Friday the 13th: Part II
Warning! Mature Content!
This following work contains material and themes that may include coarse language (albeit censored due to New Qualitipedia rules), sexual references, and/or graphic violent images that may be disturbing to some viewers. |
|
| Friday the 13th: Part II | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 They introduce Jason Voorhees, but they don't do it very well
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Friday the 13th Part 2 is a 1981 American slasher film directed and produced by Steve Miner in his directorial debut, written by Ron Kurz and starring Amy Steel and John Furey. The film also features the return of Adrienne King, Betsy Palmer, and Walt Gorney, who respectively portrayed Alice Hardy, Pamela Voorhees, and Crazy Ralph in the prior installment. It is the second installment in the Friday the 13th film series and a direct sequel to Friday the 13th. The sequel also serves as the official debut of Jason Voorhees as the main antagonist for the remainder of the franchise.
Plot
Two months after the murders at Camp Crystal Lake, sole survivor Alice Hardy is recovering from her traumatic experience. In her apartment, when Alice opens the refrigerator to get her cat some food, she finds the severed head of Pamela Voorhees and is murdered with an ice pick to her temple by an unknown assailant. Five years later, Paul Holt opens a school for camp counselors on the shore of Crystal Lake. The camp is attended by Sandra, her boyfriend Jeff, Scott, Terry, Mark, Vickie, Ted, and Paul's assistant Ginny, as well as many other trainees. Around the campfire that night, Paul tells the counselors the legend of Jason Voorhees, a boy who drowned at Camp Crystal Lake in 1957, sending his vengeful mother on two killing sprees in 1958 and 1979, until she was eventually murdered. According to the legend, Jason survived and is now living in the woods near Crystal Lake; enraged at his mother's death, he will kill anyone he comes across. As Paul finishes the story, a man with a spear scares everyone, but it's revealed to be Ted wearing a mask. Paul reassures everyone that Jason is dead and that Camp Crystal Lake is now condemned and off-limits.
That night, Crazy Ralph wanders onto the property to warn the group but is garroted from behind a tree by an unseen killer. The following day, Jeff and Sandra sneak off to Camp Crystal Lake and find a dog carcass before getting caught by Deputy Winslow and returning to the camp. Later, Winslow spots a man wearing a burlap sack mask running across the road. Winslow chases him into the woods and finds a shack. The man kills him with a hammer claw.
Back at camp, Paul offers the others one last night on the town before the training begins. Six stay behind, including Jeff and Sandra, who are forced to stay as punishment for sneaking off. At the bar, Ginny muses that if Jason were still alive and had witnessed his mother's death, it may have left him with no distinction between life and death, or right and wrong. Paul dismisses the idea, proclaiming that Jason is nothing but an urban legend. Meanwhile, the assailant appears at the camp and kills the counselors, one by one. Scott has his throat slit with a machete while caught in a rope trap, and Terry is killed off-screen upon finding Scott's dead body. Mark has a machete slammed into his face and he falls down a flight of stairs. The killer then moves upstairs and impales Jeff and Sandra with a spear as they have sex, then stabs Vickie with a kitchen knife.
Ted stays behind at the bar while Ginny and Paul return to find the place in disarray. In the dark, the killer ambushes Paul and continues to chase Ginny throughout the camp and into the woods, where she comes across the shack. After barricading herself inside, she finds an altar with Pamela Voorhees' severed head on it, surrounded by a pile of bodies. Realizing that Jason Voorhees is the killer, Ginny puts on Pamela's sweater and tries to psychologically convince Jason that she is his mother. The ruse briefly works, until Jason sees his mother's head on the altar and awakens from the trance. Paul suddenly returns and tries to save Ginny, but Jason incapacitates him. Just as Jason is about to kill Paul with a pickaxe, Ginny picks up a machete and slams it down into Jason's shoulder, seemingly killing him.
Paul and Ginny return to the cabin and hear someone outside. Thinking that Jason has followed them, they open the door, only to find Terry's dog, Muffin. Just as they sigh in relief, an unmasked Jason bursts through the window from behind and grabs Ginny. She then awakens to being loaded into an ambulance and calls out for Paul, who is nowhere to be seen, leaving his fate ambiguous. Back in the shack, Pamela's head remains on the altar, but Jason is nowhere to be found.
Bad Qualities
- While some of the kills are brutal, most are delivered in a way that ends up looking more slapsticky, such as Jason getting kicked in the balls.
- Most of the kills in this film were severely cut down by the MPAA as well, so they're only on screen for less than 2 seconds, besides Mark's death.
- Padding out the runtime: The opening has about five minutes of Alice thrashing around in her sleep remembering scenes from the first film
- Alice Hardy, the main character of the previous film and the one that survived it all, is killed by Jason right before the opening credits occur, with no recurring characters left at all, which is a main issue with many of the films, as most of them tend to not contain any recurring characters that you can root for, however, it's understandable as she was the one that decapitated Jason's mother in the previous film.
- Crazy Ralph also returns, but Jason garrotes him with some barbed wire shortly afterward.
- Ass Pull: The kid that died 20 years ago, Jason Voorhees, and the reason why Mrs. Voorhees was killed in the first place is alive after all, has been living near Camp Crystal Lake this whole time, and shares his mother's penchant for killing horny teenagers. Why his mother never found him, despite stalking the camp for years, and why Jason never attempted to contact her is never explained.
- There are too many cliches in the film, some of which are even repeated from the first film.
- If Jason was able to get the head of his mother as well as the sweater she had in the previous film, where's the rest of her body as well?
- Some of the special effects didn't exactly age well.
- Jason's design in this movie is pretty silly, and the potato sack makes him look like a rejected Klansman.
- The movie tries hard to have interesting characters but fails miserably by making the deaths come too late.
- The ending is quite confusing. On the one hand, it's implied to be a dream. On the other hand, Ginny is shown to be the only survivor despite Paul never showing up to have died.
Good Qualities
- It was the first film in the franchise where Jason is shown as the main antagonist, though he doesn't have his iconic hockey mask yet.
- The makeshift home that Jason lives in looks very impressive.
- The rotting head of Jason's mother, Pamela Voorhees, is also impressive.
- Some of the deaths are brutal, especially Mark's.
- Great Music composed by Harry Manfredini.
- For an early-80s slasher film, the movie is pretty progressive by having a disabled counselor (Mark) who uses a wheelchair, as well as having one of the girls (Vickie) coming on to him and wanting to sleep with him, treating him as just another guy working there that she finds attractive.
- The performances are mostly decent.
Reception
Friday the 13th Part 2 received negative reviews. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Friday the 13th Part 2 holds an approval rating of 27% based on 44 reviews, with an average rating of 4.43/10. The site's critics consensus reads: "Friday the 13th Part 2 sets the template for the franchise to follow with more teen victims, more gruesome set pieces, and fewer reasons to keep following along.". On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 26 out of 100, based on eight critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews."