EDITOR’S NOTE: Friday the 13th Part III 3D was on USA Up All Night on October 30, 1993 and January 13 and 14, 1995.

With Amy Steel uninterested in returning to the series, the filmmakers had to reboot and figure out what made Jason tick. And that ticking was a hockey mask — three movies into the series. The original plan was that Ginny would be confined to a psychiatric hospital and he would track her down, then murder the staff and other patients at the hospital. If this sounds kind of like Halloween 2 to you, well surprise. This is not a movie series known for its originality.

He starts the film by killing a store owner and his wife just for clothes. Then, he goes after the friends of Chris Higgins: Debbie (Tracie Savage, who played the younger Lizzie in the awesome made-for-TV movie The Legend of Lizzie Borden), Andy, Shelley, Vera (Catherine Parks, Weekend at Bernie’s), Rick, Chuck and Chili. They run afoul of bikers Ali, Fox and Loco, who follow them back to their vacation home.

Jason starts killing quick, but he’s already mentally scarred Chris, as she survived an attack from him two years ago. This has left her with serious trauma and an inability to enjoy intimacy (which, come to think of it, comes in handy in these movies).

Jason takes the mask from the dead body of prankster Shelley and it’s on, with speargun bolts to the eye, heads chopped in half with machetes, knives through chests, electrocutions, hot pokers impaling stoners and even someone’s skull getting crushed by Jason’s supernaturally powerful hands.

Of course, it ends up with Final Girl Chris against Jason, who she kills by hitting him in the head with an ax before falling asleep on a canoe. She then dreams that an unmasked Jason runs toward her before Mrs. Vorhees — decomposed but with head reattached — drags her into the lake. Jason’s body is lying in the barn. For now.*

Here’s some trivia: To prevent the film’s plot being leaked (I could tell you the plot in less than a sentence, so this seems like bullshit), the production used the David Bowie song “Crystal Japan” as the title of the movie. They’d use Bowie songs as working titles during several of the other films.

There is a ton of footage that was cut from the film so that it didn’t get an X rating. And there’s an alternate ending where Chris dreams that Jason decapitates her. None of these things make this a better movie.

*Thanks to Bill Gordon for pointing out that I totally wrote that Jason was at the bottom of the lake. In my mind, Jason is at the bottom of the lake all the tinm. Or maybe, as Mike Justice said, “The killer’s body is at the bottom of the lake” is an old Pittsburgh expression meaning, “All’s well that ends well.”