Friday the 13th Part II

There have always been sequels. However, there was a time that it was not such a trend as the de facto sequel, the sequel which is called just because the original film is there. A story had to be really unique, or excessively successful at the box office to need a continuation.

That changed with “Friday the 13^th, Part 2,” released in 1981.

Tim Brayton stated in his review, “Given a precursor that had no ready entry point for a follow-up, which did fair business for its cost, but nothing special, there's no obvious reason why this film came out before Halloween II, The Hills Have Eyes, Part 2 or even Aliens. It just did. And then the gates to Satan’s home were opened, and soon we saw everything from The Sting II to Grease 2 to the ne plus ultra of all asinine sequels, Psycho II.”

Brayton goes on to say, “Given its illegitimately descendants, it is perhaps surprising that Friday the 13th is a distinct improvement over its predecessor - not much of a hurdle to clear, I'll admit, but it's really not a terrible slasher by the standards of its day, and it's incomparably better than the watery feces the studios try to pass off as horror cinema here in 2007.”

Granted, none of this means that it’s a good movie. Just that everything considered it may have been way worse.

It’s pretty simple in this sense to point at one person who can claim responsibility for the film’s qualified success, and that man is Steve Miner, a director who brought a lot more in the look of skill and care to this movie than Sean Cunningham would have thought of (Miner was an associate producer under Cunningham during the filming of “Friday the 13^th,” but it doesn’t show). To start off, Miner seems like he really understood how to use darkness to create mood, rather than just to make a whole lot of dark. There’s always enough light to make sure we know what’s happening, but a lot of times not quite enough that we know what’s about to happen, and that is a huge improvement from the first film.

Let’s not forget, Miner (or maybe just his cinematographer, Peter Stein) has the skill to make a shot in such a way that it’s interesting and tells a story. Brayton said, “I can't think of one single image in Friday the 13th that functioned in any way other than to capture the rudiments of the action. Part 2 is hardly an Ozu film, but it's quite clear that the director tried, especially during the climactic chase sequence...but I'll get to that soon enough.”

Finally, Miner’s camera moves a lot. Brayton noted, “Apparently flush on the receipts of the first film, someone decided to get a Steadicam rig for the sequel, and it paid off handsomely.” It’s not really that the camera becomes a stalker, as it had and would in countless other slashers, but is works a little bit like it does in an early-‘80s Sam Raimi film, making sure we know that there’s something out there, looking, sneaking. It sets us inside the area in the film and adds to our way of the physicality of the movie, and that gives us to be more aware of the danger. Brayton admitted, “I'm not sad to admit that the filmmaker inside of me grew jealous at more than one moment, in admiration of some particularly well-choreographed sequence.”

One of those moments starts the film: we look down a rainy street at night to a house with a few lights on, before moving down to the street and a boy’s feet, as he runs home to bed. Moments later, two huge feet come on screen, and they walk with such speed to that first house, as the camera tries to keep up. It’s a nice, economical start that tells us something right away: there’s a giant killer out there, with secret and apparently hateful objective.

This part starts one of the longest pre-title parts in history (the time differs by print, but it’s 12 minutes on the DVD, almost 15% of the total running time), where we reunite with Alice, the protagonist of the first film. She hasn’t really got over after two months decapitating Mrs. Voorhees, as we see though the sincere recap of that part from the first movie honestly inserted as a dream scene.

Brayton mentioned, “For no real reason other than because we've seen all of the repeated footage we need (and even at this point, it's scary how big is the difference between Cunningham and Miner's visual vocabularies) Alice hops out of bed and into a laundry-list of '80s horror clichés: a quick shower, a mysterious nobody on the phone, a false scare in the form of a cat being thrown at the actress from offscreen (and it is more obvious that the cat was thrown here than in any other film I've ever seen), and finally the dismembered head of her adversary from the last film sitting in her refrigerator. This last discovery is quickly followed by a very large man shoving an ice-pick into her skull, and the first big flaw becomes clear: this film is shockingly light on the blood. Which might not sound like a problem, but I promise that it is to anyone who would willingly watch a slasher film.”

Brayton goes on to say, “And honestly, the first big flaw was already nicely pointed out by Adrienne King: the acting in this film sucks every bit as hard as the first, with one surprising exception that I'll return to.”

Fast forward years later to another summer and we see two boring looking young kids in the same exact town that “Friday the 13^th” started. It turns out that a young man named Paul Holt, played by John Furey, has decided to hold a camp counselor training session at end of Crystal Lake, a mile or so down from where the infamous Camp Blood murders. It appears from incidental evidence that these are either high school or college counselors this time around, and even though the actors are still looking in their mid to late-twenties, it’s not really distracting because of that.

And who do we have in this movie? A group that’s even harder to tell apart than from the first movie, that’s who! There’s Jeff (Bill Randolph), who is somewhat blond, his girlfriend Sandra (Marta Kober), who must have been forgetful, the practical prankster Ted (Stu Charno), Terri (Kirsten Baker), who wears tight shirts and nothing underneath, and will give the series its first real nudity, and has a foul dog named Muffin, Scott (Russell Todd), who is desperate and, as Brayton said, “very fugly after the fashion of the early '80s,” Vicky (Lauren-Marie Taylro), who is prostitute-like but dresses predictably, and is not really identified until after she’s killed (although someone vaguely in one scene did say “Vicky”), Mark (Tom McBride), who is in a wheelchair, and Ginny (Amy Steel), who has a car with horrible starter and is studying child psychology, and is a big sarcastic. Maybe, not the same assortment of actual character traits as Alice, but it’s enough – especially the child psychology part – to make her immediately as the Final Girl.

Brayton noted, “There are also six counselors, including two who are not white, in a startling display of slasher film affirmative action, who are collectively named "Extra Counselors." Hey, it's still something for the resume.”

On the first night, Paul tells the story of Jason Voorhees, who drowned when he was ten, and his crazy mother who killed people in revenge, and the myth that Jason still walks in the woods, and then it skips away as everything stops at a halt. The whole point of “Friday the 13^th,” as retold here and in the opening scene is that Mrs. Voorhees was avenging her son’s death. All of a sudden, now it seems that he’s been alive and well in the same exact woods where she did all her murderers, for these past decades, and not one time did mother and child reunite. Ant it makes the whole “zombie boy Jason” bit at the end of the first film even weirder. However, let us put that aside for this film, because there’s absolutely no doubt that Jason is now and adult and alive in this movie, and he is furious.

Brayton said, “First, the Steadicam alerts us that something is watching the campers as they unpack; it turns out to be Crazy Ralph (Walt Gorney) from the first film, and he gets garroted pretty much immediately.” A while later, Jeff and Sandra are out in the Forbidden Woods, where they find a dead dog (who may or may not be Muffin), and an angry cop, played by Jack Marks, who chases them away, finds another person in the woods who he chases to the old camp that cannot believably have gotten that run-down in just five years, where he gets instantly offed.

That night, the Extra Counselor, Ted, Ginny and Paul all go to town (this sadly saves Ted, the film’s Horrible Comic Relief, from a bloody death). The remaining six all go down really easily in mostly bloodless parts. Brayton said, “The only real exception is Mark, who gets a machete to the face in a moment that is equal parts Twitch of the Death Nerve ripoff (as is another death, in which a couple get speared in medias making out) and Dawn of the Dead ripoff. Cast those nets wide, boys!” In the last death, we find that the murderer – Jason Voorhees, big surprise – is a giant man in overalls with a potato sack with one eye-hole to see out.

Brayton said, “It's desultory and entirely boring, but it does stand above its slasher brethren in one important respect: the girls are killed just as quickly as the boys, without all those stalkery-scenes that in the first film stretched out to as much as 2.5 minutes. Which makes it a tiny bit easier to stand, moral-like.”

Brayton goes on to say, “(Also, we get to see Jason move a body. That hardly ever happens in any slasher, but nobody knew that in 1981, so I don't like to think of it as a big deal).”

Brayton continues, “Anyway, Ginny and Paul return, Paul goes down almost before they even realize that Jason is present, and so begins one the single greatest Final Girl scene in any film I can name from the whole decade.” As you have seen, Ginny is really smart, about 90% of the time, and she does very well in hiding, very often. Brayton mentioned, “Many words ago, when I mentioned the good compositions during this sequence, here's what I meant: there are many shots in which we see Ginny in focus in the foreground, and Jason is far in the back, usually separated by a framing element, a tree or car or window. It's not Welles-style genius or anything, but it is a constant reminder of the chase, and compared to the first film in the series, where half of the shots in the Final Girl sequence were an out-of-focus flashlight in the upper-left corner, I choose to be lavish with my praise.”

Eventually, Ginny comes to Jason’s cottage, and finds the shrine he built to his mother, and quickly disguises herself to look like Mrs. Voorhees. Brayton said, “Jason finds her, and falls for the trick, and you know how I said there was one good performance?” It’s an uncredited Steve Dash as Jason at this part. Really, with a potato sack over his face and one eye-hole, he does give us 100% on the idea that Jason is a shocked child-man, using little else than the angle of his head.

Then somehow Paul and Muffin come back and they kill Jason, and then run to their camp, but Jason follows them and grabs Ginny – and it’s morning, Ginny is fine, Paul’s body is missing.

Brayton said, “I suppose that at some point the final chase became a dream sequence, but I'm shocked if I know when. Shock endings suck.”

Brayton credited, “So, all in all, this might just be the best post-Halloween slasher film I've ever seen.” It is well-shot, and it has a great Final Girl sequence, and a really good performance of its slasher villain. Brayton said, “But it has some major flaws besides those I've already mentioned: it struggles too hard with continuity in the beginning, before giving up and criticizing all over continuity; and the middle third is endlessly boring. And, I need hardly mention, it's not at all scary. Slasher films are never scary.”

Brayton goes on to say, “But it's well-done enough, and although I pine for Tom Savini's gore effects, I'd rather have a good director seven days of the week. This isn't a great film - not even a great horror film - but it's good enough that for the first time in my life, I begin to see that there was at least a sliver of justification for the hundreds of slasher movies produced between 1980 and 1993.”

Brayton ended his review by saying, “Or maybe, it's just that I was that starved for something that didn't completely blow after the first film.”

In the end, this film is not as good as the first, but not as bad as everyone says it is. Definitely check this one out, because it’s the first film that introduces Jason, even though it’s not the iconic image of Jason that everyone knows. However, it’s still one that is worth seeing, so you should see it, I give it a recommendation.

Check in tomorrow when we look at the next entry in “Friday the 13^th-a-thon” in this year’s “Halloween Month.”