Thursday, March 17, 2011

Friday the 13th, No. 2 - Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)


For as much as Friday the 13th had been made as a standalone crapterpiece, it was released by a big studio. Hence it was successful. Hence in another year they’d hastily force a sequel into existence, cheaply titled Friday the 13th Part 2. This title sounds uninformative, but in 1981 the “Part” part specifically suggested class…at least, until Friday the 13th got a hold of it. This is what tasteful continuations like The Godfather Part II did (the Roman numeral thing is something Friday the 13th would sully soon enough)…as opposed to mercenary blockbuster sequels like Jaws 2. And Jaws 2 is quite like Friday the 13th Part 2, and not just in that Jaws’ sick desire to be a teenager-obsessed proto-slasher. Both come of big studios forcing sequels when they perhaps oughtn’t to exist, and ensuring their success through wide release.

Hence why Friday the 13th Part 2 exists, in turn inspiring the ‘80s horror franchise phenomenon – It was truly the decade of the horror sequel, Halloween II, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, god damned Psycho II, House II: The Second Story. By being profitable, cheap, and characteristically not good, Friday the 13th Part 2 is often cited as nearly as important as its predecessor.

Otherwise, it’s the exact same damn movie, or at least as much as it can manage while still taking place after it.

But as Part 2 starts, it is the same damn movie, as they feel content to rehash the climax of Friday the 13th practically in its entirety, including moments which nicely contradict facts this sequel establishes. D’oh! But without home video and the ubiquitous, ubiquitous Internet fueling movie discussions, maybe audiences truly needed context within the complex, multifaceted realm of a Halloween knockoff sequel. Eh, that or it’s an easier way of filling up 87 minutes.

Okay, so that repetition is couched within a new opening, as it’s meant to be a dream of returning Final Girl Alice (Adrienne King). Which is appropriate anyway, seeing as the ending of Friday the 13th was meant to be a hallucination. Except the rest of Part 2 treats is as a gospel truth, a great gaping continuity hurdle that has kept Friday fans busy or ere these past three decades.

Anyway, the gist of the opener is this: A big honkin’ dude (Steve Daskawisz) gently places an ice pick in Alice’s temple. Teaching her why slasher survivors are usually advised to steer clear of the sequels.


That’s after a stalking sequence which goes by in 12 minutes – which’d be long enough in most any context, but the slasher equivalent of suspense is a most draggy thing indeed. Watching a person slowly go through her daily life, intermixed with horror movie clichés (such as the shower scene, breathy phone call, and hilarious spring-loaded cat), is not the most engaging sight to behold. Especially when director Steve Miner’s camera opts to linger upon the apartment’s architectural to no end.

Much of the opening, and the rest of this thing, employs an adequate sub-Carpenter roving camera approach. There are scant examples of artistic attempt, like nice chase sequences once the killer becomes a visible entity, and fun editing (a dog’s arguable death is followed by hot dogs on the grill). This comes partly of a budget in excess of $1 million, courtesy of the studios. And with many a budget uptick, the technical quality improves. Unlike the first, Part 2 is lit so that everything is visible. Which means one can always see what icky violence transpires; sadly, some of the first’s wildness is lost, as these movies become “safe” with substantial budget.

Making Part 2 safer is a noted decrease in the gore, the one thing which really distinguished Friday the 13th in the marketplace. The MPAA anticipated this movie most eagerly, stinging from the moral outcry which followed the lurid excesses of Tom Savini’s work prior. Not that Savini is around now, rather lending his distinct talents to another slasher called The Burning, which is for all intents and purposes the same movie as Friday the 13th Part 2, only with a less recognizable villain, more recognizable actors, and Harvey Weinstein of all folks producing (his first)! So starts, for Friday the 13th, the inception of a mighty cat-and-mouse game with the censors, a wonderful Catch 22 which destroys much of these films’ purpose.

Despite a reduction of the goopy-oopy, in its own ways Part 2 seems more offensive, for how repetition magnifies certain unpleasant formula elements. Slasher movies are defined by sex and violence, and so far I’ve only addressed the violence, however briefly. Let’s talk about sex.


It is common knowledge that sex = death. This is often cited as an example of the genre’s moral failing. (Of course, the same rule applies to Bond Girls, which has never been a major problem.) Part 2 is unquestionably more sex crazed, as it features the series’ first extended skinny dipping lake scene – a full frontal, unabashedly unedited scene at that! The first did have some nudity, such as visible tits if you’re willing to scour the frame, and also Kevin Bacon’s buttocks – but not his bacon. Making it the chastest movie he’s been in, as even invisible, that man’s schlong dangles with impunity.

Part 2 even features the traditional Horny Couple getting speared mid-coitus.

Both these sexual details are “borrowed” from Mario Bava’s Bay of Blood, aka Twitch of the Death Nerve, aka The Stench of Flesh, aka Thus Do We Live to be Evil, aka Chain Reaction, aka Before the Fact, aka The Ecology of Murder, aka Last House on the Left – Part II, aka Bloodbath, aka This Movie Has Way Too Many Goddamned Titles. A machete to the face also comes from that giallo, so whatever moral qualms one has with this Friday the 13th can apply even better to the Italians a decade earlier…except Bava’s film is somehow a parody of future films like this one (the man invented the formula, then anticipated its problems). Shamelessly repeated, Bava’s gags lose their surrealistic, aesthetic tint (his sex-spearing is a joke). Presented without this understanding, these moments are instead puerile, desperate and ugly, in their way.

But I don’t want to sound like one of those censorial prudes. But neither will I take the desperate opposite tact, and claim these slashers are somehow all about moral punishment. The argument goes that the killer offs people for committing sins – like premarital fornication or the smoking of the marijuana-dope – therefore the movie condemns those acts. (This position rather ignores the distinct critique that most slashers indentify with the killers.) Hence anyone who has sex is due up for an inevitable demise.

But think about what actors are available for critically reviled explotationers – young ingénues, mostly, often with minimal talent and questionable futures. Those actresses without even the actorly capabilities to perform Final Girl are the ones also most often willing to doff underpanties and show ‘em. So once nudity is accomplished, that actress has no more utility. Murder away! And with time, and proximity of poking and stabbing, repetition-crazed helmers do unironically present the sex = death thing. Though without thought. Of course, I’m ignoring the related idea that knives = phalluses, but these things are goddamned psychosexual enough as it is!

All this is pretty basic – as is the general underlying story structure: Counselors go to a camp near Crystal Lake, are slaughtered like the pigs they are. Actually, I’m not being wholly fair. It’s not a camp this time, but a counselor training center. Near Crystal Lake. And though the whole lakeshore has been abandoned since the doings over at nearby Camp Blood (née Camp Crystal Lake) some five years ago (meaning it’s now 1985, complete with 1981 fashions and hairstyles), Camp Packanack looks mightily livable, fresh-scrubbed – hell, almost like it’s been at least fixed up recently, meaning things are good and safe…right?

Mostly. Ignoring Alice’s death-by-Trotsky-reference, one unjustifiable murder precedes anything overtly murder-worthy. That’d be our beloved Crazy Ralph, spouter of vague dooms, garroted with chicken wire around his turkey neck. Good night, sweet prince! (If you watch this scene closely, you’ll see Newtonian physics violated in regard to a tree trunk.) That Ralph was a-peepin’ on sex when it happened suggests today’s murderous roving POV shot is a moral avenger. Eh, that, or it objects to others employing the voyeurism approach it practices so well.


The owner of that POV, by the way, is our man Jason Voorhees. This knowledge comes through extrapolation. Otherwise, we have our counselor characters to rely upon for Jason info, and they’ve never even met the chap. Hence any continuity-raping theories they push forth are to be taken with a grain of blood-drenched salt…yet it still doesn’t excuse how awkward this is for a sequel.

Jason’ mere existence in Part 2 suggests he survived that drowning in 1957, and lived a feral, wild, cephalic retard in the forest ever since. Okay, very well. But his murder motive here is revenge for his mother’s death – and keep in mind she was a murderer because of Jason’s death. So…out seeking revenge for his mother’s death as a result of seeking revenge for his death?…Snakes eat themselves with more elegance than this! How could anyone who loves his mother enough to keep her disembodied head around the shack as a curio have been so neglectful as to hide from her for twenty-three years?! See what a fantastic ragdoll this continuity is?

Of course, the real killings come about when a few particularly life-hating counselors decide to go and trespass on old Camp Blood, which is now such a decaying ruin, I can’t even see the ostensible ruins. No matter, Jason’s murder are in response to this dread act of trespassing. That’s easy enough to justify, granted we accept Jason’s existence, and the choppy psychological baggage that goes with it – like his bargain basement Oedipus Complex.

This psychology angle is the purview of the featured Final Girl, Ginny Field (Amy Steel, also of the atypical slasher April Fool’s Day). This is her field (heh!) of study in college, as we learn in a fabulously awkward line of exposition, but nothing unusual for a movie which justifies Jason’s presence as this one does. It’s this intelligence – and Ginny is a preternaturally brilliant Final Girl – that marks her out for survival.


As for the Soon To Dies…

Camp Packanack is host to some fourteen other…characters. Now, that’s right in keeping with the Friday philosophy of astronomically high body counts, and sequel escalation, and yet…A full six of these are unnamed extras, who get shuffled away for a sinless night of debauched drinking (and then some!) in the seedy Crystal Lake nightlife – which apparently includes a casino. Even the requisite jokester asshole, here named Ted instead of Ned (incomprehensible rat Stuart Charno), survives horrid murder due to intoxication.

Well, that boils us down to a mere seven Soon To Dies. When added to Alice, dearly departed Crazy Ralph, and a nameless cop for when you just need another corpse, ya got the same body count as Part 1…and with substantially poorer gore. And certain other qualifiers we’ll get to. But first, let’s “meet the meat,” as they say (“assess the asses” is my preferred term):

Paul Holt (John Furey): Camp head. He bores me in his endless speechifying, so I like to pretend he’s a Nazi, so there’s something going on. Likewise, it is my fantasy that his “counselor training” is really a Hitler Youth thing, but this is all the ramblings of a bored viewer.

Jeff and Sandra (Bill Randolph and Marta Kober): The requisite Horny Couple. That is all.

Terri (Kirsten Baker): The skinny dipper. With her nakedness on full display, there’s no room left for a personality. She’s also in possession of an anthropomorphized wig called Muffin, though on second thought that might be a shiatsu.

Scott (Russell Todd): The one who stares at Terri. And dies just before her. It seems even the Terri-adjacent are personality-deprived, to go off Scott.

Vicki (Lauren-Marie Taylor): Among females, the role of “the naked one” and “the girlfriend” are already filled. Somehow, that still leaves room for “the horny one,” which is Vicki’s role (apart from cowering helplessly). And the object of her skeevy affection…

Mark (Tom McBride): A dude in a wheelchair. For when props equal persona! I don’t know which is more tasteless, the prospect of Jason murdering a cripple, or Vicki’s fetish for said victim-to-be. And before we credit Friday the 13th Part 2 with breaking some horror taboo, recall The Texas Chain Saw Massacre got to this one first – and made its cripple an overwhelming douchebag at that!


So while Ted, Paul, Ginny and the unnamed horde are off boozing it up like those who love life, these other six stay back at camp. Every one of them dies. This is inevitable. It makes the twenty or so minutes of steady offing rather lifeless, as it were. As for these pale murders, well…Two (Mr. and Mrs. Horny) are done in at once, so in essence one killing. Some of the others get taken out off screen, and seriously, if you ain’t gonna devise a worthwhile death scene for your useless slasher characters, why include ‘em at all?! (Oh, right, the nakedness.)

Then Ginny and Paul return to camp alone, as the movie nears an end. (These plot lines are just riveting, ain’t they?) Paul is destined to perish, to get us up to ten, yet…oh, that is a problem for later. Though we think him dead right away, as Jason makes his presence known just in time for the final confrontation.

Oh, and by the way, Jason looks like this:


Yup, no hockey mask yet! Stop anticipating! Basically, this Jason’s an offshoot of the killer from The Town That Dreaded Sundown…that, or Friday the 13th is now purloining from The Elephant Man. That flour sack passes for a mask, which is such an effective means of hiding the killer’s identity without resorting to cheap camera tricks, one wonders why the first Friday the 13th didn’t think of it (seeing as Halloween had already shown them the way). Plus, masks give personality…some more than others. This giant, lumpy sack? Not so much. (“Giant, lumpy sack” actually sums up this movie.) There’s still the mystery of what atrocious neurofibromatosis said sack hides. If you peek further down, you’ll see Jason as a balding, lumpy redhead instead. I went to college with one of those. He liked RPGs and mead. He wasn’t frightening…at least, not in the sense Jason should be.

Okay, so Jason’s looking not quite right. He’s a little clumsy, too, actually prone to comic pratfalls – though still more capable than Mama. Ginny, however, is a mighty opponent, even while arguably drunk. She doubles back, lays traps, even attacks Jason with a chainsaw! Yeah! Of course, the movie takes every opportunity it can to be as tasteless. Hence at once stage Jason discovers Ginny’s hiding place because she urinates – all that beer, perhaps (St. Pauli’s Final Girl). Oh, and Ginny has occasional bouts of script-necessitated helplessness, giving Jason a fighting chance.


Still, having a defeatable monster gives the sequence its tension, and the finale to Friday the 13th Part 2 goes a long way to resolve any flaws which precede it. The very climax to their struggle is perhaps the most effective moment in any Friday the 13th – at least, when trying to judge them as actual thrillers. Ginny gets to unleash her fearsome child psychology upon the sack-headed mongoloid, and the result is so effective, I don’t even want to discuss it.

Of course, as per the movie’s pattern, Ginny follows up this eureka moment with more Vicki-esque helplessness. As though sensing this, Paul arrives from wherever he’s been, and putters around in the filth with Jason some more. And Ginny bestows upon Jason a machete to the shoulder. This was used in favor of a thematically-satisfying decapitation (you heard me!) because Paramount top dog Frank Mancuso, Sr., didn’t wish to do anything to impede future sequels. So for as debilitating as a foot-deep gash to the clavicle is, it’s not instantly fatal…and the gap between entries is long enough to hope no one asks any nosy questions.

Not that the epilogue of Part 2 doesn’t rather shit the bed anyway. Paul and Ginny return to camp, where Steve Miner attempts to recreate the jump scare ending from Part 1. And look at how needlessly convoluted that was! So a sackless Jason sacks Ginny through a window, and…Cut!


She awakes in a stretcher, as the paramedics no one called (unless…yeah, Ted et al came back with hangovers) wheel her away. Despite Paul being alive and well when last we saw him, he’s gone now. And that’s it! In all official sources, Paul is among the Part 2 body count, so chalk that up to murder by fiat. As for Ginny’s survival, who’s to say? The sequels never try addressing any of this, so it’s just a bright neon question mark at the very tail end. Could be at some stage a dream occurred, but that answers fewer questions than it raises. What a pisser!

Even with that dorky ending, Friday the 13th Part 2 is somewhere on a par qualitatively with the first. It has a far better Final Girl sequence. But the gore is worse, the plot more convoluted (simply because it’s a sequel), and the first’s raw power of the missing. The one element which inarguably works well in both examples is Henry Manfredini’s iconic score, like the Psycho soundtrack reworked through the atonal stylings of Penderecki – one element at least where Friday the 13th left Halloween alone. The thematic “ki ki ki ma ma ma” sting grounds these movies in horror, and puts you on edge. With Savini no longer around, this is the most effective recurring element.

Friday the 13th Part 2 was reasonably successful (monetarily)…not as popular as the first, but still among the most seen of 1981’s multitudinous slashers. And even though it cost more to make, this franchise boasted great cost-to-risk. Mancuso was in a position to bring Jason back every year, in order to murder more teenagers for our jollies, and he did just back. And beneath all the potential misanthropy, there’s Mancuso’s guiding principle:

"We wanted it to be an event, where teenagers would flock to the theaters on that Friday night to see the latest episode."

That’s the series’ only goal, so let’s no judge ‘em too harshly.


RELATED POSTS
• No. 1 Friday the 13th (1980)
• No. 3 Friday the 13th Part III (1982)
• No. 4 Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)
• No. 5 Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)
• No. 6 Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)
• No. 7 Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)
• No. 8 Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
• No. 9 Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)
• No. 10 Jason X (2002)
• No. 11 Freddy vs. Jason (2003)
• No. 12 Friday the 13th (2009)

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