FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2 (1981)

DIRECTED by Steve Miner.

SCREENPLAY by Ron Kurz.

STARRING  - Amy Steel as Ginny,  John Furey as Paul,  Adrienne King as Alice, Stuart Charno as Ted,  Warrington Gillette as Jason,  Walt Gorney as Crazy Ralph, Marta Kober as Sandra,  Bill Randolph as Jeff,  Tom McBride as Mark,  Lauren Marie Taylor as Vickie,  Kristen Baker as Terry,  Russell Todd as Scott,  Betsy Palmer as Mrs. Vorhees.

PLOT - Five years ago Pamela Voorhees went on a murdererous rampage of revenge at Camp Crystal Lake, a rampage which left only one survivor and Mrs Voorhees herself also dead. And yet stories persisted that Mrs Voorhees's son, Jason, is still out there, somehow having survived or resurected from his drowning years earlier and that anyone who enters Crystal Lake will die by his hands...

Against the advice of the local authorities, a new camp has been opened near to the site of the original and before long a new generation of camp councillors are being stalked and killed. 

Jason Voorhees is back, grown to adulthood and looking to avenge his mother...

DIALOUGE  - Paul - "Legend has it that Jason saw his mother beheaded that night. Then he took his revenge, a revenge he continued to seek if anyone ever entered his wilderness again..."

PERFORMANCES  - In this movie we get several recurring actors from the previous film but none of them last for very long.

Adrienne King drops by for a pre credits sequence set a few weeks after the original film. She seems to be coping OK until Jason comes along and stabs her through the head...

We also get Walt Gorney reprising his role as Crazy Ralph - he's still hanging around doing his "You're all going to die" shtick, only this time Jason gets him and Ralph's the one to die. Didn't see that one coming did you Ralph...

Finally, Betsy Palmer drops by to briefly appear as a hallucination Jason has of his long dead mother. 

Jason Voorhees himself is played this time by Warrington Gillette (Gillette's quite an amusing surname considering he spends the entire movie going around slitting people's throats - Gillette gives a REALLY close shave). Unlike the first movie, this Jason is now a fully grown adult (how a resurected ghost/zombie kid can age and grow is never explained) but he's still not fully bulked up yet. He's basically a teenager. Still growing. He's also a lot faster moving and not as impervious to harm as later Jasons (he gets kicked in the balls at one point and goes down like a sack of spuds). He still looks intimidating though and I really like the potato sack over the head, it gives him more of a hillbilly scarecrow look. He doesn't get the iconic hockey mask yet, you'll have to wait till the next movie...

The final girl this time is Ginny (Amy Steel), she's quite a good character. Ginny does a bit more than run around screaming, she survives by trying to get inside Jason's head. Turns out she's a bit of an amateur psychologist and she uses this skill to save her own life at several points, most notedly when she dresses up as Jason's mother and urges him not to attack her. This momentarily confuses Jason and he has a hallucination about Pamela, this distraction causes Ginny to make good her escape. For a while at least. Ginny's a good character and a good performance, it's a shame we didn't see her again in later films as she had the potential to become an arch nemesis to Jason. A Laurie Strode to Jason's Michael Myers.

Less interesting is Ginny's boyfriend Paul (John Furey). He gets to deliver a suitably creepy campfire ghost story about Jason (he basically relates the plot of the first film to the new generation of kids). It's a nice set up scene with lots of atmosphere and Furey tells the story well. He doesn't get much more to do after that and his fate is left ambiguous. Jason springs out and attacks him but we never see him die, he's just kind of left in limbo.

The other kids all adhere to the standard teen slasher tropes again. Once more all the performances are good to average. I like the character of Scott (Russell Todd) as he's a bit of a pervert and quite amusing. Also good is Mark (Tom McBride), Mark is in a wheelchair but doesn't let his disability hold him back with the ladies, he also gets the best death scene by far.

SFX - Once again we get plenty of practical gore effects, this time courtesy of Stan Winston.

As Jason is older and now fully grown he gets a redesign when we finally see his face sans potatoe sack...

It's ginger hillbilly stepchild Jason. I like this look, it's different from before and also different from what we'll see in the future. It's the first and only time Jason is shown to have any hair. By the next film he's completely bald again, which is odd considering part three takes place only a few hours after part two, maybe Jason visits the barbershop between kills...

We also get to see Pamela's severed head, Jason has kept it as a keepsake (he loves his mum), it's by now all shrivelled and decomposed. It's a nice creepy little prop, they ought to sell them as Halloween decorations...

SEX & VIOLENCE  - Once more the two go hand in hand. Jeff and Sandra are literally impaled by a spear whilst having sex. Talk about double penetration...

Scott the pervert gets his throat cut whilst hanging upside down...

Poor old Alice comes back only to get an icepick thrust into her temple...

I really don't know what's worse - getting an icepick in the side of the head or having to wear the terrible pair of green dungarees that the costume department decided to inflict upon Adrienne King.

Crazy Ralph gets garrotted...

The local Sherrif gets offed with a claw hammer...with the emphasis on the "claw" part...

Best of all is the wheelchair kill, where Mark gets a machete to the head and then his wheelchair causes his lifeless, twitching body to fall backwards down a flight of steps...

Gruesome and darkly funny.

RATING - Part 2 is an effective sequal to the original. It's not quite as atmospheric as the first film but it still does a good job in setting up the story and overall mood.

Of course the main reason to see this is because it's the first full appearance of Jason Voorhees. It's every bit as good as you'd expect. The first film was the appetiser, this is the main course. It's also interesting to see Jason's development - he's still not fully formed yet - he's yet to wear the hockey mask and he's not as slow moving or lumbering as he becomes later. For a two dimensional walking killing machine he changes a lot during the first few films.

Overall I'm giving this 4 and a half mother fixated murderers out of 5, it loses half a point for not being quite as atmospheric as the first film but it's still a good solid slasher from the days when that genre was still fresh and surprising.

POSTER/VHS/DVD ART  -