Friday the 13th Part 2

I have admitted in the past and in my recent review of Friday the 13^th that I actually prefer Steve Miner’s sequel to Cunningham’s original, but I do not like the prologue to the opening credits at all. I find a flashback montage pointless since most of your audience watching the sequel have seen those scenes in the first film. Secondly, I find killing off the first film’s survivor a bit disappointing. I understand the point of Jason getting revenge for the beheading of his mom, seeing Alice chop her head off with a machete couldn’t have been healthy (although, I’m lost as to how he’s up and going considering he actually drowned in Crystal Lake, but why quibble about such minor details?), but I agree with the critique (made in My Name Is Jason) about the improbability in Jason finding her, the travel and return home would certainly have been illogical for someone such as him to accomplish. Yes, these details are probably meaningless to the fans who could give a shit, but I do pay attention to such *trivial* matters. I’m not sure why, other than her responsibility in protecting herself against a maniac by using the only weapon available, the machete, there was some need to bring her back at the beginning  just to dispose of her like trash. I’m not sure what was up with the teakettle, but Jason felt it should be taken off a burning stove eye.

You know, the camp fire bogeyman story, told by head counselor, Paul, really does closely resemble the one in The Burning, instead of Jason and his thirst for young blood told to his young recruits training to be counselors for a new summer camp to be held nearby Crystal Lake (but at least not at the same place..although, this doesn’t matter to you-know-who), it was instead Cropsy, a burn victim out to kill. It is really shot basically the same, the camera steadily pulling in, the way those in attendance are framed, the storyteller center focus.

I love how it is established right from the start that Ginny’s (Amy Steele) Volkswagen was “sick”, meaning that there’s an actual logical excuse for why it won’t start when Jason pursues her. I also dig the more human Jason, one who stumbles and falls, can be hurt when punched in the crotch, and seems actively hungry to kill Ginny. There’s a moment I enjoy where Jason is about to plunge a pitchfork into Ginny when the chair breaks on him! And he looks scared shitless when she cranks up a chainsaw and comes at him. I get a good giggle when a rat passes Ginny’s face (this gag never tires to me no matter its overuse) while she’s hiding under a bed from Jason and pisses in her pants (we actually see her urine puddle, it’s great stuff.). While Jason’s formidable presence in hockey mask and janitor’s uniform is the iconic figure so best remembered and parodied, I actually kind of find his sack-head, backwoods hick (to me a bit familiar to the killer in The Town That Dreaded Sundown) look in this film refreshing. It isn’t as popular with the overall Friday fanbase, but I have noticed in some opinion and reviews I’ve read by those that grew up with the franchise like me who actually prefer this early incarnation of Jason to his hockey-masked version.

Not sure how I feel about the psychology going on at the end of the film where Ginny puts on Mommy’s sweater, stands in front of a shrine dedicated to the memory of Mrs. Voorhies, and pretends (for a while, successfully) to actually be her. It’s a last-ditch effort by Ginny to keep Jason from snuffing her out but once he sees Mommy’s rotted severed head (ah, the horror genre, only in the horror genre) the charade is foiled. A machete to his shoulder, though, seems to do the trick but not before he gives Ginny a nice slice…down the leg. This all leads, it seems, to Paul and Ginny both escaping a close call with death, and Miner milks this for what it’s worth, first, by using a dog as a decoy of terror then really dropping the jumpscare with Jason bursting through a window behind Ginny, both going off screen as he gang-tackles her. I think if it had ended here, with the camera closing on Mommy Voorhies’ head in the shrine room of Jason’s makeshift shack home afterward, the film could have really left us wanting more. Fade that screen to black and leave the audience wondering what could happen next. It would have been cheap, of course, and the open ending setting up another sequel sure pisses people off, but I like the idea that we have no clue what happens. 

I did find the mystery regarding Paul fascinating and the sequel sure doesn’t settle why Ginny was able to survive and what happened to Jason, so the film still does feed the audience of interest with the possibility of yet another entry featuring the malform-faced maniac. While it might seem like a wily move on her part to halt certain harm, I’m not sold Jason would fall for such a ruse, but its inclusion in the script and how it’s presented was rather interesting to me as it comments on how Mommy’s hold over his life remains strong even as her head lies decaying on a table. Betsy’s face and voice are put to good use when Jason falls for Ginny’s exercise in futility; her solution to avoiding getting filleted, appealing to Jason by imitating his devoted mother, does seem to add a layer to the character of the killer, his psychosis deriving from a mania associated with not only his own trauma due to drowning but seeing his mother’s head come off the neck.

The violence in the film never really left me that impressed besides the machete directly to the face of the quadriplegic in the wheelchair (its audacity alone makes it memorable if a bit sick in the head) who rides backwards down steps in the pouring rain. The character, Scott, seriously devoted to shagging the babe who seems to appear in the film solely on the purpose of remaining scantily clad or going for a moonlight swim in the nude, does get it rather horribly, caught in a rope trap that hangs him upside down, taking a slice to the throat; I think this is really unfortunate, no one could be more vulnerable. The rest is rather uninspired. Sure a couple get the arrowhead spear through them while still in sexual embrace, but it was culled from Bava’s Bay of Blood (which was done even more ghoulishly), and the rest are either off screen or done so in quick fashion as not to lavish in the brutality. Michael Myers had also used a hammer to the head of a victim so its use in Part II here seems ho-hum (although the sheriff who gets it sold that hammer slam really well).

I noticed while watching the first two Friday films that the use of the full moon (especially in Part II) is important as a symbol of madness—mentioned in the original while the sheriff talks about how bad things always happen it seems when there’s a full moon, Miner further implements this at the end as Ginny runs for her life, finding Jason’s shack home, Jason following close behind.

I think I don’t just speak for myself when I say that one of this film’s best scenes has Ginny, before coming face to mask with Jason, sincerely conversing about the plight of a child, now an adult, while at a bar with Paul and his assistant (practical joker, the expected stereotype, except in his case he actually survives) regarding a logical reasoning behind why his mother did what she did, also arguing on his behalf, what he must have endured and why it would have easily affected him, such trauma motivating him towards a dark path. Paul and his assistant shrugs this off, barely even convinced that he exists, but Ginny’s concerns do put an interesting spin on such a violent rampage, a defense for Jason, but all of this is later undermined film after film after film, body count rising inexplicably, as he soon becomes Zombie Jason, and the purpose behind so much killing becomes moot.

Well, as I had mentioned while talking about the need of the filmmakers to execute Alice from the first film, good ole Crazy Ralph can’t stay away from the camps containing counselors and this time he’s not so lucky, the last remaining character from the original to survive put out of his misery. I just don’t understand the slasher philosophy of making sure that anyone who happened to escape the previous film’s killer is only temporarily successful. It was only later in this franchise that certain heroines/heroes were indeed able to outlast Jason and not fall to him in the next film.