The Third Saturday in October Part V review
The concept behind The Third Saturday in October Part V is a clever one. It presents itself as the fifth entry of a slasher series that you’ve never heard of before…as if you stumbled upon it late one night on TV. While it certainly works as that…it works far less as a lost 90s slasher movie. Obviously made with a love for the genre…Part V misses the mark more often than it should.
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The Third Saturday in October Part V
Directed by Jay Burleson
Written by Jay Burleson
Starring Kansas Bowling, Poppy Cunningham, Taylor Smith, Bart Hyatt and Autumn Jaide
The Third Saturday in October Part V Review
It’s a bit odd to review a movie that intends to be kind of bad. Being bad would make it kind of good, right? As a movie, The Third Saturday in October Part V isn’t very good. On purpose. Congratulations? Let’s instead dive into how successful it is at delivering on its promise. The movie is designed to be a mid-90s installment of a long running slasher franchise. The fifth installment in fact. If The Third Saturday in October Part V worked as either a mid-90s throwback or as a commentary on late-stage slasher sequels…being not very good wouldn’t matter. Unfortunately, it fails more than it succeeds.
When we think of the fifth chapters of popular slasher franchises…they’re easily distinguished by a similar quality. They’re batshit crazy. Whether it’s Dr. Loomis spending the day terrorizing a mute little girl in Halloween, Freddy having a dream child in A Nightmare on Elm Street, or Jason imposter Roy the paramedic killing everyone except the person he’s angry at in Friday the 13th…Part V’s are wild movies. Bad ideas? Most definitely. But ideas, nonetheless. The Third Saturday in October Part V doesn’t take any similar risks. It doesn’t have wild ideas. It doesn’t even make any choices. Mostly…people just walk into a room where the killer takes them out. Kind of the opposite of how over the top slashers get by their part 5s.
It doesn’t work as a mid-90s movie either. 1992 gave us a new horror icon in Candyman. 1994 saw Wes Craven dabble in meta-commentary with his New Nightmare. 1995 was Michael Myers going fully off the rails in Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. The Third Sunday in October doesn’t attempt to be, or comment on, any of what these series were doing in the era. Even if we accept that the movie is set pre-Scream and therefore is uninterested in such commentary (though New Nightmare disproves that) slashers were trying to innovate in the 90s. Often to the detriment of the series…but an attempt was made, nonetheless. Not so with The Third Saturday in October Part V.
Perhaps it’s unfair to compare The Third Saturday in October to higher budget slasher movies from the era it sets itself in. This is also designed to be a low budget slasher, after all. If we concern ourselves solely with the look and feel of the film…it works well enough as a low budget 90s movie. It feels more lazy than cheap…but that could easily have been the intention. It gets right the disposable characters and lack of build that haunts the bad examples of slasher movies from the first half of the 90s.
Set in 1994, The Third Saturday in October Part V revolves around the return of a famous killer named Jack Harding. Unlike Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees obsessions with Halloween and Friday the 13th, respectively…this killer (Jack Harding) reemerges for the big annual football game in Hackelburg, Alabama. Played, of course, on the third Saturday in October. The football game is a great excuse for the movie to gather a group of young people to murder at a party. We get stock characters like the douchebag jock, the wheelchair bound friend, the pretty girls…we even have someone to stutter so that we know he’s not popular.
Our main characters are Maggie (Kansas Bowling) and PJ (Poppy Cunningham). Given the modest ambition this movie thinks fifth installments and 90s movies had…they’re probably going to be safe. That’s a spoiler, I guess. There’s just no way to believe that anything colored outside of the lines is going to happen here. It doesn’t believe that any of those things happened before 1996…despite all evidence to the contrary. Basically, The Third Saturday in October Part V is a very static movie where the killer waits in parts of a house waiting for characters to isolate themselves so he can kill them. On top of the lack of ambition…this movie also has a very slow second act.
Maggie has more in common with Ginny Field from Friday the 13th Part 2 than a 90s final girl. Like Ginny, Maggie knows the lore of the world she’s in but doesn’t know that any of the horror is happening throughout the film. She (and PJ) leaves the party (like Ginny left the camp) and returns to find that the action has already happened. She walks into the third act blind. That’s an unusual situation for a final girl…one that was done much better in a real 1981 movie than in a movie made to represent 1994.
The feeling you get watching The Third Saturday of October Part V is that writer/director Jay Burleson is targeting a very specific thing. I was just never sure exactly what that thing was. Is the goal here to say that franchises get lazy by part 5? Ok. I don’t think that’s true…but it’s at least something. Is the point to show that pre-Scream slashers were out of ideas? Ok. I don’t think that’s true either…but it’s at least something else. If this movie had been sold as a recreation of a low budget VHS era slasher…that would have made more sense. As a new chapter of a running franchise…it never justifies its existence beyond providing the effect of jumping into a running story mid telling. Which has some value. Just not as much as it could have.
Scare Value
What hurts The Third Saturday in October Part V is that it fails to understand its own purpose. There’s no real commentary here on 90s horror, horror sequels or long running franchises. It’s just…the fifth movie in a series that doesn’t exist. Nothing is satirized or even played for laughs. Part V lacks any idea to match its concept. We’re left with a movie that’s just…fine. Which, honestly, probably defeats its own purpose.
For the previous adventures of Jack Harding…check out The Third Saturday in October,
2/5
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The Third Saturday in October Part V Trailer
If you enjoyed this review of The Third Saturday in October Part V, check out Night of the Killer Bears and Kill Her Goats
