Lest it seem that I’m only writing about great, older, classy movies, here’s a discussion of a great, older, trashy movie.
Friday the 13th, part 2 (1981)
A cheap cash grab. A totally uninspired, throwaway slasher flick. A body count film. A dead teenagers movie. All of these could be ascribed to Steve Miner’s film, and I expect they have. They would even be accurate. Doesn’t matter. This is simply a terrifically entertaining movie that knows exactly what it is, and has great fun doing it. It delivers solid suspense, scares both cheap and earned, a generally likeable group of young people that you mostly don’t want to see eviscerated, teasing play with audience expectations, and one of the all-time great final girls, who you really want to root for. And on top of all that, in spite of the fact that it seems to so knowingly draw on slasher conventions that it almost seems to be sending them up (coming out at the height of the post Halloween slasher boom—there were at least 30 released in 1981 alone), it also actually takes its antagonist seriously—probably the only Friday the 13th film in which there is any real psychological underpinning to the character of Jason.
The story is as simple as can be. After a cold open wherein Alice (Adrienne King), the lone survivor of the first film, replays nightmare memories in her head, recapping the key points of the first outing of the series (a lot of camp counselors getting killed, the revelation that the killer was Mrs. Voorhees, the mother of a developmentally disabled boy, Jason, who drowned while some counselors were having sex, Alice decapitating Mrs. Voorhees, Jason rising out of the water of the lake, apparently less dead than had been thought), she wakes up and, in a genuinely suspenseful sequence, gets creeped out exploring her apartment. Oh, it’s just the cat being thrown through the window. Whew—nothing to worry about…Nope, actually she finds a head in her refrigerator and then gets an ice pick to the noggin. The opening titles literally explode and we’re off to the races.
This time we find ourselves across the lake from Camp Crystal Lake at the Packanack Lodge Camp Counselor Training Center where a nice bunch of youngsters have come to learn to be better camp counselors, and generally drink and screw around in the woods. With one exception in the form of a sleazy, sexually aggressive dude who eventually gets his comeuppance for consistently harassing one of the girls by being hung upside down and having his throat slit, the rest of the trainees are nice kids that are easy to spend time with. It’s a shame that they find themselves in this movie, but oh well.
The last to arrive is Ginny (Amy Steel) who rolls in late and gives Paul (John Fury), the owner of the Center, a good natured hard time. It’s clear that they’re an item and in this, we immediately get something a bit refreshing for the genre. For all that the tropes have been pretty well established by this point and that this series never shied away from the regrettable Reagan era Sex = Death slasher formula, Ginny does not quite fit the mold of the ‘final girl’. I mean, sure, it is technically possible that she is a virgin—it’s never explicitly stated, but the sense is that she is a self-possessed young woman, in a relationship and free to express her own sexual desire, who has a life and interests beyond mere survival (she’s studying childhood psychology—which becomes relevant by the end of the film); and she does survive in the end by trading on her wits, education, and empathy and not only running and taking up a penetrative phallic object to use against her assailant (though of course, there’s plenty of running and stabbing). In a crowded field, she stands out by really feeling like a person.
Anyway, most of the rest of the plot requires little description. One by one, the kids start getting picked off until only Ginny remains. She stumbles upon the shack in the woods where Jason has been holed up, building a candle lit shrine to his dead mother’s head and nice, chunky knit sweater, surrounded by the corpses of recently murdered teenagers.
In a bit of quick thinking, she uses her child psychology super powers to get inside his head and, donning said sweater, speaks to him as his mother, gaining an advantage. At the end of the day, everyone else is dead, Jason gets away (there are still 9 more films to come, after all), and Ginny seems pretty traumatized, but she makes it through.
Most of the plot itself simply ticks boxes and fulfils viewer expectations. But moment by moment, the movie takes real pleasure in subverting some of those expectations. Time and time again, the audience is teased with the suggestion of prurient subject matter which then doesn’t pay off (in the sense of shower scenes and kills, this one is much less explicit than you might expect), and then there are solid jumps when suddenly the knife flashes into view or the wire wraps around the throat, or the spear…, well, you get the idea. It really feels like the film makers are playing with the form. And it is fun and funny when the movie successfully pulls one over on you.
And there is plenty of comedy throughout, particularly in the editing. Visual gags abound, such as when a cute little dog comes across Jason in the woods. We don’t really know his policy on canines as opposed to humans, but we assume it will end badly for the pup.
Quick cut to hot dogs roasting on a grill. Later, at the end of the movie, just when it seems that everything is finally over and Jason has been killed, Ginny hears a sound outside. Oh no—what will she do? Wait. It’s just the dog. Oh, good—it was ok all along. CRASH! Jason jumps through the window behind Ginny, grabbing her as we cut to black. These little tricks seem so obvious, but when obvious works, it can’t be faulted.
Beyond this sense of play, and well executed cattle prod cinema, eliciting jumps and laughs at appropriate (and inappropriate) moments, a real strength of the film is that Jason gets to be an actual person, and for my money, that makes him scarier here than in any of the later installments. In the first film, he basically doesn’t exist. He’s a sad story—an impetus for revenge on all the naughty teenagers of the world who dare visit this lake. In later films, he is an evil tank. Wearing his characteristic hokey mask and mostly standing menacingly when he isn’t skewering somebody, he is the beefed up uber-version of the silent masked killer archetype.
In this film, wearing a sack over his head and seen running, scrambling, desperate, angry, wild, he is a broken, dangerous human being—nothing supernatural. Just a person who has had a terrible life and grown into a vicious killer, filled with rage over the death of his mother, the only one who cared about him. The film sees him, and Ginny can empathize. To be fair, this is repeated with Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldmen) in the fourth part, but it really lands here.
No one could make the claim that the sequel to Friday the 13th, itself, a cheap American retooling of Bava’s Bay of Blood, is some kind of classic of world cinema, but it does what it does excellently and in my opinion, is the scariest, most fun flick this series has to offer. Miner went on to direct the next sequel one year later (in 3D: Dangling yo-yos! Eye balls jumping out of sockets! Popcorn kernels popping!) and managed to produce another fun movie, but for me, failed to quite catch lightning in a bottle the second time around.
