Review of Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) by Chuck D — 13 May 2010

I suppose the thesis behind films like Friday the 13th and its ever-expanding pantheon of sequels is that getting murdered would be hilarious if we only stuck around to see the results. Man, that whole dying thing really is a bummer. To be honest, I'm not quite sure what to say about movies like this or how to defend why I like them. But I will first be clear that we are talking about movies, here. If Lawrence of Arabia is a film, or, more formally, a motion picture, then Friday the 13th Part II is a movie. So bring some popcorn and a date; dim the lights, crank the sound, and not too much hanky-panky. It's movie time.

Friday the 13th Part II picks up a few months (we assume) after the events of the first movie where the vengeful mother of a deformed and ridiculed child went all Cuisinart on the camp counselors of the re-opened Camp Crystal Lake, which is the central location for nearly all twelve films in the series. You'd think that after the, oh, I dunno, fiftieth murder in the same general location that someone would be considerate enough to erect a wall around it. But, ironically, it is the nonsensicality of these movies and the idiocy of their characters that lie at the heart of their gory charms. I remember a conversation I once had with a former friend about romantic comedies. "It's a despicable, pretentious genre," I told her. "They're all the same movie made again and again." "Well, so are horror films," she retorted. "And I don't hear you complaining about those." I didn't disagree. "That's true," I replied. "But fans of horror are generally in on the joke, not victims of it.".

In what must have seemed like a masterful stroke of creative bravado at the time, the writer(s) of Friday the 13th Part II have decided to hold the killing fields not at Camp Crystal Lake this time around, but rather at -- wait for it -- a new camp that has set up shop adjacent to it since Camp Crystal Lake closed permanently after the murders. The movie opens awkwardly with an arduously long recap of the first movie as the heroine from that ordeal tosses and turns in her bed reliving the moments for us just in case we forgot last week's episode. She then wakes up and the camera follows her around the house as she quietly gets dressed and puts a pot of tea on and then she opens the refrigerator to reveal a severed head just as someone rams an ice pick into her ear canal before taking the time to move the squealing tea pot off of the burner. She didn't even make it to the credits. We then move on to the new camp counselors who are just as vapid and sexually virile as ever, all but one whom we identify early on as the one who will face down the killer.

And so, in the first installment the mother had her killing spree and if you've seen that movie you'll know how well that worked out for her. In Part II, however, we find out that her formerly picked-on son is *gasp!* still alive and roaming the woods around Crystal Lake and thus we have the genesis of one of the most familiar characters in all of horror. Jason is a character whose popularity is kind of inexplicable given that he never speaks and doesn't really project much in the way personality beyond that he likes to kill moronic teenagers, usually in the throes of late adolescent sexual clumsiness, in hideous and (sometimes literally) side-splitting ways. Well, maybe it's not so inexplicable after all. But remember, dear reader, that this is early, pre-hockey mask Jason. He isn't raised from the dead, or the manifestation of Baptist rage, at least not yet. In this, his introductory movie, he's a redneck with a potato sack over his head who kind of lumbers around like the lost Walton sibling and lives in a shack built out of aluminum scrap and toilet seat covers. Modest beginnings for horror's biggest icon, eh?

It pleases me to write that Part II is one of the better films of this series, and is certainly better than its predecessor. I'm not quite sure what "one of the better ones" will mean to most people, so I had better elaborate. It's sleeker, more brisk, and clearly more expensive than the first movie, but not as bawdy as any of the sequels that follow. Of the Fridays that take themselves at least somewhat seriously, this is undoubtedly the best one (rivaled only by Part IV), and I mean best in that it actually approaches some real tension and Jason's one-eyed potato sack is a scarier image than a hockey mask ever could be. Of all the Friday the 13th movies, this one is the only one that even comes within striking distance of generating a sense of atmosphere. The characters are the usual fodder, although the heroine (Amy Steel) is likeable enough and there is a character in a wheelchair (Tom McBride) that meets a gruesome fate just as we sort-of, kind-of, maybe, just-a-little-bit start to care about his situation.

It's a tacky subgenre, what can I say? In the end you'll either be with this or against it and that makes it basically immune to critics and criticism. Roger Ebert calls movies like this "Dead Teenager Movies", and that's a fair description, although anyone familiar with this series will know that Jason kills a lot more than just teenagers. I prefer to call them "Dead Duck Movies". We spend the first half hour or so lining up the ducks, and then at some point the script starts shooting them one after another and we get to watch. Yes, it's all semantics, I know. As long as "dead" is the operative word, I'm sure Jason won't mind.

SCORE: 8 / 10.