Friday the 13th Part II

 

The original Friday the 13^th ended up being a surprise hit, making a whole bunch of money. And when a film makes a whole bunch of money, a sequel can’t be far behind. Thus we get the imaginatively named ‘Friday the 13^th Part II’. It’s essentially a re-tread of the first film, not really bothering to break new ground, just doing the same thing over again. It is notable and somewhat iconic as being the very first appearance of Jason Voorhees as a serial killer. While he doesn’t have his iconic look yet, it’s still the first time Jason runs around killing people.

The story is even simpler than last time, and is mostly a repeat of the first. Only two months after the last film, where a deranged Pamela Voorhees hacked her way through a group of camp counsellors before meeting her end, a new group of camp counsellor trainees head to Camp Crystal Lake for a training camp, run by supervisor Paul and his assistant (and our heroine) Ginny. Paul tells the group the legend of Jason Voorhees, the young boy thought to have drowned twenty years ago who is rumoured to live in the wilderness. He tells it as a joke, but in reality Jason really is lurking in the woods, and it isn’t long until he starts to stalk and kill the trainees.

There are more teens this time around, but they’re also a lot less memorable. Half don’t even have names I don’t think, so they’re all pretty forgettable. There’s one in a wheelchair and an Asian one and that’s about it. Half of them don’t even die; they leave to go get drunk in town while Jason goes on his rampage. I have to say that the F13 franchise as a whole really lacks good characters and with only a single real exception there aren’t any notable protagonists. For the most part the characters in an individual film will be completely forgotten by the sequel, meaning most characters are completely disposable.

 

Our heroine this time is Ginny, who is studying child psychology and has some theories about Jason. Her theories are way too specific though, especially since she starts sprouting them before she even knows Jason is real, basically basing her analysis on Paul’s story of ‘there’s a crazy guy in the woods whose mom got killed’. Jason is described as ‘some sort of demented creature surviving in the wilderness’, and she suggests that witnessing his mother’s death would have turned him into a feral killer. This makes little sense since that only happened two months ago, while if he survived drowning he’d be in the woods for over twenty years. I will say that it’s refreshing that the characters already know about the murders two months earlier, but it’s also somewhat strange that nobody is concerned or cares at all.

The first six or so minutes of the film have a lot of flashbacks of the end of the original – Alice fighting and killing Pamela Voorhees, going out on the canoe in the lake, having the nightmare of zombie Jason dragging her into the lake and then being questioned by police in the hospital. It’s a bit odd, since instead of just having characters fill in the backstory (which they pretty much do anyway) the movie just shows it. It also feels a bit cheap (I usually find the use of stock footage cheap), especially since it shows so much of the end.

After the flashbacks it begins with the heroine of the first film, Alice, being killed in her home by Jason, who presumably found out where she lived and tracked her down to her house. I just want to point out that, in retrospect, this is actually really strange. From this point on, barring the last few entries in the series, Jason never ventures outside of his haunt at Crystal Lake. Also a bit ridiculous is the fact that, before Jason appears and kills her, Alice finds Pamela Voorhees’ severed head in the fridge because Jason has kept it the entire time.

Speaking of Jason, this is when we finally see the series’ iconic killer (not counting him as zombie nightmare dream boy at the end of the first film). Unfortunately you get the impression they were short on ideas of what he’d look like since he doesn’t come across as particularly menacing. This film was before the iconic hockey mask, so Jason just wears a burlap sack with a hole on it on his head. It’s not particularly menacing, especially since he’s wearing plain old overalls throughout the movie.  Towards the end the sack comes off and you get to see his messed up face. He’s slightly deformed and looking a bit ghoulish. If anything he just looks like an inbred redneck mountain man, the sort seen in other horror movies like The Hills Have Eyes (original and remake) or the Wrong Turn movies. Weirdly this is the only time you ever see him with hair. He doesn’t have much, but he has some, with several tufts of long, black hair coming out of his head. Weird detail, but it’s there.

Part II retcons a few thing about Jason. Most importantly, Jason didn’t drown after all; he survived and lived in the woods around the camp for two decades. He was there at the end of the first film and saw his mother get decapitated, which is what made him snap and is why he stalks and kills anybody who comes to Crystal Lake. This is a bit silly, since it means that for twenty years he was in the woods and nobody ever found him, least of all his mother, who you’d assume he’d seek out. It’s also means that he never killed anybody until he saw his mom get decapitated, which turned him into a full-on serial killer.

The ending twenty or so minutes (essentially a quarter of the film) is basically a massive chase/fight/struggle between Ginny, camp supervisor Paul and Jason that takes them through seemingly the entire camp, eventually into Jason’s den, where he keeps his mother’s severed head on a shrine. Ginny momentarily tricks Jason by putting on his dead mother’s sweater and pretending to be her, despite not looking or sounding like her at all. It’s stupid (and doesn’t work), but this sort of tactic will show up again in one of the later movies. I will say that Jason gets the crap kicked out of him a lot here. He’s not an unstoppable killing machine yet, so he gets kicked and beaten down a few times, and Ginny even buries a machete into his shoulder, seemingly killing him.

Ginny survives, and it’s unclear as to whether Paul does too, since this ends in a similar way to the first film. They think they’re safe after ‘killing’ Jason, but he suddenly bursts through a window and grabs Ginny (in slow motion no less) and then suddenly it cuts to Ginny in the hospital with the police, making it unclear if it’s another nightmare ending or not. It worked in the first film, but here it’s forced. The whole ‘sudden nightmare, then hospital and the police’ twist ending will be repeated a few more times before they finally cut it out.

The film feels beholden to the original in a lot of ways. Barring the opening ten minutes, it strictly sticks to the established structure of the first film. It doesn’t really try anything different, except maybe towards the end, so it’s pretty stuck in its ways. The same crazy guy who warns people not to go to the camp from the first film shows up again, but he gets murdered pretty quickly. Another thing beholden to the original is the use of theme music, notably what I call the ‘spooky intrigue theme’. It’s those few discordant spooky notes that make things seem a bit uneasy. The problem is they play it every few seconds here, even when nothing is happening. It gets old.

The gore is far less impressive this time around (no Tom Savini). It lacks blood, but worst of all it cuts away from the violence very quickly (possibly edited for violence, which has happened to a fair few F13 movies), so while there are a few more deaths they’re less interesting and nowhere near as memorable. Wheelchair guy getting a machete to the face and then rolling backwards down the stairs is pretty cool, but otherwise a lot of the kills don’t have too much of an impact. There is a bit more nudity here though.

Part 2 is pretty unremarkable overall. It’s mostly just more of the same, and doesn’t really improve on anything or do anything different. It has a few memorable parts, and seeing the first real Jason movie has its charm, but it isn’t mind blowing. It was the first film to bring us Jason, but even then he’s fairly unremarkable and not the unstoppable killing machine he’ll later become.