Friday The 13th, Part 2

You almost have to admire a movie that completely invalidates its own predecessor in the first few minutes.

WARNING: Once again, here be spoilers.

The first 6-7 minutes of Part 2 recaps the last several scenes of Part 1, and ends with the sole survivor of Part 1 (Adrienne King) getting a screwdriver to the head. After which, the killer politely removes her tea kettle from the stove.

Part 2 is full of unintentionally silly things like that.

But the big ol' plot flaw is, of course, Jason Voorhees, ghost of the first film, ends up the slasher in this, and most of the remaining movies. He's not a supernatural force, though, he's a kid who grew up in the wild.

Wait, what? Didn't his mother kill everyone for letting him die? Are you saying she wasn't a mother-of-the-year candidate as she pretended? Jason wasn't really dead at all?

This movie takes place five years after the last one, so that young Jason could grow up. Lest you find yourself inclined to give the film makers credit for even that, I remind you that Jason died in 1958. That was spelled out in Part 1. He dies, the there are murders the following year, the camp burns down.

So, were he not an undead creature, he'd be in his 30s by part 1. Unless we are to presume that the first movie takes place in 1960 and this one in 1965. (Pay no attention to the jogging suits!)

Well, a sequel was needed. This one has even more sex and maybe even more violence than the last and because there's no need for a Scooby-Doo reveal, it has the more plausible hulking figure of a grown-up Jason doing his dirty deeds.

Oh, he's gonna get those counselors back for...for...for...um...chasing him off and forcing him to live in the woods while convincing his mother he had drowned.

No drugs in this one, unless you count alcohol. Actually, if memory serves, there's really not much drug use in any of the movies. That's one of those things--like the virgin living--that comes more from fuzzy memories.

Much like the original movie, it doesn't really matter who survives this one. But we know when Amy Steel starts to sort-of defend Jason that she's the one. I love the little speech she gives when she's trying to be sensitive to what Jason might have become, "What would he be like today? Out of control psycho? Frightened retard? Child trapped in a man's body?"

Well, whatever he is, he managed to track down the survivor from the first movie, call her on the phone, pick the lock on the door to her house--remember, she's having constant nightmares five years later, no way does she not lock the door--and ninja up behind her despite the hard-soled "casual elegance" shoes, which he'll later change for a pair of shiny black ones.

So, obviously not "full retard".

I believe this is the first movie to give us the full-on cheat shock. When the guy in the wheelchair--you heard me--gets it, the camera closes on him from front and back. There's no one around. When it gets in close, an arm with a cleaver comes out of nowhere to chop the guy across the face. But in order for that angle to make any sense, Jason would have to be kneeling or crouching at a 45 degree angle in front of the guy, and we've already seen there's no one there.

This pales compared to when he garottes ol' Crazy Ralph from behind a large tree! Long arms, that guy, to reach with the garotte over the top of the tree and then bring it down in front of Ralph's neck. Or maybe he nun-chucked it.

Stuff like this, which ultimately becomes the hallmark of the F13 series, really destroys any chance to achieve suspense, unless it's the sort of suspense you get from wondering when Bugs Bunny is going to let Elmer Fudd have it.

About the wheelchair thing: It's not until Kane Hodder takes on the role of Jason in the 7th movie that there are any rules to his behavior, and so the Jason of the early films is just not a very nice guy. Guy in wheelchair? Fair game. Children or animals? Fair game.

Blech.

This movie does less sproingy-body tricks than the previous, presumably because Jason doesn't have his mother's engineering savvy (though he does manage to make himself a nice rope-tree trap), but it has a particularly odd scene where Jason kills a couple in bed, hangs the guy's body up on the wall, does something unknown with the girl's, and then gets in bed and waits! Because he knows, I guess, that someone will come looking in that bed soon enough. (Nobody would think of letting a young couple be undisturbed for the night, I guess.)

What's awesome is that he then hides all of the bodies, but without ever leaving the house. I think he even manages to take one of the bodies to his forest hideout, too, while in pursuit of the surviving counselors. You wish you were that creative.

Despite his teleportation skills, Jason's pretty weak in this one. He gets knocked over by the slight Amy Steel, she kicks him in the groin, and she confuses him by dressing like his mother. (Hello, Oepdipus!) He stands on a rickety chair to fool the girl under the bed into thinking he's gone. (Say what? What kind of killing-machine slasher doesn't just drive his pitchfork through the bed, like he's done so many times before?)

In a weak attempt to recreate the thunder of the original, the two survivors "kill" Jason--who wears a flour sack over his head in this one--only to crash through a window and grab the girl sans mask. (He looks like a cross between the Elephant Man and Jack Black as the farmer in this Mr. Show sketch, "The Farm House Musical".)

Inexplicably, Amy Steel ("Ginny") is left alive while the hapless John Furey ("Paul") simply vanishes. No rhyme or reason, except perhaps to give the series a protagonist.

Somewhat amusingly, Adrienne King, the survivor from Part 1 wasn't offered a big role in Part 2 due to a miscommunication--and Amy Steel wouldn't take any role in Part 3 on her agent's advice. At least Steel and Furey would go on to have real careers, even as F13 would go on to lack any semblance of continuity.

Gore-wise, this one is particularly uninspired. A lot of slit throats, an impalement (a twofer!) and members of the cast seem to just vanish. (They actually do: They go into town, never to return, not even when the police are hauling away Amy Steel at the end.)

The next entry in the series would rip off a few of the original movies' deaths, but would at least provide some particularly creative new ones--and in eye-popping (heh) 3D. It would also be the first film not to take place on Friday the 13th. (Not that this ever seemed to be a prominent feature in any of the movies. Let's be honest, they called it "Friday the 13th" because they needed a holiday and "Groundhog Day" just doesn't sound very scary.)