Friday the 13th Pt 2 (1981) – Review

When a low budget horror film, one created simply to cash in on the success of another, makes almost ten times its investment back it shouldn’t be considered all that shocking if the studio wanted a sequel right quick. Enter first-time director Steve Miner and the creation of one of horror’s most iconic screen villains, Jason Voorhees.

Sean S. Cunningham, who had created the original Friday the 13th film, pictured the sequel becoming the next installment of what could have become a fun anthology series, this was not to be, instead, the continuing misadventures of Camp Crystal Lake would be the setting for the foreseeable future films. The big question to the filmmakers was “Who would be the antagonist needed to knock off the next round of camp counsellors?” Mrs. Voorhees (Betsy Palmer) had her head cleanly removed at the end of the previous film, and even though we got that shocking moment with a young Jason leaping out of the water at Alice Hardy (Adrienne King) it was clear that this was simply a product of her traumatized mind, Jason was not some zombie living under the surface of Crystal Lake, or was he?

“Later I will be resurrected by lightning, does that count?”

Cunningham himself thought the idea of Jason being the villain for the sequel was one of the stupidest things he’d ever heard and actress Betsy Palmer is on record stating, “I don’t know who that guy in the hockey mask is but he’s not my son. Jason is dead and at the bottom of Crystal Lake.” Two very valid points of view and this movie doesn’t bother to explain anything about Jason or how he’s been spending his time during the last twenty-one years since presumably not drowning, which raises the big question, “If he never drown in the first place what the hell was his mom so upset about?” Or is it possible that she was such a terrible mother that he faked his own death and then hid out in the woods until she was beheaded by Alice?

If that’s the case having a shrine to her makes very little sense.

The movie opens with a prologue where we find sole survivor Alice Hardy living alone and recovering from her traumatic experience at Camp Crystal Lake, despite the protestations of her mother that she should come home, and sadly it turns out that maybe she should have listened to her mother because faster than you can say “Ki-ki-ki, ma-ma-ma” she finds the decomposing head of Mrs. Voorhees in her fridge and catches an icepick to the head. This kind of pissed me off, not only is the murdering of the previous film’s Final Girl a big “Fuck you” and sure there were extenuating circumstances surround a real-life stalker that Adrienne King was dealing with, but that doesn’t excuse lazy writing. That thirteen-minute prologue poses some serious issues such as, “How did Jason know where Alice lived? How did he get there from Crystal Lake? Did he take a bus and if so did any of his fellow passengers wonder who the dude with the burlap sack over his head was?”

“What do you mean, exact change?”

The true crime here is the fact that if that entire prologue had been cut it would have changed nothing, and they could have even used all that flashback footage during the campfire storytelling sequence without having to mention Alice disappearing, but instead we get a nonsensical opening to a movie that wasn’t going to make a lot of sense to anyone who had seen the previous film. Jason has to have been a figment of Alice’s imagination because if he wasn’t dead it removes the motivations of Mrs. Voorhees and completely undercuts the original film. It’s no surprise that Sean S. Cunningham, screenwriter Victor Miller and special effects legend Tom Savini decided not to return.

“You’re doomed! You’re all doomed!”

There isn’t much of a plot to Friday the 13th Pt 2 as director Steve Minor and screenwriter Ron Kurz seemed to be following a horror movie algorithm to ensure their film was as big a hit as its predecessor and, apparently, intelligent storytelling wasn’t part of that algorithm. We have Paul Holt (John Furey) opening a school for camp counsellors that is located across from the infamous “Camp Blood” and he is ably assisted by Ginny Fields (Amy Steel) who he is also having an affair with, and while all the various camp counsellors frolic and play a dark cloud falls across the camp, a cloud in the form of a machete-wielding Jason Voorhees (Warrington Gillette), who proceeds to murder the counsellors for no discernable reason. In the first film, Mrs. Voorhees had a logical if twisted motivation for her killings, that of preventing the camp from opening and kids like her son being endangered, but Jason has no such motivation and is more akin to Michael Myers from Halloween, and emotionless killing machine. The first film was made to cash in on John Carpenter’s film yet the reveal of the mother being the killer was a nice twist, but then in the sequel, we get a mute Jason hacking apart random teenager, which basically turned this film into more of a clone of Halloween than the original was.

“Have any of you guys seen Donald Pleasance around?”

Stray Observations:

• When the first six minutes of a ninety-six-minute movie consist mostly of flashbacks from the original film you know there must still be budget issues.
• Not only is the date Friday the 13th never mentioned but the killings also take place over two days.
• This sequel takes place at a school for camp counsellors, is that even a thing?
• The camp’s resident prankster surprisingly survives this film, in fact, the last we see of him he was looking for an after-hours bar.
• Jason murdering Crazy Ralph has me wondering “Was he tired of the old coot warning off potential victims away?”
• We see over a dozen counsellors attending this “school” but Jason barely manages to kill a handful.  Talk about a slacker.
• Ginny breaks one of the “Final Girl” rules by having sex.
• A camp counsellor in a wheelchair seems like a strange case of affirmative action for an 80s film, but it did illustrate that Jason doesn’t discriminate when it comes to victims.

I’m assuming Jason was a huge fan of the film Kiss of Death.

As an antagonist, the Jason in Friday the 13th Pt 2 is far from the hulking unstoppable killing machine that would become in later films because here he’s taken out by a kick to the balls and even falls off a chair while trying to kill Ginny, which certainly takes away some of that imposing factor he so tries to implement, but speaking of the final girl, she is easily one of the more interesting ones to appear in the series. Ginny is shown to be quite an intelligent woman as we see he beat her boyfriend at chess and uses her knowledge of child psychology to mess with Jason’s head and this was something not seen too often in this franchise. If Friday the 13th Pt 2 is guilty of anything it’s in not trusting the audience to want something new, which resulted in a script that made little to no sense and provided us with a killer who was slightly more threatening than Mr. Rogers.

Note: The film tried to replicate the jump scare ending from the original film, by having Jason burst through the window to grab Ginny, but then the film fades to white and eventually reveals that Ginny is fine, being wheeled into an ambulance, but we have no idea what happened to her boyfriend Paul or to Jason. If it was Steve Miner’s intention to confuse and piss off a viewer consider this a success.