Friday the 13th Part 2

When I reviewed the first Friday the 13th film, Fogs asked when I would “turn” and start rooting for Jason to kill the teenagers. I put the over/under at #3, and that seems so far to have been a pretty good bet. Because while it hasn’t quite happened yet, Friday the 13th Part 2 certainly doesn’t go out of its way to generate sympathy for the young adults who make their way to Crystal Lake. In this case, it’s actually the other side of the lake — the actual Camp Crystal Lake is closed — but it’s still a camp on the same lake, and the same basic plot unfolds.

The film actually opens with a flashback, of surviving girl Alice (Adrienne King) from the first film reliving the events of that day in a nightmare. This sequence takes about ten minutes and feels like it takes about thirty, as it is (obviously) familiar and mostly redundant. Everything about it could have been left out and simply included in the narration given in the head counselor’s story at the camp. Even the present-day part of it winds up feeling predictable and redundant.

Friday the 13th (1980)

I normally reserve horror movies for the month of October. I watch so many of them during that period that I’m usually sick of them for quite a while afterward, and I want to try and reserve as many of the potentially “good ones” for that period since there are, after all, so many bad ones. But it’s a rare October which contains a Friday the 13th (the next one is 2017), so there’s a conflict in that the appropriate time to watch Friday the 13th is seldom within that month. But that’s all right, it’s worth making an exception for, and nothing says I can’t enjoy the occasional horror film outside of the glut period. I missed my opportunity in January, but I acquired a DVD of the original Friday the 13th in late February; I’ve held onto the copy since, unwatched, so I could watch and review it for today, Friday, April 13.

Although I had not previously seen any Friday the 13th films, it’s more-or-less impossible to not have picked up a lot of tidbits about the series from various pop culture references and discussions. I know, for example, that Jason Vorhees doesn’t acquire his iconic hockey mask until the third film. I knew his origin story. And, of course, even if I had been coming into it completely blind, the DVD setup menu helpfully reveals the killer before you watch the film. (Brilliant!) Nevertheless, I tried to “blank my mind”, so to speak, and watch this movie as if I knew nothing about what was to come, like a viewer upon its original release. (Fun fact: the film was released May 10, 1980, but was set slightly later, on June 13. That was an actual Friday the 13th that year, which had to have increased the general nervousness of teens going to summer camp. Fortunately, unlike in the film, it was as far from a full moon as it could be.)