Film Review--Friday the 13th Part 2

Friday the 13th Part 2
directed by Steve Miner
written by Ron Kurz
starring Amy Steel, John Furey, Adrienne King, Kirsten Baker, Stuart Charno, Warrington Gillette, Walt Gorney, Marta Kober, Tom McBride, Lauren-Marie Taylor

Crazy Ralph (Gorney) warned ‘em. Don’t go to that camp, ya punks. He’ll get ya. Yer all doomed. He said it and they ignored him cause he’s called Crazy Ralph and no body pays any attention to him. Too bad for them. Well, actually, too bad for Ralph too ‘cause he gets it with a garrotte by some unknowable creature who is also stalking and killing thoroughly annoying camp counselors one by one.

Now, the kids gather to learn how to boss little turdlings a bout with the least amount of effort and the most effectiveness. The film opens with a crazy dream by Alice (King), the lone survivor of the first installment in the franchise. She relives the end of the first film which means we do too. So for ten minutes we see everything that happened with shots of Alice tossing and turning intercut to remind us that this is indeed a dream. Then poor wee Alice gets an ice pick through her head and the drama begins. Then we are thrust into the story proper and are introduced to the first pair of nitwits who will most likely be slaughtered. It’s clear the girl will because her breasts are the only feature on her body that one remembers. That’s a rule with this film. Obvious breasts equals grisly death. There is another girl we meet who is actually never wearing a bra so it’s clear as crystal she’s going down hard and will never get up again. The other sure ticket to oblivion is as every horror fan knows: sex. If you have sex, you die. Actually, if you think about having sex and make preparations for it, you die.

The deaths are of course the only interesting thing in this film. Outside of the aforementioned breasts, there isn’t much here to get all jazzed about. The people are dull and dismal and lack even a semblance of personality. It’s a pleasure to watch them knifed, or to have a hatchet buried in their skull. They really are the highlights of every one of these films and the only point in remaining with the series is to see new and interesting ways of dispatching morons and creeps. Here the results are tentative as to how inventive the various slayings were. We have a hammer claw, a knife, a double impaling, an ice pick, a piece of barbed wire, and a machete. All are worthy methods of killing someone but none of them are particularly exotic or novel. Indeed, they are fairly obvious tools that can be found around any household or work shop. Still, they work well to convey the untimely deaths of a group of people who do nothing particularly odious to deserve their fates other than to lack a definable persona worth investing time in.

It takes a hell of a long time for this film to kick it in to high gear. The film makers try as they might to create fascinating characters that the audience will miss when they are dead but this never happens. It’s just a waste of time when the counselors could be being butchered slowly and methodically. That’s the one thing this film lacks and that the Saw films tried to perfect but failed. It could have given us characters worth knowing, worth crying over, and worthy of all of our attention–and then killed them wretchedly, tormenting them, torturing the fuck out of them and making there deaths into something that guts us as we try to watch. One of the best examples of this is “The Strangers” which introduces us to two people we can wholly relate to and then proceeds to kill them”. It’s always more satisfying to meet someone, develop a relationship with them, and then to watch them die. These films merely create ciphers to whom we share no particular allegiance and when they die it doesn’t matter in the slightest. It’s quite sad when the only reason you want a character to survive is because of her ample bosom. But that is what these films reduce a person to.

Back to sex. Jason Voorhees seems to have a difficult time with seeing girls who clearly are built for sex or who are in the process of having sex. He is terrified of what sex does for and means to a person. He’s a voyeur so he suffers from at least one psychopathological trait. He’s also fond of penetrating women with various implements which suggests latent at least a passing interest in fornication and release. It is unclear what he gets out of his acts of mayhem; it would be interesting to see if he obtains any type of gratification out of his deeds. Of course all that is beyond the scope of this film. It merely wants to show a madman killing young people and that’s really it. The joy is in the killings and the audience is supposed to root for the killer, in this case Jason. It’s not clear how much of this sympathy comes from the fact that he witnessed his mother’s death and is essentially a lost orphan forever searching for her and finding them instead. Personally, I don’t care who is doing the killing and I don’t identify with his pain in the slightest. I just like to see twits get butchered as strangely as possible. I assume that’s the case for many people who follow these films.

We do get to see a cripple tossed down a flight of stairs which makes one laugh, actually. I suppose people in wheel chairs naturally gain our sympathy considering their condition but it still doesn’t prevent their deaths from eliciting great peals of laughter. It’s never clear why this is, precisely. A non-handicapped person getting the same treatment wouldn’t be funny in the slightest. It’s a conundrum that will never be solved.

Jason is at the height of his game, fashion wise. He’s got the disgruntled lumberjack thing working for him and he’s quite a catch. One hopes he’s found a little foxy mutant farming woman to bed down with at night but that’s probably not happening. Still, he deserves love just as much as everyone else and should be able to find it amongst the garbage and the flowers. Jason in love would have been a thrilling new direction for the franchise but we never got a chance to see it. Or maybe we did, I cannot remember.

Overall, this film does what it sets out to do and satiates the audience’s thirst for blood. Although the deaths are all over too quick and the victims don’t seem to squirm enough, the actual implements that are used in these acts take on a iconic status as soon as they are employed to take out one of the sniveling brats. They are all elevated to a higher level and become symbols of great import in our minds as the film progresses. We tend to worship them and wait for their return with fangs bared. It’s certainly true that we watch these films to see how many can be done and the various methods that are brought to bear on their weak flesh. It’s a treat to watch them fall and allows the audience to project their own pet fears and animosities on the “victims” of these atrocities. All our hatreds can be released and we feel much better with each killing. There is nothing like watching a meager puppet get butchered for our amusement and edification. It helps if you add sex to the equation because we truly enjoy watching sexually alluring human beings get theirs in as grisly a fashion as possible. Maybe it’s just me.