Review

We’re back on the shores of Crystal Lake five years after the original movie. A camp down the way from the infamous scene of the original rampage is in counsellor-training mode. Teens do sex, booze, and drugs, then get picked off one by one as an unseen assailant does a bit of housekeeping. That’s about it really; spot the final girl is the only attention-grabber to be honest. And that should take all of about ten minutes. Much Psycho-POV, nekkid bits, and stuff ensues. Ready to go camping…?

This is full of freaking spoilers; if you haven’t seen this film or the original, don’t read on or count yourself very lucky in not catching the movie.

Sean Cunningham’s original trash entry in the franchise made near enough to $40 million U.S. domestic gross leading Paramount to demand a sequel. Steve Miner stepped into Cunningham’s shoes, gave Paramount a sequel, and it went on to earn around $21.7 million; thus ensuring a franchise was up and slashing from a major studio. The horror genre ultimately paid the price, as the high water mark achieved through the mid to late 1970s, drained away in a sea of F13th sequels, rip-offs, and ultimately spoofs. By the end of the 1980s, horror was left licking its wounds, and waiting for a recovery to come via anyone from any country. Surprisingly, a spoof on slasher movies by Wes Craven would achieve that in 1996. As they say, if you don’t learn from history you are doomed to repeat it: see 2006 and 2007.

Writer Kurz had a major problem with the sequel; they had killed off the antagonist in the first movie, so where could they possibly go from here? In perhaps one of the most seriously intellectually challenged developments in cinema history, Kurz decided Jason Voorhees would fill in for Mom this time round. What’s wrong with that? you may ask; everything, would be the answer. Consider this: how old is Jason in the penultimate scene in the original? That’s one hell of a growth spurt going down in five years. Equally, how come Pam Voorhees is unaware that her son didn’t really drown in 1957 and has instead been loitering around the shores of Crystal Lake for the last few decades? Pammy may have had issues with inattentive counsellors, but by heck she’s hardly parent of the year material herself. She didn’t notice her son for a few decades! No wonder Jason has more than a few Roos loose in the old top paddock, parental neglect reaches a new milestone. And while on the subject of mommy’s boy Jason, how about helping Ma out there a bit Jason. Not too much to ask surely.

A classic example of moviemaking where you simply re-invent things, and hope the audience is too hyped on food additives to really think about things. Considering the hordes of Voorhees fans, intellectually challenged isn’t that far off the mark.

Anyways, Miner opens his movie pretty effectively, and then proceeds to insert about every horror cliché in the tarot pack. We get a rain-glistening street with a child playing in the puddles. Mom calls, child leaves, and an adult enters the scene. This is shot from ground level, so no details on who the heck this is are shown. There’s possibly some relevance to the child, and we assume adult Jason here, but you know what? It’s a slasher, so it was probably a cool intro and the moviemakers didn’t think to add anything approaching a theme in there. Am going to really resist reading too much into this film, as that might approach actually doing criticism and stuff. As stated, review site, go read navel-gazing places if wanting critical analysis.

Jason wears a potato sack as that's what the franchise needed, a grounded belief in U.S farm lifestyles!

We cut to an upstairs bedroom (don’t think about it; normal physics are out the door in this opus). Inside we find Alice Hardy having nightmares about what went down in the first film. Normally I would say this is a pretty cool way to reprise major events from a previous movie, but since Part 2 hit cinemas a year after Part 1, I’m putting it down to Miner doing his best for the attention-challenged audience members.

Alice is woken from her nightmare by the phone ringing. Hey, it’s Mom, and naturally Ms Hardy is still trying to get over her afternoon tea party with Pamela Voorhees. You can tell Alice is traumatised cause she sleeps with the lights out, yet there’s a couple of lamps burning away in what I suppose is the apartment lounge room. If you were cynical I suppose you could suggest this was Miner’s wanting to light the scene, yet keep the frame edges in darkness. So trauma gal then grabs a shower, invoking yet another horror cliché. The camera stalks in on the shower curtain, and whammo, Alice rips that sucker back. If I wasn’t at the time banging my head against my desk I might have actually jumped. Would have saved on the headache as well.

We next follow Alice to her dimly lit kitchen, where – gasp! – there’s an open window. Now I don’t know about you, but I found this development kind of dumb. If I had been present at a psycho coming-out party and then meet the “boy in the lake”, I probably wouldn’t leave windows open overnight. Because there’s an open window and Alice hears a sound from outside, we get the obligatory spring-loaded cat flying through the window at warp factor nine. Actually slo-mo that and take note of the cat size and colour, ’cause in the next shot it’s a completely different animal! I would imagine this was due to spring-loaded cat getting the hell out of Dodge after some sicko threw it through a window.

Alice, distracted by the preening of cat mark 2, then opens her fridge and finds a little present. Totally off guard by now, she becomes victim number one in the movie. I actually thought that was pretty callous to be honest; Alice got through the first movie, and then gets offed in the exceedingly long prologue of the second one!

Actually, speaking of long, am I running out of room in this review? And we’re still buggering around with the start of the movie! Couple of points then, and we’ll call it a wrap. See the second half of the review of Friday the 13th Part 2 for something like a discussion on the rest of the film.

There have been a million and one articles published about the rules for surviving to the end of a slasher over the last few decades, and by heck an awful lot of serious discourse on the mixture of sex and violence. Weighty stuff to be sure. Unfortunately for our shoot from the hip writers, the granddaddy of all slasher franchises tends to break all those concrete rules pretty readily.

Our last girl in this one, Ginny Field, during the course of the movie breaks about every rule ever devised for a slasher flick. She drinks beer, it’s hinted that she isn’t adverse to the odd toke on the happy weed, and in the only subtle scene in the entire movie she’s clearly dug into a bit of hide the sausage with head counsellor dude Paul Holt. We even get a bra shot, normally reserved for a victim, and by heck Ginny is off on her own for periods of the movie. Exactly what were those rules again?

What I would like to present as the requirement for surviving a slasher epic is situational awareness. Both our final gals thus far in the Friday the 13th franchise in scene after scene stop and look around them. Alice and Ginny are aware there’s someone out there in the woods; they can’t pinpoint the danger, but both know something isn’t right. Their fellow campers are of course unaware till it’s too late. Sex, booze, drugs, or a combination of all three distracts the various victims in both movies. The final girls are focused on the situation. Think I made a similar point in a Halloween review from memory.

The second point I want to make before closing is all about final gal Ginny. The feminist intellectuals have by and large taken a big knife to the slasher sub-genre, and have carved it up in far better fashion than the Voorhees could ever hope to do. Horror tends to be misogynistic at the best of times, so why single out slasherdom! In movie after movie, strong female roles are shown in amongst the T&A and stalking going on. Part 2 is no different. Ginny is strong-willed, resourceful, intelligent, and by heck she can kick butt when required. Feminists may want to look at other genres and their depiction of females – westerns anyone? – rather than focusing on the easy mark that slasher epics represent. Pseudo-intellectualism of the highest order would be my call. Sure slashers might be the lowest value in horror’s dark deck of cards, but why not aim at how the fairer sex get on in action flicks, martial arts movies, and the 101 teen comedies we get each year. Want to talk about stereotyping, check out the rest of the bill of fare down the multiplex any day of the week.

Wow, I have managed to go dissertation length, in terms of reviews, on a sequel to a pretty bad first movie. Totally off the reservation, and unrepentant in doing so kids. If you want to read a review of Friday the 13th Part 2 then wait for the second half of this narrative, when I actually get around to reviewing the movie. I just had the mother of all digressions happening.

Till the second half, then.