Review“I told the others, they didn't believe me. You're all doomed. You're all doomed.” - Crazy RalphSince the original movie made a major dent in the Box Office, admittedly the forces of all that are decent managed to advertise the movie while making complete prats out of themselves, Paramount decided that a sequel might well be worth funding. Problem with getting into bed with the devil, you have to pay the devil his due, and while some of the film makers responsible for the first movie managed to run for the hills a number were netted in to make a sequel. Remembering at the time sequels weren't exactly order of the day as opposed to the modern conveyor belt attitude to pushing out continuous streams of crap to wrench extra dollars out of gullible wallets. The major problem for Writer Ron Kurz was how to get out of the corner F13th had painted the fledgling franchise into, he need not have worried F13th fans aren't exactly the most discerning movie goers on the planet then or now. It's five years since the events in the first movie and Camp Crystal Lake has fallen into ruin, though that hasn't stopped urban myths about Jason Voorhees somehow surviving in the forest alone from percolating to the public consciousness. Paul Holt is running a Counsellor Training Centre, just around the bend from Camp Blood and the usual assortment of ready slasher victims are arriving to be put through their paces. So we get sex, lots of nekkid bodies, and Jason not being such a rumour after all. Can Paul and Ginny outwit the psychopathic Jason or will they become his victims as well? The whole basis of Part 2 makes exactly zero sense, and I have to say that Writer Ron Kurz is treating his Audience as the morons they apparently are. If Jason didn't drown and has been living traumatised in the woods after witnessing his mother's death at the hands of Alice Hardy, then exactly how did Mrs Voorhees determine he had died in the first place? Sorry someone should have been looking after Jason, and Pamela you are not going to win Mother of the Year, posthumously or otherwise. Part 2 makes it amply clear that events in Part 1 didn't need to happen, it's all been a big misunderstand brought about by Pamela Voorhees being on crack cocaine or something and thinking her son drowned due to fornicating Counsellors. Someone needed professional help here, see what happens when you keep things bottled up! Any-ways Steve Minor, who Produced the first movie, is in the Director's chair here trying his darnedest to reproduce the magic of Cunningham's epic. Unfortunately for Steve the MPAA, at the urging of those doyens of public culture Siskel and Ebert, were out to cut any future F13th outing to ribbons after the carnage of the first movie, so less blood, but hey when did that stop a full scale massacre of teens in a movie. Well done Siskel and Ebert, what a couple of prats. Director Minor of course substituted flesh for gore, full frontal nudity being apparently what the franchise needed. Yes this one has really amped up the sexual aspects, I may need to birch myself for slow-mo viewing of those scenes. Part 2 kicks off with one of the longest prologue pieces yet committed to a slasher opus. Alice, the final girl from the original movie, is home alone and having nightmares that are minute by minute replays of the chaotic final confrontation from the first movie. Clearly this is for the few Audience members who didn't groove to Cunningham's vision. A number of false scare scenes later, the Audience is well aware Alice is in danger but we don't know where the threat is going to come from, and things culminate with Minor or a flunky throwing a cat through an open window. Marvellously in the next frame it's clearly a different cat. Alice's guard comes down, it was just Minor loitering outside with a spring loaded cat, and she opens the fridge to find she's got a head. Stunned and reeling Alice proves easy pickings, tehehehehe, for Jason as he gets on-board with his first kill of the evening. Strangely, since the prologue is about fifteen minutes of the movie's 88 minute running time, we then pretty quickly get the legend of Jason Voorhees at a camp fire cook out. If we wanted to be pedantic, and hey lets, we could accuse Minor of padding the hell out of his movie. A full quarter of running time is devoted to recapping what his Audience already knows. Lets face facts here kids, the franchise was highly unlikely to have gained a new following from those turning up for the first movie, box office figures bare that out. The rest of the movie follows pretty much in the mould of the first movie, teens having sex and partaking of various substances, a thunder storm rolling in, heralding teens being slaughtered for their troubles by some unseen assailant out to cull Counsellor numbers around Crystal Lake. Where things differ slightly here is, a) Ted the odious comic relief for the evening is spared, b) a guy in a wheelchair gets the business end of a machete, and c) we have some slight work being done on setting up Ginny as a child psychologist with an inherent insight into Jason's world. Not much on the new front, but hey Minor is doing a sequel what more do you want? Well, okay, a good movie but moving along. One of the weird aspects of Part 2 is the character of Vicky, don't know about anyone else but I found her pretty freaky. Vicky seems to have this over the top fetish for crippled guys. She's all over wheelchair bound Mark like a leopard onto a wounded gazelle. Mark doesn't stand a chance, and that's even before he becomes one of the more problematic victims of Jason's camp rage. Given all the angles, how did Jason sneak up on Mark again? I'm out of room kids. Notably Part 2 already dices the thinly held tropes of slasherdom, proving once again that some half arsed analysis of horror only works for the sort of people that hold this movie up as a classic. Ginny, our apparent final gal, indulges in the sex (rather artfully alluded to I thought), drinks the evil alcohol, and shows the Audience her bra. Admittedly it's a white bra, the universal horror symbol of a “good girl”. And to compound Minor's sins of not adhering strictly to a formula that only exists in some people's minds, we have a final couple here rather than a single white female going toe to toe with the protagonist. Considerable effort has gone into shoe horning all slasher movies into a narrow working model, clearly the first sequel in one of the major sub genre franchises already shows that model to be false in most aspects. As I'll demonstrate through a series of articles in 2011 the whole concept of the “final girl” itself is a complete fabrication, invented to back a narrow minded political agenda. But hey more on that later. Surprisingly I found Part 2 to be rather boring, not sure why that is as the first movie certainly held my interest. It just seemed that everything was preordained and Director Steve Minor added nothing to Cunningham's original take. Maybe the franchise was already stale by the second movie and needed something else to ice the cake. Full frontal nudity certainly helped, sorry not PC over here, but everything else seemed rather formulaic. The whole child psychology angle was laboured with the resulting confrontation lumbering over the horizon right from the bar room scene. Probably not helping was the obvious continuity issues, the unbelievable ability of Jason to move apparently unseen from location to location, and the share stupidity of the victims as they lined themselves up slaughter. Probably the single most horrifying aspect of Part 2 was Muffin, a lapdog, that leads to one of the most ludicrous false scare scenes in the history of the franchise. Director Minor fails to hit the tension and doesn't bring anything new to the party, a purely by the numbers sequel.
ScaryMinds Rates this movie as ... A by the numbers sequel that doesn't add anything.
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