Friday the 13th Part 3 is one of the better regarded sequels in the slasher franchise, but its final ending scare makes absolutely no sense. As silly as the Friday the 13th movies may seem to outsiders, for horror fans, they’re just as beloved as something like Star Wars or the MCU is to the general moviegoing public. The Friday the 13th films are almost like cinematic comfort food, allowing slasher devotees to sit back and enjoy examples of the sub-genre done right, complete with gory kills, gratuitous nudity, and an iconic killer.
As with every franchise though, Friday the 13th has its better entries and its worse entries, and thankfully, 1982’s Friday the 13th Part 3 is on the good side of the fence in the opinion of most fans. One aspect that really makes the film important is that it plays host to the immortal moment in which Jason Voorhees ditches the potato sack and first acquires his trademark hockey mask. There’s also some really great deaths, including a guy getting chopped down the middle while doing a handstand.
Sure, Friday the 13th Part 3‘s 3D effects aren’t the greatest, but when viewed as they were meant to be seen, at a theater in 3D, they’re actually pretty cool. As good as Friday the 13th Part 3 is though, the sequel certainly isn’t without some plot holes and continuity issues, one involving the very end of the film.
Friday the 13th Part 3’s Final Scare Makes No Sense
As usual for the Friday the 13th franchise, Part 3 ends with the main “final girl” Chris Higgins (Dana Kimmel) managing to take down Jason, at least temporarily. Chris nails Jason in the head with an axe, and that’s enough to render him unconscious. Not knowing what else to do, Chris grabs a canoe and heads out on Crystal Lake, falling asleep. This leads to a nightmare sequence in which the rotted corpse of Pamela Voorhees rises up out the water and snatches Chris, dragging her into the watery depths. Chris is later rescued by the police back in reality.
While it’s obvious that Friday the 13th Part 3‘s final scare with Mrs. Voorhees is a call back to a similar scare in the original film that saw a child Jason rise up out of the water and grab Alice, if one stops to think about it, the sequence makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Part 3 takes place only a short time after Part 2, and there’s no scene in which the latest group of victims is told about the Jason legend. In fact, the name Jason isn’t even spoken outside of footage from the prior films. This means Chris has no idea who her assailant is, much less who his mother was. She’s never met Pamela, or even seen her, and also wouldn’t be aware of Crystal Lake’s connection to the Voorhees family, making her dreaming of Pamela entirely nonsensical. As an additional point, Mrs. Voorhees was decapitated, so why does her dream corpse have a head? While it by no means ruins the movie overall, clearly, very little thought went into this particular ending scene.
