can pick up a change of clothes. (That’s apparently all he needs after the events of the previous movie, which happened yesterday, even though he seemed to be pretty badly wounded in that one.) This brings up a MacBeth-ian question so far unexplored by the Friday the 13th franchise: Jason needs to kill because his pants are bloody, but if in the process of killing to acquire pants those new pants always get bloody, can he ever stop murdering? I guess what I’m saying is that these movies could have ended years ago if somebody had just given Jason a smock.

Anyway, poor, smockless Jason’s next move is to stalk a new group of kids vacationing for the weekend at a cabin by the lake. This means I have to list the names and shallow personalities of the soon-to-be-dead, as is tradition. This time we have… Chris, our new Final Girl; Debbie, who is pregnant, and her boyfriend Andy; stoner couple Chuck and Chili; Vera, set up with a blind date for the weekend, and Shelly, her date and a prankster (this movie’s Ned/Ted equivalent). None of these kids are camp counselors, and this is just a cabin, not a camp. That doesn’t seem to make a difference.

In fact, the cabin is owned by Chris’ family. Nervous about returning here after a period of some years, Chris eventually relates that she was traumatized the last time she visited, when she encountered and was chased by Jason in the woods. The randomness of this backstory symbolizes how far down the chain of second and third-order consequences Part III really is. Jason is no longer part of a story about vengeance; he’s just a force of nature, an event. Like a tornado, he strikes violently, without warning or motive. And there’s no way to avoid him other than by staying far away from Crystal Lake: that’s tornado country.

• Why is this place different from all other places?

Almost every horror movie ever made starts with an apparent idyll that’s eventually revealed to be a nightmare. Part III doesn’t really bother committing to the idyll. Sure, the woods are pleasant, and the cabin is cozy, but the film makes it clear that the bloody massacre in Part 2 has just happened, with the news still giving out the first reports. Part III‘s teens see a cop car, siren blaring, heading toward the roadside store where Jason acquired his new pants (there’s a humorous moment where, sure they’re being pulled over, everybody quickly eats most of their pot, only to see the cops drive right past). Part 2‘s events clearly are big news, and yet doesn’t seem to have dissuaded Chris and her friends from returning to a dangerous area. Perhaps they’re just uninformed.

Even if they haven’t watched the news, they do get a warning to ignore, thanks to another instance of cargo cult filmmaking. Since Crazy Ralph died in the last movie, we get a new creepy old man who warns the kids they’re all going to die in pseudo-Biblical language: “Look upon this omen and go back from whence ye came! I have warned thee,” he shouts, gesticulating while holding a human eyeball. What’s the point of this scene? Ralph’s function in the original film is to clue us in that something bad will happen in a movie where nothing bad had happened yet. But we’re three movies into this franchise and we know what the score is. (Even if we accidentally wandered blindly into the theater, Part III makes sure to open with a repeat of the last five minutes of Part 2.) The weird old man’s warning isn’t new information for us, and the kids seem to forget it the instant the scene is over. Who is it for, then? Nobody.

Jason isn’t the only problem making this supposed idyll seem kind of half-assed; the only other significant interaction in town sees Shelly and Vera starting a blood feud with a biker gang. They’re in this movie for three reasons that I can see. One, to pad out the running time by “developing” Shelly and Vera’s relationship. Two, to pad out the running time by offering up more victims for Jason, after the gang follows the kids back to their cabin. Three, to set up a plot point in which the gang siphons the gas out of the kids’ van so that later that van can run out of gas while the kids are trying to flee from Jason–a scene which, in my opinion, is basically there to pad out the running time. Granted, I would be hard pressed to come up with any scene in this movie that isn’t basically padding. In many ways Part III is the equivalent of receiving one of those 3rd-party seller Amazon boxes containing nothing but a handful of rocks the exact weight of the laptop you were hoping for. You cut open the tape, set down the scissors, open the flaps, and stare, wondering: Did I get drunk and buy some rocks? Is that what’s happened here?

• Why are these characters different from those in all other movies?

Every Friday the 13th character, and I mean all of them, are basically cardboard cutouts that the filmmakers have attached strings to so they can wave their arms around like screaming, dying Muppets. You can’t really relate to them as people, the way you relate to characters in other movies. You can only observe them. In Friday the 13th, the camera observed them, too, and noticed them doing things (sex, drugs) that drew violence to them. Even in Part II there’s some traditional “don’t go off alone” going on, where the characters were, if not “immoral” by the killer’s standards, at least acting stupidly given the danger.

Part III takes this a step too far. With one exception (more on that later), this entry in the franchise replaces behavior deserving of violence with hateable types. And it’s not that Jason hates them, either–that mute galoot never communicates his preferences to us, even through any directorial implications. That might make the killings make sense. No, we hate them. Or at least, we’re supposed to. Supposed to go, “Look at the hippies,” or “Look at the bikers,” or “Look at the dumb townies.” Whatever your 1980s cultural or countercultural bugaboo, Friday the 13th Part III has a lazy stereotype waiting to get slashed for your enjoyment.

Is it okay to enjoy murders on screen? Yes, sometimes. There’s a kind of cathartic exhilaration in seeing your worst imaginings play out. There can be a visceral joy in watching a kind of cinematic vengeance enacted against those who truly deserve it. There are themes and there’s art and at the end of the day, mostly it’s not blood on screen, it’s just red. I don’t judge anyone for getting a kick out of even a Friday the 13th movie, one of the basest, barest examples of the form.

But what does make me mad is pandering. And Part III–filmed in 3D and full of ridiculous shots of axes, body parts, and yo-yos coming right out of the screen at your face–it panders, because it is desperate to be liked. Lazily, it engages your cheapest impulses and prejudices. Without any real reason it throws a half dozen bikers into the meat grinder. It’s just hoping you’ll think they’re dicks who deserved it. Likewise Chili and Chuck, who I guess are supposed to deserve getting cut up because ha ha, they’re potheads. People in Part III get killed on the toilet, get killed while committing crimes, get killed in places and ways that are supposed to get my blood pumping, to amuse or exalt or otherwise fulfill me while their blood is spilling. Every Friday the 13th victim is made to die. These more so than most. That bothers me.

• Why are those who survive different from those who die?

If horror movies teach us lessons, I’m not so sure Part III says what it actually wants to say. Or maybe I’m just not sure I agree.

If you’re following along at home, you’ll notice that this is the movie where Jason gets his iconic mask–and what that mask means, and will continue to mean going forward, is where the film and I have a difference of opinion. Because there’s this movie’s Final Girl, Chris, and then there’s the girl who should have been the last one standing instead. Like just about everybody else in the movie, Vera was made to die, while Chris was made to live. What a shame.

See, just like the previous film’s Final Girl felt like she’d been created for that purpose, given absurd insight into Jason’s history and personality so that she could have the best chance at surviving, Part III‘s Chris feels as though she belongs in a different movie entirely. She spends almost the whole film away from the rest of her friends, wandering through the woods with her would-be boyfriend, Rick. While they’re having encounters with the locals and enjoying the lake, Chris and Rick are talking through her reluctance to return to the area (and to her relationship with him). While everyone else is getting murdered, Chris is walking home after Rick’s car stalls out. She arrives pretty much just in time to find all the bodies, triggering the extended chase/fight sequence that ends every one of these movies. Chris fulfills the role of the Final Girl in the plot, but it feels meaningless, another wooden airplane, another guru sitting on air, because her story has nothing to do with anything in the rest of the film, thematically or otherwise.

Vera’s story, on the other hand, is tailor made for Final Girl status, if the film would only see it. Because at bottom, whether it wants to be or not, Part III is about the male drive to use and hurt women.

Like a lot of ’80s movies, Part III inadvertently offers a number of competing visions of masculinity, none of them very good. There’s the shopkeeper, a cliche portrait of the long-suffering husband with the nagging wife. There’s Rick, who pressures Chris to have sex and acts like a jerk when she won’t. But the film’s most complex portrait of masculinity gone awry is Shelly, Vera’s blind date.

I said earlier that Shelly was this film’s equivalent of Ned and Ted from earlier Friday the 13ths, young men whose douchey pranks invariably led to somebody or other heading to their doom saying, “Come on, man, this isn’t funny,” in the face of serious danger. There’s a lesson there, but none of these movies improves in that direction on “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” so we’ll leave it at that. Anyway, that’s not Shelly’s problem, even though his pranks are terrible–especially when he puts on a scary mask and jumps out at people, or pretends to be dead, as he does several times throughout the film. Sometimes he scares Chris, who’s suffering from traumatic memories of being chased through the woods by a masked killer. It’s not good.

But the problem with Shelly isn’t that he’s a jerk, it’s that he knows he’s a jerk and does it on purpose, which I think we can all agree is worse. Pudgy, with big, curly hair, Shelly Finkelstein’s obvious Jewishness is all part of the film telling us this guy doesn’t do well with women. Shelly knows that, too. He’s so down on himself that he acts out, figuring he’d rather be a jerk than a loser. The disaffection of young men who worry about not getting laid is no joke, but a powerful destructive force in many societies. These are men who would rather be hated than pitied, who hurt women because they feel powerless. Toxic masculinity is found more in the Shellys of this world than with the Ricks, because there’s nothing so toxic as the person who wants to be masculine but feels that they can’t. “Being a jerk is better than being a nothing,” says Shelly. “I never said you were a nothing,” says Vera, but the true answer here is that being a nothing is better–for the people around you, at least.

Shelly’s interactions with Vera over the course of the film play like the making of a killer of women, or maybe a cartoon supervillain. He pranks her, scares her, is awkward around her, tries to impress her in destructive ways (“standing up” to the gang by running over their bikes), ultimately makes a pass at her and is rejected. It’s so easy to feel sorry for him, and I’m sure that’s what the film wants us to do. But when Vera turns him down and leaves the room, Shelly calls her a bitch under his breath. The difference between a nice guy and a “nice guy” is that the latter always lash out when they don’t get what they want. And indeed, Shelly reacts by trying to scare Vera again, this time emerging from the lake in front of her in a hockey mask and carrying a harpoon gun.

I think the film wants us to look at the hockey mask and the harpoon gun as toys, tools of sport that young men use to have fun. When Jason kills Shelly and takes them for himself, we’re supposed to be reminded of Jason’s childish nature, of the tragic irony of a little boy who grew up physically but not mentally or emotionally.

But I look at Vera, seeing Jason in the mask and confusing him for Shelly, and I see the real message of Part III, intentional or not. Shelly felt low after Vera rejected him, and he responded by acting out in a mean, thoughtless way, by scaring her, and he did it using items that made him feel more like a man–a hockey mask like a jock would wear, the compensatory, phallic weapon. Shelly was wearing a mask of masculinity, but there are three layers there. The surface, the way he wants to perceived, as someone powerful; the pathetic reality, a wounded boy pretending to be strong; and underneath it all, the sublimated drive to hurt others, to scare bitches, a subtext of rage. Jason is that rage unleashed–the anger and violence of a man who never grew up. By killing Vera in Shelly’s mask, Jason enacts Shelly’s darkest impulses, embodying the toxicity at the core of Shelly’s personality. Whether the movie agrees with me or not, I believe Jason’s mask will forever reflect that anger and that rage, directed at everyone but especially at women, at all the women, down to that last Final Girl.

Vera should have survived to conquer the negative masculinity in Jason that she tried to deflect in Shelly. But maybe it’s for the best, because things don’t work out well for Chris, either. Even though she kills Jason, first hanging him from the barn, then hitting him in the face with an axe, Chris sees Jason getting up again, coming after her, unstoppable. Far from finding the catharsis she returned to Crystal Lake to get, the satisfaction that murdering her nightmare should have brought, Chris seems to have gone insane. This time, instead of being bundled off an in ambulance, the Final Girl rides away in the back of a cop car, screaming and laughing, wild and broken.

It’s a sick joke of an ending, as pointless as anything else in Part III. But I don’t know why I expected anything different. In a series that’s gone from a complicated reckoning with sexual desire, especially male desire, to a movie that sympathizes with Rick’s frustration, with Shelly’s self-loathing, with that growl of “bitch,” more than it does with Vera’s choices and Chris’ fears, why should I expect a Friday the 13th movie to respect its Final Girl? Here’s a trope that’s supposed to be about women triumphing over adversity, and now it’s just an excuse to extend their suffering. Imagine being a producer, and reading that script. Imagine signing off on it. Imagine looking up at the sky and waiting for cargo you know you don’t deserve.

---

Every year, Kyu attempts to watch and review 31 horror movies in 31 days. This year, it’s Killtoberfest 666, because the devil will always come back again. Check out past Killtoberfests along with this year’s reviews, and be sure to follow us on Twitter @insidethekraken to track Kyu’s progress.