This movie opens with Alice (our survival girl from part 1)
alone in her house. She’s having a
nightmare, and the events at the end of part 1 are shown again. She wakes up and gets a call from her mom. After getting off the phone, she starts
hearing strange noises. She opens her
fridge, finds the rotting head of Mrs. Voorhees…and is promptly killed by Jason
(screwdriver in the temple). I guess a
survivor girl is only guaranteed the end of her first movie.
The set-up: A bunch of teens gather at Crystal Lake for a class in camp counselor
training. This is not Camp Crystal Lake ,
but it’s another camp on the same lake.
A murderer surfaces and begins killing them off.
Let’s meet our characters for part 2:
Ginny: Our
survivor girl. She is Paul’s assistant
in this counselor training camp. She’s a
normal girl…very likable. She's fantastic.
Paul: Ginny’s
love interest. He’s in charge of the
camp. He is tall, blonde, and looks like
a classic 80s bully. But, once you get
past his initial introduction, he’s actually a decent guy.
Ted: The
prankster of the group. Same kind of
look as Ned, but much more likable. I’m
pretty sure DJ Qualls was a clone of this guy.
Jeff: Dating
Sandra. Wears a dressy hat and tank
tops. Like a gentleman.
Sandra: She looks
like she’s 12 years old, so that’s off-putting.
Scott: Total
jackass. You can see it from the first
time you look at him. He has one of
those faces you just want to punch. He
wears a polo with a popped collar and dances with Terry’s dog to try to hook up
with her. It doesn’t work.
Terry: Remarkably
slutty. If there were actually kids at
this camp, she would be the most inappropriate counselor ever.
Vickie: Seems nice
enough. Hits on Mark very aggressively a
number of times before he seems to realize what’s going on. She reminds me a little of Linda Cardellini.
Mark: Wheelchair
bound. Seems like a decent guy. Isn’t bitter or angry about the fact that
he’s in a wheelchair.
Mark & Vickie, in happier times
There is also a black character, but I don’t think he has a
name. Still, you don’t see him die, so
that breaks the “black character always dies first” stereotype.
The Killer:
Jason Voorhees:
But he doesn’t get his hockey mask until part 3. In this movie, he simply has a bag over his
head. He uses a number of different
weapons: machete, pitchfork, knife, spear, pick-ax, and the aforementioned
screwdriver.
The Deaths:
Ralph (the town crazy from part 1) is the first to go. Strangled by piano wire while leaning up
against a tree.
A cop chases someone through the woods. He finds a dilapidated shack in the middle of
the woods. He goes in, snoops around,
and gets a hammer in the back of the head.
Scott goes next.
Terry (wearing not much to begin with) goes for a walk by herself at
night, and decides to go skinny-dipping.
Someone is watching her, and they steal her clothes. We find out that’s it’s only Scott…laughing
like an idiot. He runs away and gets
caught in a trap that hangs him by his feet from a tree. Terry leaves him to try to find some
help. But it doesn’t matter. Jason comes by and slits his throat with a
machete.
Terry comes back to Scott and finds him dead. She screams, turns to the camera…and we don’t
see her die. The next time we see her,
she is dead at the shrine Jason built to his dead mother (the centerpiece of
that shrine being her shriveled head).
Vickie goes back to her cabin to get freshened up. Wearing only a sweater and underwear, she
runs out to her car to grab her hairbrush.
[Meanwhile, Mark, Jeff & Sandra are all killed.] She makes her way back to the main cabin (now
wearing pants). She finds Sandra in the
bed…with Jason lying next to her. Vickie
screams, and is stabbed to death.
Mark, rolling out on the porch to look for Vickie,
unceremoniously gets a machete in the face, and rolls backwards down a ton of
stairs.
Jeff and Sandra are upstairs in the main cabin, having
sex. Jason – having grabbed a spear from
downstairs – skewers both of them.
Following the Survival Girl:
She takes off her shirt, but she’s wearing a bra. That wasn’t enough to save Brenda, but it’s
not enough to kill Ginny.
While in a bar, Ginny talks about what Jason would be like
if he were still alive. She paints a
sympathetic picture of Jason…a child isolated from everyone but his mother, who
he was forced to watch die. It’s a
terrific speech. It almost makes you see
him in a more positive light. Until you
see him killing more kids.
As Jason attacks Paul, Ginny repeats “Paul” while backing
away. I guess that’s why she’s called a
survivor girl and not a fighter girl.
However, in a later scene she kicks Jason in the nuts, so I guess that’s
something.
Much like Alice ,
Ginny spends a lot of time running from Jason.
And, like Alice ,
there are a handful of times where she is able to knock him to the ground, but
fails to deliver the finishing blow.
Once inside Jason’s hovel, she slips on his mother’s sweater
(and grabs a machete) and attempts to talk to him like his mother would
have. He advances, kneels in front of
her, and sees his mother’s head. She
tries to cut him with the machete, but he blocks it with his pick ax and cuts
her leg. Paul shows up, and, as he
wrestles with Jason, Ginny is able to embed the machete into Jason’s
shoulder. He keels over, presumably
dead.
They get back to the cabin.
Paul comforts her. They hear a
noise at the door. Paul goes to check it
out…and there’s a little dog. But Jason
(sans mask) busts through the back window and grabs Ginny.
And then she wakes up as she’s being loaded into the
ambulance. She asks for Paul, but
there’s no sign of him.
Notes:
Jason is kind of a big, fairly uncoordinated oaf. He’s a far cry from the immortal killing
machine we see in future installments.
He stumbles around, and he’s easily tricked. With his appearance (overalls and a sack over
his head), he looks more like a angry farmer than the symbol of terror he
becomes. But he’s strong, and he’s
better than his mother.
Jason finds out that Ginny is hiding under a bed when she
pees her pants out of fear. Not a
survivor’s girl finest moment.
Final thoughts:
It seemed like there were more people involved in this
movie. But really, the main list of
characters is only 9 (and of those nine, three of them – Paul, Ted and Ginny –
are alive the last time we see them.
Paul is assumed to be dead, but the last time we see Ted is at a
bar. As far as we know, he didn’t make
it back to the camp until the next morning, when the killing was all over). It also seemed like there was more sex and
nudity. That wasn’t necessarily the case
(still only one sex scene and one nude girl), but there was definitely more
skin in this movie than the last one.
I really like this one.
Not only are we introduced to Jason (as the killer) in this movie, but
we also have Ginny, who is probably my favorite survivor girl in the series. She’s a very likable character. Also, if she needs to, she knows how to use a pitchfork.
As always, we’ll end with Final Girl’s deaths of Friday the 13th Part 2.
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