It's been almost two decades since Friday the 13th: The Series left the airwaves (unceremoniously dumped despite having good ratings-particularly for a syndicated show) but horror fans have never forgotten it. Many of us (myself included) still have VHS tapes of the show's episodes from their original air dates. Others have made DVD compilations from reruns aired on The Sci-Fi Channel, Scream, and Chiller over the past twenty years. Despite this level of dedication, it took until this September for fans to finally get a full run of the show on DVD. And while the packages aren't as spectacular as they might have been, I think most of us are just happy to have all the episodes in the digital format. Season 3 sees the series moving in a new direction, but when you get right down to it, it's still pretty much the same show many of us came to know and love.

After two seasons of recovering Satan's cursed antiques, actor and co-star John D. LeMay decided he'd had enough. This departure of one of the show's stars had a profound impact on the third (and final) season of Friday the 13th: The Series-one that it never managed to fully recover from. Viewers new to the anthology show can see this for themselves now that the last batch of episodes has made their debut on DVD.

Ask any serious fan of the series what their least favorite season of the three is and they'll invariably tell you it's Season 3. Ask them why, and the almost universal response is "Johnny". Johnny Ventura, the devil-may-care stud introduced as a supporting cast member in Season 2's Wedding Bell Blues takes over as the full-time male lead in the third season, after LeMay's character is written out (albeit with a potential door to his return left open) in the two part season opener The Prophecies. I'm not sure why the producers thought this would work (an earlier attempt to add a new character to the mix, occult expert Rashid, failed pretty miserably in Seasons 1 and 2), but the show lost momentum with the change (momentum that it never fully recovered) and was gone by the end of this cycle of episodes.

The reasons for Johnny's failing are numerous. He wasn't particularly well-written (the writers made him a little dense for some reason-he was a bit of meathead), he was clearly brought in to create a potential love interest for lead female character Micki (Louise Robey)-something that changed the dynamic of the show, and he had the unenviable task of replacing a character and actor that fans had loved since the series' debut. Actor Steven Monarque gave it his all (and to be fair, Johnny does sort of grow on you as the season progresses-given another year and some tweaking on the writers' part, I suspect fans would have come to accept the character), but the odds were stacked against him from the start.

So, just know that you're in for a character change right off the bat with Season 3. Once you get past that, it's the same old Friday the 13th: The Series we've come to know and love.

In fact, this third set of shows has some really fantastic standout episodes. The season opens with LeMay's swansong, The Prophecies Part 1 and 2. For me, this is one the show's highpoints of the entire run-particularly the first hour, which finds Jack and the gang in a town based on Lourdes, France, duking it out with the demon Astaroth (played with great relish by Fritz Weaver) as he uses the prophecies in The Book of Lucifer to attempt to bring the lord of Hell back to Earth. Fans of the whole biblical horror subgenre should find much to like in The Prophecies, which has an eerie atmosphere and some great imagery.

The rest of Season 3 is a bit scattershot, but the whole is often greater than the sum of the parts. There's another black-and-white time travel episode (Hate on Your Dial-which finds Jack and Johnny trying to recover a cursed car radio from a white supremacist), a Texas Chainsaw Massacre pastiche (The Long Road Home), the return of the cursed Coin of Ziocles in Bad Penny, and more. Season 3 also boasts the only episode in the series to not feature a cursed object (the odd Midnight Riders, although one could make the argument that the Book of Lucifer from The Prophecies wasn't a cursed object, either) and has the distinction of having the weirdest episode of the entire run, My Wife as a Dog (which finds regular guest star Denis Forest playing a fireman using an aboriginal dream leash to swap his dying dog's soul with that of his estranged wife...)

Things end nicely (or as nicely as they can without an actual series finale) in the last episode of the season, The Charnel Pit. This is another time travel episode (this time, a professor is using a double-sided painting done by the Marquis de Sade to send women to the Marquis' time in exchange for new writings from the father of sadism-Micki winds up stuck in the past for awhile), although the segments in the past in this episode are presented in color. The final shot is of the vault doors closing-for what appears to be the last time ever.

By this point, if you've watched or read reviews of the first two season DVD sets, you know what to expect as far as the technical stuff goes-and that's not much. Season 3 doesn't change that-colors are still muted in some scenes and garishly off in others, black levels are all over the place, and the visual quality is best described as "soft". I'm disappointed that more love wasn't put into the transfers of these episodes, but once again I'm just happy to have them at all. There's no real excuse for the poor video quality of the episodes, but beggars can't be choosers. The audio doesn't fare any better. It's all mono, and the volume levels are wonky with dialogue being low at some points while sound effects and music are significantly higher.

Fans hoping to finally get some good supplemental material will also be disappointed. The discs are bare bones, save for some episode promos. I'm incredibly bummed out that no one managed to even shoot some interviews with the cast about their time on the show. I'm sure they could have gotten all of them to do a featurette or something. Instead, we're treated to the episodes and little else.

I hate to be an apologist for a technically flawed release, but yet again I find myself making excuses for why Friday the 13th: The Series is worth owning despite the shoddy quality of the presentation. Having all the episodes on disc outweighs the problems in the presentation for me. These episodes are all over the place-some have aged well, others look horribly dated, but if you lived through that era, the nostalgia factor alone makes these sets worth having in your library.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening