Friday the 13th, Part 2 (1981)

A few months ago I composed  a list of my top 25 horror films and had Friday the 13th, Part 2 ranked at number 25. I was initially going to leave it at that, but after having watched the movie again, I realized that there was much more that needed to be said.
Friday the 13th, Part 2 is my favorite entry in the critically maligned series. Part 2, in particular, felt the wrath of the critics; Roger Ebert gave it half a star, while Leonard Maltin in his movie guide book rates it a BOMB. This isn't too surprising as there is nothing remotely original about Friday the 13th, Part 2, it slavishly follows the formula of the first film:

1) Friday the 13th begins with a pre-credits scare sequence. In 1958, two horny camp counselors gets offed by an unseen assailant. In Friday the 13th, Part 2, Alice, the survivor of the first film, gets killed off by an unseen assailant.

2) The introduction of the secondary characters. In Friday the 13th, the first character we are introduced to (after the credits) is Annie, who is hitchhiking her way to Camp Crystal Lake, she is to be the cook. She wanders into a small town and stops in a local diner to get directions to the summer camp. At first she is given the shifty eyed treatment by the locals, but eventually a kindly truck driver offers to give her a partial lift.  While driving his truck, he warns her about all the wrong doings that have occurred there and advises her to quit. She laughs him off as being superstitious. In Part 2, the first characters we meet (after the credits) are the busty Sandra and her boyfriend Jeffrey. Like Annie, they arrive in a small town. Unlike Annie, they have a means of transportation, Jeffrey's black pick up truck. Jeffrey gets inside a phone booth and dials the number of his friend, Ted, to get directions to the camp. As Jeffrey is talking on the phone, his pick up truck is getting towed away. Sandra alerts him to this and they chase after it, imploring the driver of the two truck to stop. This, however, turns out to be a prank arranged by Ted. The three of them have a good laugh and drive up to the summer camp.

3) The heroine in both films is one of the last characters to be introduced. In Friday the 13th, Alice's introduction doesn't come until fifteen minutes into the movie. In Part 2, Ginny makes her entrance around the twenty minute mark. There's a lot of bait and switch going on in both films; in Friday the 13th, the audience is tricked into believing that Annie is the main protagonist, only for her be killed off in the early going. Annie is your ideal American Girl, apple cheeked with a sunny disposition. She has the ability to brighten up her surroundings, which makes her death even more shocking. The makers of Part 2, try to the same tactic with Sandra and Jeffrey. They are two fairly likable, and attractive, teenagers that most of us in the audience wouldn't mind having a beer with. However, once the character of Ginny enters the scene, we know they are doomed to suffer the same grizzly fate as Annie.
However, Alice and Ginny are radically different heroines. Alice is a fairly passive character for the first hour of the movie, to the point of being a non-entity. It's only when she's left to her own devices that she's able to assert herself as being the film's protagonist. Ginny, on the other hand, is fairly proactive from the get go. The other camp counselors, especially Paul, are fairly dismissive when it comes to the topic of Jason. They view him as being a legend cooked up the locals to scare away outsiders.  However, Ginny takes Jason very seriously; she is studying child psychiatry and tries to understand Jason from a psychological view point. She is the first to recognize the threat of Jason, while the others are off screwing around.

4. Crazy Ralph. Ralph is a local drunk and doomsayer. In the first two installments of The Friday the 13th series he warns the counselors that they are all doomed if they go to Camp Crystal Lake. In the first one, he approaches Annie in the street and screams, "YOU'RE DOOMED!" In Part II, while Jeffrey is in the phone booth, Crazy Ralph pops out of nowhere and preaches his prophecy of doom, much to Jeffrey's bemusement. Sadly, Crazy Ralph doesn't take his own advice to heart, for he bicycles down to the camp and gets garrotted by Jason.

"If Friday the 13th, Part 2 is such a carbon copy of the first film, then how can it be your favorite of the series?" you might be asking, or not. How can something so completely unoriginal be better than the film that preceded it? While there is nothing innovative about Part 2, there are a few things that it manages to do better than the original, like........

1) The Villain. I always thought that the "twist" ending to Friday the 13th (Pamela Voorhees, Jason's mother, is the killer) undermined the horror that came before it. Pamela Voorhees is a middle aged woman and not in particularly good shape, yet is some how capable of performing some extraordinary physical feats. How could a woman of her stature, for instance, toss the body of recently murdered Brenda through a raised window? How could she overpower a much younger and stronger Bill and impale his body so that it's hanging a few feet off the ground? This would require super strength, something that Mrs. Voorhees doesn't possess; she can't even hold her own against the rather ineffectual Alice. Plus, Betsy Palmer's performance is so ridiculously over the top, that it is often more comical than scary. She possesses super speed as well, seconds after tossing Brenda's corpse through the window she manages to pull up in a jeep.  The film tries to overlook this fact by giving a Mrs. Voorhees a more "mannish" appearance - she has short hair and they bulk up her frame by having her wear a thick sweater.  Still, I don't know anyone that is remotely scared by Pamela Voorhees.

Jason, on the other hand, is much more formidable foe than his crazy mother. It easy to believe that a man of his physique would pose a serious threat to Ginny and the other camp counselors. Jason is sheer brute force. However, one of the main reasons I like Part 2 the best is that Jason is a rather clumsy, and therefore, a more believable serial killer. With each progressing sequel Jason became more and more of a Super Human to the point that he seemingly developed the ability to teleport; his victims would out distance him by a good mile or so, but then cut to close up and there would be Jason standing right in front of them, brandishing some implement of destruction. When Jason became a super natural being, it drained the reality out of the franchise (and suspense) out of the franchise. In Part 2, it's Jason determination and devotion to his deceased mother that makes him frightening. He doesn't teleport, or for that matter crush skulls with his bare hands, but he does have the element of surprise going for him.

2) Heroine. Amy Steel is my favorite leading lady in the entire Friday the 13th series and a genuinely good actress. For instance, take the scene at the end in which Ginny dons Mrs. Voorhees' nasty sweater and tricks Jason into believing that she is his deceased mother. It's a rather ridiculous moment, but Steel manages to sell the living hell out of it and somehow makes it work.
I mentioned how Alice (Adrienne King) is almost a non-entity in the first Friday the 13th film, but that basically applies to most of the leading ladies in the series, Amy Steel being the exception. She manages to inject a lot warmth, humor, and intelligence in to what could have easily been a thankless role. The other leading ladies tended be rather humorless and fairly stiff in their performances; Dana Kimmell in Part 3, for example. The only actress in the series that really comes close to matching Steel's performance is Jennifer Cooke in Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives. She gives a  fairly lively performance as Megan, but she is often shoved to the sidelines to make room for Zombie Jason and Tommy Jarvis (played in dour fashion by Thom Matthews.)   Hell, by the time Jason Takes Manhattan came along, the "lead actress" was more or less relegated to supporting player, while Jason was elevated to "hero" status.

The slasher films have often been accused of being misogynistic and moralistic - the sexually promiscuous woman is hacked to pieces, while the virginal woman is rewarded for her virtuous lifestyle by being allowed to survive the night. However, the first two Friday the 13th films throws a monkey wrench into that criticism, because not only are both the heroines sexually active (Alice is sleeping with her boss Steve Christy, Ginny and Paul make love in her cabin), but they indulge in some worldly vices; Alice smokes pot and partakes in a game of strip Monopoly, while Ginny tells sick jokes and goes to the bar with other camp counselors. They may be nice girls, but they are certainly no angels.

3) Scarier Opening Sequence. Friday the 13th begins with two horny teenagers meeting their demise at the hands of an unknown assailant (later revealed to Pamela Voorhees). It's a fairly short scene and the deaths are fairly inconsequential to overall plot.  Part 2 begins with the murder of Alice, the sole survivor of the first film. It's a fairly divisive moment among Friday the 13th fans, many of whom feel that Alice should have been the protagonist in the second film as well. I rather like the scene as it sets the tone for the rest of the film, that essentially all bets are off. If Alice, the heroine of the first, isn't safe from Jason's wrath, then no one is.  Killing off the survivor of the first film would become cliche among horror sequels, but Friday the 13th, Part 2 was one of the first to do it. The only sequel, that I can think of off hand, to do it prior to Friday the 13th, Part 2 was the 1942 film The Mummy's Curse, in which Kharis (Lon Chaney, Jr.) offs Dick Foran midway through the film.

4. The prankster lives. In the Friday the 13th series, there's always one character that is an absolutely prankster; Ned in the first film, Shelley in Part 3, etc. Therefore, when Ted makes his first appearance in Part 2, we are  certain he's going to get it. When he scares the other counselors by jumping out at them with a monster mash and a spear, we are 100%  certain that he will suffer a gruesome demise. Yet, Ted is spared, because he opts to stay at the bar and get drunk. Paul, Ginny, and Ted go to a local bar for one last night of hardcore drinking, before the children arrive in the morning. When Ginny and Paul go back to the camp, Ted stays behind and asks a local if there are any "after hour" bars? It's actually a nice deviation from the norm; a character survives the night by indulging the kind of "sinful" activity that would usually mean certain death in other horror films. There could always be a sequel in which Ted relates how alcohol saved his life.

The early Friday the 13th films (1-4) were often under harsh criticism for being extremely violent and gory, yet are absolutely tame when compared to recent horror films. What I like about the first four Friday the 13th movies is that they mix up the killings; some are more extreme than others. In Part 2, Mark takes a machete to the head, while Terry is killed off screen; we see her reaction to the unseen killer and then it cuts to the next scene. Rather than bombard the audience with nonstop gore, the filmmakers allow us a breather every once in awhile. Plus, it doesn't desensitize us to the killings later on the film - each one is shocking in their own right. Modern horror films have become so excessively gory, that it has the effect of numbing, often boring the audience. 

The first four Friday the 13th movies might come across as slow to modern audiences that are used to the rapid pacing of present day cinema; frantically edited to the point that they are incomprehensible.  Friday the  13th, Part 2, in particular, relies heavily on extended takes to build up suspense. The best example is when Paul is telling the rest of the camp counselors about Jason while they are all sitting around a camp fire. The scene begins as a long shot of the group huddled together and then it slowly zooms in on a close up  of Paul's face as he tells his story. It's a nice way of getting a piece of exposition out of the way by disguising it as a scary campfire story. When Paul gets to the end of his story, in which he warns "Jason's out there,"  Ted, donning a monster mask and spear, jumps into the camp fire circle and scares the living crap out of the counselors. It's a cheap scare, but effective.

It's interesting to note that a similar scene occurs in The Burning, made the same year, and complete with the same gag. It would be easy to accuse one film of ripping off the other, but that seems as unlikely as both were in production at the same time and released within one week of each other; Friday the 13th, Part 2 opened on May 1, 1981 and The Burning came out the following weekend, May 8. It's more likely that the screenwriters of both movies had very similar moments in their youth (campfire stories) and decided to include it in the script. The early slasher movies are the cinematic equivalent of a campfire story; they slowly build to a very grim ending and often end on a cheap scare.

Later on, Jason enters a cabin to look for Ginny. The camera tracks Jason's feet as they pace about the room, eventually revealing that Ginny is hiding underneath a bed. Jason stands in front of the bed for a few seconds; the shot is framed so that Jason's feet are stationed in the foreground, while Ginny is lying underneath the bed in the background.The tension builds as the audience wonders whether or not Jason will look underneath the bed and discover Ginny. This scene plays out so long that it becomes almost unbearable (in a good, frightening way) to watch. Will Jason discover her? Will he walk away?  A modern horror film might not even bother to establish Jason and Ginny's spatial relationship to one another, instead you might get a close up of Ginny lying under the bed and  then a close up of Jason as he scans the room. Rapid editing would ruin a moment like this, because it wouldn't be able to properly convey the danger Ginny is in.

Another criticism leveled at the Friday the 13th franchise is the audience actively roots for the killer. This may be true of later entries in the series, when Jason was the star, but certainly not the case in early films. In the first two films the filmmakers do a good job of distancing the audience from the killer, who is off screen force for most of the film and completely devoid of an identity, hence making it extremely hard to root for her/him. The audience genuinely fears for the lives of the camp counselors and, in some cases, it actually saddened when one of them comes to a ghastly. In Part II, I am always saddened when the characters of Mark and Vickie get offed by Jason, because they seem like genuinely nice people. Mark has been dealt a hard hand in life, he was cripple in an accident and is stuck in wheel chair, but he has an extremely positive outlook. He doesn't sit around and sulk about his current state, but rather is determined to walk again. He also has a sex drive, which is a rarity in Hollywood, in which people with physical disabilities are often depicted as being extremely child like.Vickie has a crush on Mark and the two of them are about to spend the night together, until Jason steps in.

While Friday the 13th, Part 2 is my favorite film in the series, it oddly enough, has the weakest ending. Ginny has seemingly killed Jason (in the dilapidated shack he lives in) with a machete and Paul carries her to a nearby cabin to look after her. Just then the hear a scratch coming from the front door, they expect the worst and Ginny arms herself with a pitch fork, while Paul stands by the door, waiting for her cue to open it. She gives Paul the nod and he opens to reveal...A DOG! The dog belongs to the now deceased Terry and went missing earlier in the film. They both breathe with a sigh of relief. Ginny is about to walk over to pet the dog, when Jason (unmasked) comes crashing through the window behind Ginny and attacks. WHITE OUT and fade in to Ginny on a stretcher being carried into an ambulance. She asks "Where's Paul?" over and over again, but doesn't receive an answer. The medics put her in the ambulance, close the back door, and drive off. THE END.  Jason lunging at Ginny is, of course, a repeat of the gag from the first film, in which Jason rises up the lake and attacks Alice in the canoe. It's a frustrating ending, because it's so abrupt. It comes off as being an after thought by the filmmakers, realizing they need at least one more scare and aping the ending of the first film. Paul's disappearance is never explained, so we are to assumed that he was killed while saving Ginny from the clutches of Jason. Or maybe, it was all a dream?!

In Part 3, the ending has been retconned so that after Ginny has taken Jason out with the machete, he pulls it out of his shoulder and walks away. When Jason crashes through the window at the end of Part 2, the machete is still lodged in his shoulder. The third film never references the attack of Ginny in the cabin, nor the mysterious disappearance of Paul. It does, however, have a TV news report that shows Ginny being taken aboard the ambulance, but that's it.

I would like to finish this review by talking about the muddled Friday the 13th time line. The first film tries to dance around this subject with the caption "PRESENT DAY!" However, in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, Pamela Voorhee's gravestone reveals that the year of her death was 1979. The second film takes place five years after her death, making it 1984. The events in Friday the 13th, Part 2 through Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (Part 4) happen within the same week. This makes very little sense, because in The Final Chapter, Sandra's brother, Rob, has come to Crystal Lake to hunt down Jason and avenge her death. Given that her death was just a few days ago, Rob must have psychic abilities. Granted, he might have heard about her death, but how would he know Jason is still lurking about the woods? Considering that at the beginning of The Final Chapter, Jason has been pronounced dead. Friday the 13th: The New Beginning (the worst entry in the series) occurs four years after the events in the fourth film, making it 1988 (which is doable). In Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives, Tommy Jarvis is significantly older, which would place the setting of this movie in the 90s (which isn't doable, given the style of clothing on display). Friday the 13th, Part VII: The New Blood, confounds things even further by taking place seven years after the events of Jason Lives, putting it near the millennium. It's all very confusing, but then again, I'm probably putting way too much thought into all this.

Credits

Amy Steel (Ginny), John Furey (Paul), Adrienne King (Alice), Marta Kober (Sandra), Bill Randolph (Jeffrey), Lauren-Marie Taylor (Vickie), Stuart Charno (Ted), Kirsten Baker (Terry), Tom McBride (Mark), Russell Todd (Scott), Betsy Palmer (Pamela Voorhees), Walt Gorney (Crazy Ralph), Warrington Gillette (Jason unmasked), Steve Dash (Jason).
Director: Steve Miner.
Screenplay: Ron Kurz
Running Time: 87 min.