Friday the 13th Part 2 (

1981

) ½

It's pretty obvious that Friday the 13th (1980) was never planned to be the start of a grand horror series that could span a dozen entries. Nobody in early 1980 knew how successful formulaic slasher movies could be, and certainly, no one predicted that the first Friday the 13th would be so successful that Summer Camp themed horror movies would be popping up regularly for the rest of the decade. You would have to be crazy not to make a sequel to Friday the 13th (1980), and the suits at Paramount Pictures were so completely sane that over the next decade they would make seven! The only problem was that the original left precious little to work with in terms of sequel material. Mrs. Voorhees was dead, and not just in a “We couldn't find the body” or “Your friend is only mostly dead” sort of way either. She got her head hopped clean off with a machete. Not even Vampires and Highlanders could live through that! The only way to bring her back would be to resort to out-and-out magic and at this point, horror films were still dominated by mundane killers. Adding in black magic and witchcraft would be a risky proposition that could easily make the film look ridiculous (just see the later entries of the Halloween franchise for examples of that in action). Moreover, there's some question as to why you'd want to bring back Mrs. Voorhees as the killer. After all, most of her impact was due to the fact that audience members would initially assume that the killer must be a man given due to their own innate sexism (the women are wonderful effect) and the killer's preference for boots and jeeps. The ending of Friday the 13th (1980) teased the possibility of Jason's ghost returning to seek vengeance for his murdered mother, but again the film was not willing to move in an openly supernatural direction lest they wind up making a film that looked like Thirteen Ghosts (1960) in a climate where The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and The Burning (1981) were the norm. The only thing they could come up with was to make Jason the new killer, but have him be alive, an adult, and living in the woods around Camp Crystal Lake.

This raises so many questions. Where was Jason during the events of Friday the 13th (1980)? Just hanging out in his cabin while his mom massacred a few camp counselors? Why didn't he help her out? Moreover, if he was alive the whole time, why was his mom carrying out a vendetta against the camp counselors in the first place? She says she's killing them because they were goofing off and screwing around while her son drowned, but if he didn't drown then what is she so upset about? Did she not know that he was still alive and living in the woods? Jason clearly knows that she was there because in this film we see he's built a shrine to her using her severed head and her old sweater. This premise makes no fucking sense! While later entries in the series will try to fashion something comprehensible out of this mess, the whole issue goes completely unexamined here. As a result, the basic premise of this film falls apart if you give it even the slightest bit of scrutiny. Which is a real shame because in terms of characterization, pacing, and effects Friday the 13th Part 2 is way ahead of its predecessor.

As if to highlight its problems further, the film opens with Alice, the final girl from the first film, living in a city. Where exactly, we don't really know, but it's obviously at least a couple of counties removed from Camp Crystal Lake. After the obligatory fake-out scare with a spring-loaded cat, she is ambushed and killed by an unseen assailant, who we must assume is Jason, if only for the sake of conservation of detail. How the hell did Jason, a mute, mentally retarded guy who lives in the woods, manage to track her down? I doubt his ability to buy a bus ticket without attracting notice, much less travel to a densely populated city. Was he wearing the goofy bag on his head the whole way there? I understand the need to start the film off with a bang, and I can understand the desire to tie up all the loose ends from the first film, but this is just compounding the absurdities of the premise. It raises the questions of just what Jason is, questions that this movie would be better off sweeping under the rug. There's also no need to rope Alice back into this, as everyone that she interacted with from the first movie, save crazy old Ralph, is already dead. Her plot is a dead end and adding her in here just adds to the absurdity of the premise.

Curiously, Jason here does not yet resemble the iconic monster that you probably have in your head. Rather than the famous hockey mask, he's wearing a burlap sack over his face. I can see why they switched it up in later entries in the series, as the bag is simply blown out of the water by its competition. Leatherface's masks made from flayed human skin are far more ghoulish and imposing while Michael Myer's featureless white Halloween mask is far more unsettling. The bag just looks like something they found something lying around on set the day before filming began. It's not even a black sack that would conjure up images of medieval executioners and Gothic horror, but instead a brown sack that gives every indication of having once carried potatoes. About the only good thing I can say about this costume is that the filmmakers had the good sense not to poke out two eye holes for Jason, which would make the mask look like a cheap (and I mean really cheap) Halloween outfit, and instead just left it with one. Having only one eyehole invites the audience to speculate on how the rest of his face may be deformed or disfigured, as well as conjuring up primal fears of ancient cyclopic monsters.

Anyway, this is a Friday the 13th movie so we need to come up with a reason to get a bunch of attractive twenty-somethings out in the woods so they can be slaughtered one by one. This year, the forests around Crystal Lake are not hosting a traditional Summer camp, but rather a training program for Summer camp counselors. How much training do camp counselors need anyway? All the people I know who worked those gigs were total burnouts who could barely be trusted to tie their own shoes and stumble into their morning classes. Still, a premise is a premise, and hosting the training program is macho man's man Paul Holt. He's somewhat annoyed when his girlfriend/assistant Ginny Field shows up late in her ancient, broken-down Volkswagen Bug, but he gets over it after she gives him a minimal amount of eyelash-batting charm. Attending the training is the usual bunch of expendable characters who will get annihilated by the end of the second act. You have the requisite annoying prankster Scott, his nondescript friend Jeff and Jeff's nondescript girlfriend Sandra. Then there's fitness nut Terry, another obnoxious prankster Ted, wheelchair-bound jock Mark, and Vicky the girl that has a crush on him. These narrow archetypes constitute a significant improvement on the cast of the first film, as I can at least remember something about all of them whereas it took several trips back to my notes to even figure out who was killed in Friday the 13th (1980). Sure, none of them are particularly fleshed out, but what are you expecting in a movie where a character's sole contribution is increasing the body count at the end? In addition to the main cast, there are a bunch more extras attending the training as well, but they will all head into town the night that Jason starts carving into our cast members.

Before any of that happens, the film decided that crazy old Ralph has outlived his usefulness as a red herring and promptly has Jason take him out. It makes sense, by this point we already know that he's not the killer and once he's announced that all the young folk are “doomed” he has no further purpose to serve. I'll confess that I'm a little disappointed that we never saw Ralph's wife or saw his family life expanded on. I really wanted to know what sort of lady married this loony old codger. I can see why they took out Ralph and Alice, as it's pretty obvious by this point that the first Friday the 13th sequel was not overly concerned about things like inter-film continuity. Simply killing all the characters from one entry in the series to the next going forward would make things considerably simpler. With the cast of the previous movie removed, and the extra cast members absent from the mise-en-scene, the film can finally get down to business emulating the formula of the first film. So, one by one (or in one memorable instance two at once where Jason spears a pair of young lovers mid-coitus) Jason carves his way through the expendable meat. Once again, the gore on display here is the same sort that made Friday the 13th (1980) so successful. It steers a middle course between really depraved shit like Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and films where all the gore is artfully implied like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). It's gruesome, but not so twisted that it would put anyone off their lunch. The result is a series of cheap thrills that are undoubtedly fun, but ultimately not very memorable. The effect of this kind of gore is also plainly going to be subject to the law of diminishing returns. There is no moment here that is anywhere near as shocking as the arrow through the neck death scene in Friday the 13th (1980). Almost immediately the gore in this series lost its effect to shock audiences, but it would be some time before it lost its ability to entertain as well.

Friday the 13th Part 2 also deserves some credit when it comes to nailing the basics. I don't know how many horror films I've seen where cars just stop working the moment it would be inconvenient to the plot for the protagonists to just drive away from the monster. Hell, it's such a common occurrence that I bet there is a TV tropes page for it (I'm not gonna look because this would inevitably start me clicking on links there and before you know it I would have lost an hour or two). Friday the 13th does this too, but at least they establish that the car in question is a piece of shit that is always breaking down before they do. It's little touches like that, the simple set-ups and pay-offs, that turn a formulaic slasher into an enjoyable night at the cinema.