Friday the 13th, Part 3 -- IN 3D!!!!!!!!!!!

[Javakoala]

Yeah, I bought this. My curiosity was getting the better of me and they had it fairly cheap on Amazon, so....

I hated this movie the first time I saw it. It just is there. It does nothing, goes nowhere, and other than the guy who does handstands getting whacked, the murders aren't all the gruesome. And watching it 2D all these years just made me realize I was missing the ONLY reason to watch this time-waster, and that was the 3D.

I watched it with my girlfriend, and the 3D was worthwhile enough that I managed to keep my hands to myself through the whole mess. It makes me want to watch more of this kind of thing. The movie itself still sucked, but some of the average shots were more intense in 3D than the ones that played to the gimmick.  Hands down best shot was of the kids playing ball in the street as the future victims stop to pick another friend. It was unreal.

If you have money to throw at it, throw. It is worth it just for the "Oh, that looked cool" factor.

[Paquita]

It came with 3D glasses, right?  Were they the red & bue ones or the clear ones? I got the Freddy's Dead in 3D and it came ith red/blue glasses and I used them but I really didn't see anything that was crazy awesome 3D! Just a little bit 3D.  I thought maybe it was just really crappy or my TV wasn't showing it right.

[HappyGilmore]

The best thing about this movie: Shelly.  Dude was awesome.

[Menaaard!!!]

It came with 3D glasses, right?  Were they the red & bue ones or the clear ones? I got the Freddy's Dead in 3D and it came ith red/blue glasses and I used them but I really didn't see anything that was crazy awesome 3D! Just a little bit 3D.  I thought maybe it was just really crappy or my TV wasn't showing it right.

It's the anaglyph red/blue (red/cyan) glasses. Polarized 3D, which uses the gray looking glasses, won't work on video as there has to be a reflected image for that to work.

The reason that polarizing works better than anaglyph, and hence double images with anaglyph, is that the polarized image has a 90 degree shift from the original image for each right and left part respectively. As such, when the glasses are worn, and each lens also has an equivalent 90 degree shift, each eye, right and left, can only see the image intended for that eye, and none of the opposite image.

That is not true with anaglyph unless the image is entirely comprised of the colors of the lenses (red/blue, red/green, red/cyan).

Being that a full color image viewed in anaglyph is going to consist of colors which cannot be blocked completely by each lens, each eye will see parts of the image intended for the opposite eye, resulting in a double or ghosted image; not to mention that combining two images into a limited video format does not lend itself well to 3D with its limited resolution.

There was a version of F13 3D released, on VHS though, which worked with shutterglasses. Being that shutterglasses sync with the right/left respective images (right blocks left; left blocks right), it can produce quite an effective 'out of the box' 3D effect on television; plus, being that each eye sees an image using the full video resolution, the image quality is better. There is a caveat with shutterglasses technology (aside from the headaches) in that it depends on the interlaced scanning of the television image, meaning that it won't work with a progressive scan DVD player or television set.

There are two other types of 3D glasses: Pulfrich and Chromadepth.

Pulfrich glasses come with one clear lens and one dark lens. They are based on the Pulfrich effect name after the physicist Carl Pulfrich. Using one dark lens (that's really all that it requires), cause one eye to see a separate image from the other due to it creating a split second delay between the images seen by each eye. This does not necessarily cause a 3D effect unless the subject of the video is moving in a certain direction across the frame of the camera; left to right or right to left, which would also determine which eye needs to wear which lens.

Chromadepth uses diffraction lenses which causes a depth effect in a color image by arranging the colors in depth according to their natural position in the color spectrum. Again, an image/video has to be optimized to take advantage of this.

There is actually no such thing as true 3D vision. The 3D image we see when each eye is presented with an image of the same scene, but each with a different perspective of that scene, is how the cortical area of the brain translates it when present with two disparate images. Being that there is no spacial information included with the two images, the brain will compensate, and depending on that compensation, different people can have different results viewing the same 3D images. This is also why 3D works so well in images and movies as how our brains translate it is often exaggerated in spaciality.

Some vision problems can cause difficulty in viewing 3D. Of course, it does require being able to see with two eyes in the first place.


There are some interesting bits of trivia concerning those either directly involved with 3D, or whose works contributed to developments in it.

Carl Pulfrich was blind in one eye. He would never be able to see the result of his work.

Andre De Toth, the director of House of Wax 3D (1953), only had one eye. He was never able to see his movie in the way it was intended to be seen.


Sorry, got carried away.

[Javakoala]

It came with 3D glasses, right?  Were they the red & bue ones or the clear ones? I got the Freddy's Dead in 3D and it came ith red/blue glasses and I used them but I really didn't see anything that was crazy awesome 3D! Just a little bit 3D.  I thought maybe it was just really crappy or my TV wasn't showing it right.

Now that my head is hurting from the science lesson....  Thanks Menard. I didn't know the history of the whole 3D image thing. Pretty cool. 

The movie comes with the red/blue glasses, so you do get the ghosting, but it still worked rather well.  If you can rent it, you might do that, just to see if you like it.  But I'll watch it again and again, just for the 3D image. The movie still sucks.

[Javakoala]

The best thing about this movie: Shelly.  Dude was awesome.

Uh, wow.  <uncomfortable pause>  You, uh, liked the character?  Feel sorry for...maybe. But like?  To be honest, none of the characters are very likable, which was the main reason I don't care for the movie itself.

[The Burgomaster]

I bought COMIN' AT YA! in 3-D on DVD a few years ago.  They used the red-green anaglyph glasses, which are terrible when the movie is in color.  As a result, all you get is a blurry double image and distorted colors.  Terrible.

I also bought a couple sets of the gray-lensed "flicker" glasses and some special 3-D DVDs.  This 3-D system works pretty well.  I bought HOUSE OF WAX (the original) and ANDY WARHOL'S FRANKENSTEIN on eBay and the 3-D effects are good.  I also have some other movies like CAMP BLOOD and THE ZOMBIE CHRONICLES that have both 2-D and 3-D versions of the movie on them.

I also have THE BUBBLE, which uses the red-green anaglyph glasses.

And I was in Best Buy the other day and saw THE STEWARDESSES, which had both a black-and-white 3-D version of the movie and a color 2-D version.

When I was a teenager, I had 17 minute versions of CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON and IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE in 3-D for my super-8mm sound movie projector!  I paid about $49.99 for them and sold them on eBay 7 or 8 years ago for about $70 each.

[HappyGilmore]

The best thing about this movie: Shelly.  Dude was awesome.

Uh, wow.  <uncomfortable pause>  You, uh, liked the character?  Feel sorry for...maybe. But like?  To be honest, none of the characters are very likable, which was the main reason I don't care for the movie itself.

Yeah I did.  While I agree that the majority of the characters were unlikable, Shelly was probably the most likable of the bunch.  Plus, wasn't it his hockey mask that Jason eventually found?  He was very vital to the franchise.

[Javakoala]

The best thing about this movie: Shelly.  Dude was awesome.

Uh, wow.  <uncomfortable pause>  You, uh, liked the character?  Feel sorry for...maybe. But like?  To be honest, none of the characters are very likable, which was the main reason I don't care for the movie itself.

Yeah I did.  While I agree that the majority of the characters were unlikable, Shelly was probably the most likable of the bunch.  Plus, wasn't it his hockey mask that Jason eventually found?  He was very vital to the franchise.

Okay, karma for that viewpoint. Excellent way to look at the movie.

[Javakoala]

Andre De Toth, the director of House of Wax 3D (1953), only had one eye. He was never able to see his movie in the way it was intended to be seen.


Sorry, got carried away.

This kinda creeped me out.  You posted this, and today, while I was reading this dreadfully bad horror novel, they referenced this fact, and phrased it almost WORD-FOR-WORD as you did.  Utterly mental, that was. Just had to share that.

[Paquita]

Thanks for the History of 3D!  I needed to get a snack to read that.