Review of Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) by Charles P — 27 Nov 2011

Here we go again...

*SPOILERS THROUGHOUT, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED*.

Friday the 13th Part 2 takes place not long after the events of the original 1980 film, about a woman named Mrs. Voorhees who kills a bunch of teenagers at a campsite because a group of camp counsellors accidentally let her son Jason drown in a lake 25 years earlier. She is later killed by one of the visitors with her own murder weapon; a machete. However, the ending of that film hinted that Jason had in fact not drowned and was still alive. This film is about Jason returning to a nearby campsite (the campsite from the original has been condemned) and avenging the death of his mother, which he had apparently witnessed.

The first 6-or-so minutes of the film gives us a recap of the original, saying pretty much what I said in the previous paragraph. Alice, the girl that killed Mrs. Voorhees in the original film, is at home late at night. She talks to her mother on the phone, has a shower and gets frightened by a cat jumping through the kitchen window. All typical suspense-building stuff. She then opens her fridge door to discover Mrs. Voorhees' severed head next to the milk. An unidentified assailant, most likely Jason, then stabs her in the head with an ice pick. The cat is spared. Cue opening credits, with some of the most horrendous music you have ever heard - mindless screeching noises which make Psycho sound like Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 - which were also present in the original film.

We are then introduced to a large group of brand new characters who are training to be camp counsellors. Oh, the irony. Can you see where this is going already? It doesn't take Jason very long to stumble across them and pick them off one-by-one. The characters aren't particularly that interesting, but they are a lot more likeable than the ones from the original, and they're acting is much better. One or two of them do stand out, but they're all basically lazy layabouts who seem to like taking their clothes off every 5 minutes; whether it be to change their shirt, to go skinny dipping or for fornication, these kids seem to love it and don't do a whole lot else. Eventually some of them stupidly wonder off into Camp Crystal Lake, the condemned camp from the original and trigger a series of murders carried out by a vengeful Jason. A cop is whacked on the back of the head with a hammer, a boy is hung upside down by a rope and has his throat slashed with a machete, a boy in a wheelchair then gets the same machete embedded in his face and falls down some stairs, a couple are impaled on a bed with a spear whilst making love and a girl is stabbed with a kitchen knife which is filmed from the first-person perspective - Halloween rip-off, much?

The final showdown is pretty much a rehash of the original; Jason chasing the last two survivors through the camp, hiding in bathrooms, under beds, inside cars and tussling on the floor. Eventually, they discover a shrine devoted to Mrs. Voorhees. In this ridiculous scene, the female survivor puts on Mrs. Voorhees' sweater and manages to convince Jason that she's his mother. She tells him to get down on his knees but before she can kill him he sees through the disguise. After a short scuffle, Jason gets own machete lodged into his shoulder and falls to the ground. But of course, he isn't dead and comes crashing through a window a few minutes later and grabs one of them from behind, revealing his freakishly disfigured face. The film then abruptly cuts to the survivors being put in the back of an ambulance and then back to the Mrs. Voorhees' shrine. The camera slowly pans in closer and closer before suddenly fading to black. End credits. What happened to Jason? We're never told. Looks like he escaped before the police and ambulance's arrived. Perhaps Part 3 will tell us.

Friday the 13th Part 2 is a mild improvement over the original film, but not by much. The characters are slightly more likeable but are killed off just as quickly, the kills are more creative and Jason is the killer at last but he doesn't seem to be wearing his signature hockey mask and doesn't seem to like using his signature machete all that much. There's a lot missing here to make Part 2 a decent slasher film, honestly, what happened to the iconic image of Jason wearing a hockey mask and holding a machete? However, it is definitely worth a watch if you're a fan of the original film. Having said that, you could just skip the original completely and watch this one instead. It recaps its events in great detail, leaving no reason to bother with it. The choice is up to you.