A really long time ago, I took a look at the first movie in the Friday the 13th series, which seems to be expanding all the time. I think the main reason it took me this long to get back to it is due to the rate at which these movies drop in quality. Possibly more so than any other series, these films get really unoriginal extremely quickly, with even the first one that was made not being very good. As I said back then, it's still a shocking movie with the level of violence shown, but there's so much filler throughout that it's more famous for starting a franchise rather than being a well made source of entertainment. In my view, things in this movie immediately get off on the wrong foot. The story begins by showing Alice (Adrienne King) in bed having a nightmare. She was the only survivor of the horrors that took place at the allegedly cursed Camp Crystal Lake in the first film. Pamela Voorhees, the mother of a child named Jason who drowned in a lake due to the negligence of counselors, went on a murdering spree and killed all the counselors to avenge her son. Alice wakes up, finds the severed head of Mrs. Voorhees in her fridge, and is stabbed to death by Jason, now shown to be alive. Years later, a guy named Paul (John Furey) is hosting a training course for future camp counselors with his girlfriend Ginny (Amy Steel). The other attendants are Sandra, Jeff, Terry, Scott, Vickie, Ted and Mark, the latter being in a wheelchair due to a motorcycle crash. That night, Paul tells the others about the legend of Jason and how his body was never recovered from the lake in which he died, but tells everyone it's nothing but a myth as Jason is dead, his mother is dead, and Crystal Lake is now condemned. Later on, a strange man in a fishing hat comes across Paul and Ginny's cabin and tries to warn them that Jason is real, but is garroted to death with a wire by an unknown entity. Sandra and Jeff run off in the woods together and attract the attention of a cop, Deputy Winslow, who brings them back to Paul and says if he doesn't keep closer watch over his campers, he'll be arrested. Winslow gets back in his car and during a short drive, sees someone with a sack over his head crossing the road into the woods. Winslow gets out, tries to follow him, and comes across an abandoned shack. He is killed with a pickax shortly after. At the campsite, Paul wants others to go out with him to a bar since it's their last day off before their training. Most stay where they are (including Jeff and Sandra because they ran off earlier), but Paul, Ted and Ginny go out. While the three are off drinking, Jason attacks the cabin and kills the counselors one at a time with spears, machetes, and kitchen knives. Ted opts to stay at the bar while Ginny and her boyfriend drive back to the cabin. Paul is nearly stabbed to death by Jason in a dark room while Ginny runs away into the forest. As Jason chases her, she comes across the shack and goes inside, discovering a kind of shrine Jason built for his mother, consisting of her head on an altar with 3 corpses around it. Jason breaks into the room with his pickax, and Ginny is able to stay alive by speaking to him as if she's his mother. Jason breaks out of the trance when he is attacked by Paul. While distracted, Ginny grabs a machete and brings it down hard on his shoulder, apparently killing him. Taking the sack on his head with them, Ginny and Paul go back to the cabin, where they hear someone outside the door. Ginny grabs a pitchfork just in case and gets Paul to open it, but it turns out to be a Shih Tzu that went missing earlier. Right when everything appears nice and calm, Jason comes crashing through the window and tries to kill Ginny. However, it's only a dream. Ginny is loaded into an ambulance and driven out of the campsite, while Paul is somehow gone. Why did they ruin the ending like this? Just like the first movie, this one ends in a cop-out. You're really not expecting Jason to come back right at the end, but it doesn't even matter considering it's just a dream. I didn't like how Alice was killed not even 10 minutes into this movie, seeing as how the previous one ends with Jason pulling her into the lake. That ending would have been disturbing enough and it would have made perfect sense to leave the audience with that unsettling feeling, but they blew it by saying it was a dream. This is the first movie in the series where Jason is the murderer, whereas in the first it was his mother. Still, it doesn't have him in his iconic hockey mask, which I don't think happens until the third movie. The music fits well with the suspense being shown, but overall, this second installment already feels tired to me. It's also painfully predictable much of the time. Whenever a character goes into the woods by themselves or is left in the cabin alone, just consider them dead. Despite their repetitiveness, Friday the 13th films would be made every year all through the 80s except for two.
Review of Friday the 13th Part 2
