Friday the 13th Part 2

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.  

 However, someone needs to teach him how to wear a hat.

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 13^th Part 2.