DVD Artwork
Let me just say this first off. I’m gonna spoil the shit out of this movie. You know why? I fucking hate it. This is one of the worst slasher flicks ever made. It is vile garbage, insulting to any horror fan with an ounce of sense in their already horror obsessed head. Crap, crap, crap. So if you have yet to watch this steamer and insist upon doing so, don’t read this review. Because I’m going to smash your dreams, kill your heroes and demand retribution from the heavens. Jesus is on my side for once. This movie is so amazingly toxic, I’m surprised that all copies of it haven’t been confiscated by the CDC for a public destruction by fire. Not only is it shit, it is dysentery shit, the kind where you get up, look in the bowl and wonder what the fuck you ate that made that come out of your ass.
Ready? Okay!
Poor Alice Hardy (Adrienne King). She made it all the way through Friday the 13th and now, Alice is being followed. Cats jump through her window in a vain attempt to scare the audience. She feels nervous in the shower but doesn’t actually get naked. Imagine her surprise when she opens the refrigerator door and finds, instead of a nice Hawaiian punch, the rotting and grotesque head of Mrs. Voorhees, the killer from the original Friday the 13th, a woman Alice herself beheaded! Alice didn’t put that in there! Who could have… oh. Apparently, it was the guy driving an icepick through Alice’s temple.
Jason, the guy who shouldn’t exist, launching a franchise that shouldn’t exist.
Unless you’re fantastically dim, you’ve realized this is the first movie where Jason is actually the killer. The question is… why? At the end of Friday the 13th, Jason jumps up and drags Alice out of the boat and into Crystal Lake. Since it’s all done in slow-motion, it is easy to see that Jason is a kid, maybe nine years old. It’s also made very obvious that the entire scene is a dream. The cops didn’t find any boy and they found Alice in the boat. Alice’s claim, “Then he’s still out there!” makes sense. Of course Jason is still out there. He’s in the same place his body settled in after he drowned. He’s a dead nine year old boy.
Knowing that, how can we have suddenly this huge man in dockworker clothing, making his way to another town to kill Alice Hardy? How do we have Jason at all? Has he been living on pond scum? Did he grow gills? Oh, you say. He’s been living in the woods. Sorry. I don’t buy that. He drowned. If he didn’t drown, don’t you think he would have come out of the water? And let’s say he had been living in the woods. No one found him? No one saw him? No one said, “Hey! There is smoke over there. It looks like someone has built a fire at the abandoned camp. I wonder who it is.” They found Eric Rudolph, for fuck’s sake, and he was a grown man with an underground support system!
Having Jason Voorhees as the main villain in the Friday the 13th franchise is ludicrous, nonsensical and insulting. I do not accept Jason as my personal Lord and Savior. I’ve never been able to make the final leap, that one suspension of disbelief that allows me to fully go over into this series. No one has ever fully explained Jason to my satisfaction.
Even more amusing, this time, the campers aren’t even at Camp Crystal Lake! It is a different camp down the road a few miles. As usual, the cookie-cutter camp counselors arrive. The stereotypes are all in place… and this time, we’ve got a guy in a wheelchair! That’s progressive. Seeing all of them in the same scene together is like playing “Where’s Waldo?” Can you spot the Last Girl? Can you figure out which two are going to have sex first? Who is going to be first to go?
And the bloodshed, heavily edited by the MPAA, begins anew. The guy in the wheelchair catches a machete with his face. The hot sexually active couple gets skewered together with a big spear while doing the nasty. Dammit, even Crazy Ralph from the first movie gets dispatched. All of it with no sense of humor whatsoever. This is not a fun movie. Well, not intentionally fun.
I’m gonna blow the ending for you now, so you may want to leave the room. Here is a prime example of this movie’s incredible stupidity, a main reason why I hate it so.
Last Girl Ginny (Amy Steel) has had a rough night. She has found her friends dead in various places –inside closets, hanging upside down from trees, etc.—and now she is being chased by a lunatic killer with a burlap bag on his head. There have been maybe a dozen attempts made on her life by this time. She’s hiding underneath a cot in one of the cabins, sweaty and frightened. A mouse comes out and starts sniffing around her boot. Ginny instantly stiffens and backs up against the wall even further… and pisses her pants in fear. Because of a mouse. Everything else that happened that night and she was able to hold her water. Now she wets herself because of a friggin’ mouse? Oh! And even better, Jason smells her urine, like some invincible bloodhound boy, and is able to find her.
You’re kidding, right? I mean, this has to be some kind of joke. We wouldn’t accept this in a Lionsgate movie, but we take it in Friday the 13th Part II, just because it is part of the franchise? This is ludicrous!
And when Ginny discovers Jason’s shrine to his mother, she slips on her old grey sweater and starts talking to him like she’s Mrs. Voorhees. “Jason, listen to your mother!” And he cocks his head at her like a dog, waiting for a command. Absolutely amazing. I can put on my mom’s sweater, but that doesn’t mean my dad is going to listen to me, thinking I’m her.
This movie can’t actually have been written down on paper for people to follow. Surely this was made up as they went, or perhaps they consulted the Magic 8 Ball. “Should we have Ginny lose control of her bladder? Well, guys, the Ball says, ‘It is decidedly so.’ Guess we should go with it.”
Folks, just because a movie is part of a franchise you like doesn’t mean you have to like the specific movie. I enjoy the Friday the 13th series, but there is still that little nagging voice in my head that says, “Jason is the killer? How? Why?” And since Part II was the springboard for the entire Jason story arc, if you can call it that, why didn’t they try to back it up with a better legend? To this day, I would rather see the avenging ghost of Betsy Palmer running around the woods with a machete than Jason.
Friday the 13th Part II is as bad as they come. Even more amateurishly made than the first one, but with a grim tone that makes it as enjoyable to watch as PETA footage of puppy mills, Part II at least makes you realize that the franchise had nowhere to go but up.
