So in the last installment, we saw everyone but Alice get killed by an unknown murderer. Alice runs outside and finds a woman who identifies herself as Mrs. Voorhees, an old friend of the Christys. Alice feverishly informs her of how everyone is dead. Mrs. Voorhees says that she is not afraid and goes in to investigate. After seeing one of the bodies, she tells the story of how Jason drowned due to the negligence of the counselors. Mrs. Voorhees was in fact working that day as a cook. She then drops the bomb; Jason was her son. Her niceness then morphs into psychosis as she repeats, “Kill her, Mommy!” and exclaims that Alice let her only son drown. At this point, it is obvious that she has been killing everyone. There is a chase and some biting, and they both end up at the lake. Alice cuts Mrs. Voorhees’s head off with a machete. She gets in a canoe, rows out to the middle of the lake and falls asleep. In the morning, the police find her and as they are calling her from shore, what appears to be a deformed youngster leaps out of the water, and pulls Alice under. She wakes in the hospital and the police inform her that all of her friends are dead. She asks about the boy, Jason. The police have no idea what she is talking about, stating that they did not find a boy. Alice is then convinced that Jason never drowned and is still alive (kind of a poor bit of number crunching; he died in ’57 and is still a child in ’80? Unless the dream was just a general premonition).
Two months later brings us to Part 2. Alice is at home sleeping dreaming about the above events (presented to us in flashback). She wakes startled, takes an annoying phone call from her mother, has a shower. She opens the fridge and Mrs. Voorhees’s head is inside. Naturally Alice panics, and is immediately stabbed in the head with an ice pick by an unseen assailant.
Five years later (which makes it now 1984), a new group of teenagers arrive at a counseling training center, which is located near the now shut down Camp Crystal Lake. On the first night, the head counselor Paul, tells the story of Jason and what happened on Friday the 13th. Part of the story of that night is that Jason actually saw his mother beheaded, and now lives in the woods, waiting to kill anyone who arrives. After scaring the fuck out of everyone, he then maintains that it is only a legend, and that Jason surely drowned. So the teenagers are free to fornicate and tell bad jokes ’til summer’s end, without fear of being slaughtered. And these kids make the last ones look like Mormons. They are drunk, naked or having sex every fucking second they can be. However, much like the last kids, this makes them completely oblivious to the fact that their peers are being offed one and sometimes two at a time, this time by a psychopath in a flannel shirt and a sack on his or her head.
Part two is better than part one. This is because since there are more people, the killings are closer together and the film moves at a pretty brisk pace. Again, we are not seeing cinematic genius, but it is actually not a bad flick. Still no over the top stereotypes, and the killings are all fantastic. So many great deaths. Spear through two people at once. There is a counselor that is wheelchair bound, and he gets a machete in the face, and rolls backwards down a huge flight of stairs. That is my favorite kill in this one.
Every time I found myself getting irritated at the horror film formula (i.e. “Hello” Is that you?” or a cat jumping in the room creating a false scare) I had to remind myself how old this film is, and that it practically invented those devices. That being said, this honestly is a completely enjoyable chapter in this story. It is more dark and brutal than the first and definitely an excellent follow up.
I will end this review by saying that Friday the 13th Part 2 punches A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 right in the fucking balls.
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