As Dave's review of this film ever so truthfully states, this third chapter of the "Friday the 13th" series, which was filmed in 3D but released to home video in the conventional format, is so enamored of its 3D effects that it forgets to tell a story. Not that it's any great loss. This series was storyless from the beginning.

As usual, there is a gang of teenagers that Jason kills. No one finds out until twenty minutes from the end, when it's down to the last one. The last one runs away from Jason, discovering the bodies of all her friends in the process, kills him, then has a hallucination where something comes back to grab her one last time. What separates part 3 from its kin is that it is actually not Jason who leaps out of the water and drags her from the canoe, it's his dead mother. Revel in the originality.

We open with the customary overlong flashback to the end of the second episode of the series, which serves no other purpose than to screw up those who don't watch the series in order. Then we have the credits sequence, which consists largely of goofy disco music and that insidious chh-hhh-hhh-hha-hha-hha sound repeated ad nauseum. Cut to teens in a van en route to Crystal Lake. "Stop the van!" one shouts to the driver. "What?" the driver asks. "Stop the van!" one repeats. Without quite knowing what's going on, the driver puts on the brakes. And then it is discovered than a man is actually lying down across the road. So the driver didn't see him? Even *after* being told to stop the van and wondering why?

Stuff happens. Some hooligans act mean and follow them to the camp. The female member of the trio walks into a barn and inexplicably finds EVERYTHING in it fascinating -- a saddle, a canteen, a shoe -- touching each object in turn and smiling delightfully. She goes up the ladder to the hayloft and swings out the doors on a rope. One of the other gang members tells her to come down, then looks away for a moment, then is immediately alarmed when he doesn't see her swinging anymore. Wait -- didn't he tell her to come down? Why should he be suspicious? How does he know she isn't on her way down? Of course she isn't -- Jason had killed her -- but that's beside the point.

More deaths happen, unbeknownst to the survivors. How does Jason kill so many screaming victims in secret like that? Later, the heroine confides to her boyfriend a harrowing experience from her past -- a narrow escape from Jason. Her acting is pathetic. She sounds like Jan, relating the horrific injustice of attention and praise lavished upon Marcia.

Obviously there's a shower scene. This one is hilarious. The showeress spends an incredible amount of time soaping and scrubbing her upper chest and shoulders, taking care not to clean anywhere else. There are several cuts away from this scene and back again -- each time, there she is, still rubbing away at her shoulders. There isn't one shot where she scrubs anywhere else. Then, finished, she turns the water off, takes a towel, and dries only her chest and shoulders. Then she gets dressed. This is the movie's funniest -- and only funny -- moment.

More deaths. One guy touches a circuit breaker box, so naturally the electric shock is enough to fry him. At last, only the One Who Lives remains. She (it's always a she) takes off in the van but stalls on a wooden bridge, which starts to buckle under the weight. Apparently this bridge, in spite of the fact that it's on a road, wasn't made to hold actual vehicles.

The One Who Lives runs away some more, screaming in a very annoying fashion and doing all the wrong things when it comes to ridding herself of Jason. Finally she takes an axe to his head. Ordeal over, she does what any sane, normal human being would do after a traumatic experience that killed all her friends: she goes for a canoe ride. And that leads up to Jason's mom leaping out of the water. Yawn.

I haven't even touched upon the 3D effects, which are so gratuitous as to be somewhat amusing. I can see harpoons shooting out of the screen and knives stabbing out of the screen, but when you have to juggle or remove the lid off popping popcorn just to get a cheap 3D effect, some geek behind the camera got a little too sidetracked by the technology.

Rating: 1 turkey, but a small step up from its predecessors.