Dana Kimmell
Dana Kimmell is an actor, born 1959.
The whole of Dana Kimmell's screen career fits inside about a decade. She came out of Texarkana, Texas, into television at the turn of the 1980s, with episodes of Hart to Hart and Bosom Buddies, the daytime serial Texas (1980) and short-lived series like Code Red and Hollywood Beat, and by 1982 she was carrying Friday the 13th Part III, which opened at number one at the American box office.
The part is harder than the genre's reputation suggests. Chris Higgins has to hold the exposition, the dread and the last stretch of a 3D horror film aimed at an audience that turned up for the effects, and Kimmell plays her with an unfashionable seriousness. There is no winking and no camp in it, just a young woman who is frightened in a way the film keeps taking seriously, and that is a large part of why the third entry is the one people still argue about.
She stayed in the orbit of that role longer than she stayed in the business. Footage of her turns up in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984) and again, uncredited, in Part VII (1988), by which point she had largely moved on. In between she was Sally McQuade in Lone Wolf McQuade (1983) and a teenager in the slasher Sweet Sixteen the same year, and after By Dawn's Early Light and Night Angel in 1990 the credits stop. It is a small filmography with one genuinely enduring performance inside it, which is more than most careers manage.
Movies (7)
TV (5)
Where to start with Dana Kimmell
Friday the 13th Part III is the reason this page exists, so start there and set your expectations correctly. It is a 3D gimmick picture with objects thrown at the camera at regular intervals, and Kimmell is playing it as though she has been cast in something better. That gap is precisely what makes it watchable now.
Sweet Sixteen is the companion piece, a slasher with a whodunnit structure that gives her more to do with dialogue and less to do with screaming. Lone Wolf McQuade is the outlier and the most fun of the three, a Texas-set action western that puts her in danger without treating her as a slasher victim, and it is a better film than its reputation.
If you are completist about the series, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter and Friday the 13th Part VII - The New Blood both reuse her footage, which is a strange sort of afterlife for a performance.