Friday the 13th Part 2 - the Definitive Slasher

by Tom
(Australia)

Your days are numbered, wheelchair boy!

**Reader Submitted Review**

If you grew up in the 80's and you don't like these movies, shake your head from side to side, because I guarantee somethings shaken loose in there and you'll hear it rattling around. How can you not love the limited plots, atrocious acting and lackluster production values of these cinematic gems? My mind boggles. I'm just thankful the DVD revolution means I get to see my old favorites in all their remastered glory.

Friday the 13th Part 2 begins with a handy recap of the final moments of part one (didn't you just love it that films used to do a "previously on…"?), in the form of a dream had by the sole survivor of part one, Alice (Adrienne King). She's got herself a small house, where she is attempting to quietly put the events of her recent past behind her. But in the interests of moving right along, Jason Voorhees has tracked her down, and promptly dispatches her by jamming a screwdriver into her temple. Nice. The best part of this scene is that after killing her, Jason pauses to remove the whistling kettle from the stove top. What a considerate guy.

We begin 5 years after the events of the first film, back at Crystal Lake, at a new campground run by counselor Paul Holt (John Furey). This is opening weekend, and the only participants are the camp counselors-in-training - his girlfriend Ginny (Amy Steel), along with a stereotypical assortment of 20 and 30-somethings playing teenagers. We have the obligatory blond sex-obsessed guys and bouncy-breasted girls, an attractive brunette with short-shorts so short they might as well be knickers, and even a dude in a wheelchair.

Around the campfire the first night, Paul tells the story of Jason and his sicko mother, and the massacre at the lake five years before that has become more myth than reality. It's become a campfire story to scare the campers before bed, and to ensure that our bouncy breasted girls seek comfort in the arms of their sex-obsessed boyfriends.

Never mind we are essentially watching the glorified exploits of a serial killer. Friday the 13th Part 2 is, in a word, fun.

Jason's biding his time. He stalks the campground at night, watching, waiting. The Jason POV shots are great. I especially like the one where we see the dog skitting around in the woods, then it walks right up to the camera and we pan down to look at it, realizing WE are seeing through Jason's eyes as scuffy boots come into frame. We know immediately this pooch is f*cked.

It's a sad fact that people viewing this film today assume "it's all been done before", never realizing that in the early 80's when this film came out, it HADN'T all been done before. The false-alarms built up with foreboding music, the false scares, the killer's-POV shots, the tension building quick cuts, it all started with these old "slasher" films. To this day, you can see Friday the 13th shots duplicated in modern horror films.

This remains my favorite Friday the 13th installment, because it's Jason doing the killing (I hated that it was his twisted mother in the first film, an opinion not too many horror fans share), and I like my sociopaths to be male. And, Jason in this one is still a far-cry from the superhuman monster he became in the later films. He is simply a traumatized little boy who grew into a demented man while hiding in the back woods, eking out a living in a home made shack, killing rodents for food and obsessing about avenging his mother's death by killing people with whatever implement happens to be on hand at the time. That's my kind of psycho.

Jason dispatches the hapless teens (and an old guy, and a nosy Sheriff) in a variety of ways, ensuring we never get tired of it. There's folks garroted with wire, claw hammers to the back of the head, a couple impaled through a bed, and what's more this is pre-hockey mask Jason (he had to kill a hockey dude in Part 3 to get that). His mask is simply a Hessian sack with an eye hole cut out. Now that's believable attire for a sick, twisted psycho who's been living in the woods his whole life… it's effective and quite creepy. Creepy too, is Jason's shrine to his dead mother, though this makes for a great scene near the end where Ginny, after fleeing through the woods and stumbling across Jason's shack, dons his mother's sweater and employs a little psychology to extricate herself from one BAD situation. Her flight from Jason is another of the film's more effective scenes. The camera stays with Ginny as she runs, panicked, through the woods and tries to escape. She doesn’t know exactly where Jason is, just that he is after her. We, as the audience, don't know where he is either, and that amps up the tension to a surprisingly intense level. What makes it all the more effective is Amy Steel's performance. I really believed her fear. In fact, as far as "bad" 80's horrors go, her acting is tremendous. Gone is the "I'm reading these lines off a prompter" performance of Adrienne King as the heroine of part one (my god, that was actually physically PAINFUL to watch), replaced with some really believable behavior and an excellent portrayal of a terrified young girl. Brilliant.

But my favorite scene is when wheelchair dude gets it. I love the lack of sentiment. Wheelchair boy gets a machete to the face before bouncing down some stairs. Call me heartless, but this never fails to bring a goofy grin to my face. I think it's the way he's jostled in his seat as he bounces down the staircase… it's just hilarious.

And I just can't go past a film that features a crazy old guy riding around on a bicycle telling everyone they're "doomed", it's just not in me. I see a bicycle and a bit of lunacy in my future, let me tell you. All in all, to me this is the definitive "slasher" film. Halloween is another great example, but that series, in my mind, is not quite as "fun" as the Fridays, and thus doesn’t have the same replay value. I can stick it on anytime I'm in the mood to chill out and watch a villain slash and hack his way through a few nice looking young people, and that's pretty much all the time.