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| Release: 1988, Pages: 172 |
Everyone who reads my site knows that I love novelizations of movies. I just can’t get enough of them. They read fast, they offer insight into the characters mind and sometimes even provide material that was cut from the movie. Friday the 13th Part 3, written by Simon Hawke, for the most part is no different. It offers some nice insight into what makes Jason tick and it provides some backstory on the events after Part 1 and 2, but sadly it sticks a little too closely to the movie script and rarely provides anything extra. Read on to see if my love of Jason get’s tarnished or not…
Short nitty-gritty plot description from the back cover is as follows: ONCE WAS NOT ENOUGH… Beautiful, auburn-haired, nineteen-year-old Chris was going back. Back to the place where the others had been hideously butchered. Back to where she had been found near-mad with terror. Back to prove to herself that the horror was over and she could live and love again. This time she brought her friends. They all thought the weekend would be a kick. All they had in mind was goofing off and getting off on fun and games. It was party time-until an uninvited guest showed up. His name was Jason…and he was out to have a bloody ball of his own.
If you’ve seen Friday the 13th Part III the movie, than you know exactly how the book is going to play out. It starts off where the movie starts and ends exactly where the movie ends. Like I said before, there are a few chapters where we get to be inside Jason Voorhees (spelt Vorhees in the book for some odd reason) head and see what makes him tick. We learn that Jason has regenerative abilities and that he did infact drown and come back to life. He witnessed his mother’s beheading and due to that, the rage filled up inside him and now he must keep killing to satisfy that hunger.
However, I do have to knock some points off the book for how closely it
sticks to the screenplay. You can pretty much see the movie play out in
your head while reading and guess the dialog before it even comes up. I know, I shouldn’t complain that a book based on a movie is so much
like the movie, but I gotta say, I like when they add a little extra. For example, the book really shined when we get to that aforementioned back story on Jason’s past events and how he managed to escape into the woods after Friday the 13th Part 2 and backtracked around the lake to avoid being detected by the police and dogs. Also, we find out that the cottage that Chris and her friends are staying at, is in fact next to the lake, even though the movie makes it seem like it’s near a dirty pond. These are all things that I love about novelizations, getting that extra little bit of information, so when you pop the movie in again, you can appreciate it even more.
In the end, despite it’s mistakes (incorrect spelling of Jason’s name and sticking too close to movie), I loved the book and would recommend you try to seek it out and pick it up. (However, it is pretty hard to come by nowadays, as is most of Simon Hawke’s novelizations of the Friday the 13th movies, of which there are four.) Friday the 13th Part 3 reads super quick, offers some nice details on how Jason thinks and for those gorehounds out there, the way Jason dispatches his victims in the book is much more brutal than the movie,
especially Rick’s eye popping kill, which just sounded so damn painful and a lot less cheesy looking.
Rating: 4/5 (I can’t help it, I just love Jason and the Friday the 13th series)