Honestly, I think the Friday the 13th series kind of lost its luster after Part 67. Still, it’s mighty impressive that they managed to crank out over a hundred entries in the span of about two years.
Random Thought Before Bed: Self-Satire in Friday the 13th Part 3
Many critics credit Wes Craven’s Scream with starting the trend of self-referential slasher flicks, but having recently re-watched the third entry in the Friday the 13th franchise, I can confirm that the phenomenon dates back to at least 1982. The film’s opening teaser, which lasts approximately six hours fifteen minutes, savvily deconstructs the genre’s already-familiar visual language as a wounded Jason Voorhees stalks and kills the proprietors of a mom-and-pop grocery shop. Granted, it’s not a particularly successful deconstruction—watching a pair of unfunny sitcom characters stumble around in the dark, jumping at the sight of mice and snakes (there’s misdirecting the audience’s attention, and then there’s being obnoxiously coy) until they’re murdered for no discernible reason becomes an interminable bore after about five minutes—but it nevertheless makes a conscious effort to acknowledge the formulaic nature of the slasher narrative. It even offers an explanation as to why the doomed protagonists don’t just drive away at the first sign of trouble (albeit a ridiculously convoluted one that involves a gang of bikers, siphoned gas, and the convenient failure of a car battery) and goes out of its way to lend the comic relief’s annoying hijinks some genuine emotional context and psychological depth (a better movie might have explored how poor Shelly’s brush with a serial killer helped him to discover his true worth, inviting empathy rather than sympathy). Much like the recently-released You’re Next, however, Friday the 13th Part 3 remains far too immersed in the very same tropes and conventions it attempts to criticize; if you’ll allow me to invoke an old cliche of my own, “You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.”