Picking up precisely where Part 2 left off, Jason hobbles out of the foliage of Crystal Lake and, after offing a couple of mom-and-pop grocers in the surprisingly lengthy opening sequence, stumbles upon an isolated vacation retreat on the outskirts of town.

There, a group of misguided youths have gathered for a weekend of boozing and drugging, neglecting the prophetic warnings of Abel (David Wiley), a ragged drifter, who recalls the horrible legend of the area.

One-by-one the youths, as well as a gang of rogue bikers, fall prey to Jason until only Chris (Dana Kimbell) is left alive. It is then she discovers that the masked killer is the same deranged, malformed psycho who attacked and nearly killed her some years before. But this time she gets the best of him. Or does she?

Released theatrically in 1982 amid the early 1980s 3-D boom, the film featured a throng of magnificent visual effects. Among them, a shooting spear gun in the face, a red hot poker through the chest, a lunging rattlesnake, and a dazzling head-squeezing/eye-popping sequence that has gone down in history as one of the greatest 3-D sequences ever shown on the big screen.

This film also marks a series of firsts in the franchise. It is in this movie that Jason dons his trademark hockey mask for the first time. Also, Steve Miner, who once again took over the directing chores, became the first and only director to have worked on two Friday films. Likewise with Martin Kitrosser, the writer, who would later go on to script Part V.