Friday the 13th Part 2

FRIDAY THE 13^th PART 2

Released in 1981 (but set five years after the events of the first movie aside from a twelve-minute prologue that occurs two months after Alice Hardy decapitated Mrs. Voorhees), Friday the 13^th Part 2 does not (as a review in Variety claimed) “employ too many of the same twists and turns used in the original.” The sequel is a unique tale with a new killer and a distinct set of victims. While the setting is similar (the bulk of the movie occurs at a training facility for camp counselors along Crystal Lake near the camp from the first film), the plot unfolds in a wholly different way from the yarn told in part 1. In the lengthy prologue this time around, Alice (the survivor from the original film) has a nightmare about her encounter with Mrs. Voorhees. She awakens, takes a phone call from her mom, and showers. As Alice heats water in a tea pot, a cat startles her by jumping through the window. Alice goes to her fridge to fetch some food for the kitty and therein discovers the severed head of Mrs. Voorhees moments before an unseen assailant drives an ice pick through her temple.

In the twenty minutes that pass before the next kill scene, the audience eventually meets the protagonist (a graduate student named Ginny who studies child psychology). First, the narrative introduces an array of young adults: Sandra and Jeff (a couple) who encounter Crazy Ralph in the town near Crystal Lake, their old friend Ted, a wheelchair-bound counselor-in-training named Mark, and two ladies (Terry and Vickie). All of these doomed individuals gather outside Packanack Lodge to hear an orientation speech from a dude named Paul (the protagonist's love interest) as they gear up for counselor training. Our heroine (Ginny) arrives late in a sputtering unreliable car twenty-one minutes into the story (an awfully late introduction for a main character). That night, the group sits around a campfire as Paul recounts the legend of Jason Voorhees, who allegedly drowned in Crystal Lake back in 1958 but whose body was never recovered. Paul says that certain old-timers in town claim to have seen Jason, who some believe survived and grew up living off the land in the dense local woods. Paul speculates that Jason may have seen his mother decapitated that fateful night in June of 1980 and that he might even now lurk in the forest waiting to exact revenge on any who dare enter his territory. Because there would be no movie otherwise, this legend is totally true (though Paul doesn't believe it).

Later that night, Ginny and Paul kiss in Ginny's cabin while Crazy Ralph lurks outside and spies on them. Jason (still mostly unseen) shows up and quietly murders Ralph. The next day, Jeff and Sandra set off to visit the off-limits grounds of neighboring Camp Crystal Lake. They stumble upon the mangled corpse of a dog moments before a cop busts them for trespassing. After the cop takes the curious couple back to Packanack Lodge, he glimpses Jason vanishing into the woods and sets off in pursuit. The policeman stumbles upon a weathered shack of sorts deep in the forest and explores its interior until Jason sneaks up behind him and embeds the claw of a hammer in the back of his head.

That night, Ginny, Paul, Ted, and many of the background extras (additional trainees who are not named or given much to do in the story) head to a bar in town, thereby leaving a small group of young adults to be picked off at the training facility. A guy named Scott steps into a rope trap that hauls him up by his feet so that he dangles upside down, and Jason shows up to slit his throat with a machete. Terry arrives to cut down Scott, sees that he's dead, and whirls to (presumably) face Jason (her death occurs off-camera). Mark and Vickie flirt in a couple of scenes dense with clever subtext, and Vickie heads off to her cabin to freshen up. In her absence, Jason embeds a machete in Mark's face. Less than two minutes later, Jason drives a spear through the back of Jeff as he sleeps with Sandra, and the spear goes through her as well. Three minutes later, Jason knifes Vickie. Ginny and Paul then arrive back at camp so that the third act can commence.

As Ginny and Paul explore the lodge in search of the people they expect to find there, Ginny senses something amiss and bellows, “Paul, there's someone in this fucking room!” Jason leaps out of the shadows and attacks Paul. Ginny wisely arms herself with a knife. Jason chases her outside, and she kicks him in the crotch. Three minutes later, Ginny goes on the offensive again and attacks Jason with a chainsaw (wounding him but inexplicably opting to not finish him off). Ginny races into the woods and stumbles upon Jason's shack. Therein, she finds a shrine of candles surrounding the severed head of Mrs. Voorhees (whose gray sweater also sits nearby). As Jason pounds on the door, Ginny puts her child psychology skills to good use and dons the sweater. When Jason bursts through the door, Ginny addresses him by name and identifies herself as “mommy.” She talks a confused Jason into kneeling before her and is about to decapitate him with a machete when he spots the head of his real mother behind Ginny and raises a pickaxe to ward off the death blow. Paul shows up (in a deux ex machina moment) and grabs Jason from behind, enabling Ginny to slice the machete deep into Jason's shoulder and neck area. Jason drops, and Paul carries Ginny back to Packanack Lodge.

After a false scare in which Terry's missing dog appears at the door, Jason leaps through a window and grabs Ginny from behind. This is an infamous “money shot” moment in which the viewer gets a good long look at the deformed face of Jason, who had worn a sack over his head throughout the rest of the film. (The iconic hockey mask does not appear until the third film in the series.)

In a brief epilogue, paramedics load Ginny into an ambulance as she calls out for Paul – a slightly confusing ending.

An entertaining and frightening tale from a bygone age (before the existence of cell phones and rectangular television sets), Friday the 13^th Part 2 contains ample spooky imagery (one can never un-see the severed head of Mrs. Voorhees surrounded by candles in Jason's shack after one gazes upon it) to sate hardcore slasher film fans and is laced with humor to balance out the jolts and gore. There's a fair amount of gratuitous nudity and women-in-panties moments also. Ginny is a more dimensional protagonist than most heroines of this horror sub-genre, and (before she actually encounters the killer and realizes that he's more than just a legend) she cooks up a fine psychological profile of what Jason would be like if he existed: “a child trapped in a man's body.”

The first four films in the Friday the 13^th series are wildly entertaining. Check back before October for reviews of parts 3 and 4.