SPOTLIGHT ON: Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)
Celebrating the birthday of Jason Voorhee's today is IHdb's Spotlight series on his cinematic debut, Friday the 13th Part 2.
Five years after the events of the first film, a new camp-counselor training camp is built on the shores of nearby Crystal Lake. Included among the counselor is camp director Paul Holt (John Furey), hopefuls are lovers Jeff and Sandra (Bill Randolph and Marta Kober), troublemaker Scott (Russell Todd), his girlfriend Terry (Kirsten Baker), wheelchair-bound Mark (Tom McBride), sweet-natured Vickie (Lauren-Marie Taylor), jokester Ted (Stu Charno), and Paul's assistant - and girlfriend - Ginny (Amy Steel). At the campfire that night, Paul tells them the legend of Jason Voorhees to scare the other counselors from entering Camp Crystal Lake. Later on Paul offers the others one last night on the town before training starts. As most of the trainee counselors depart, the remaining teens are stalked by an unknown figure wearing a burlap sack over his head and, one-by-one, are dispatched in various gruesome ways. Is it Mrs. Voorhees' son Jason, who did not really drown in the lake some 30 years before? Of course it is!
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Following the success of Friday the 13th in 1980, Paramount Pictures began plans to make a sequel. First acquiring the worldwide distribution rights, Frank Mancuso, Sr. stated, "We wanted it to be an event, where teenagers would flock to the theaters on that Friday night to see the latest episode." Steve Miner, associate producer on the first film, believed in the idea and would go on to direct the first sequel (as well as the next one, Part 3), after Cunningham opted not to return to the director's chair. Returning from the first film was Adrienne King - who at the time was being stalked by an obsessed fan after the success of the original Friday the 13th - and requested her role be as small as possible, and her character Alice is killed in the opening five minutes of the sequel. Speaking in 2009 for the documentary His Name Was Jason, King described Alice's early death as "unfitting way for her character to go." Betsy Palmer also returned for a small cameo as Pamela Voorhees, appearing to her son as a dream urging him to kill.
Actor Warrington Gillette played Jason unmasked at the end of the film with tuntman Steve Daskawisz (also known as Steve Dash) being credited as Jason Stunt Double but played Jason throughout the rest of the film. During the shoot, Daskawisz was rushed to the emergency room when Amy Steel hit his middle finger with a machete during filming the climax scene. Steel explained, "The timing was wrong, and he didn't turn his pickaxe properly, and the machete hit his finger." Daskawisz received 13 stitches on his middle finger. The film's ending has also been a source of confusion for fans. Writer Ron Kurz has stated that Jason's window jump was intended to be set in reality and that Paul was killed offscreen. However, the beginning of Part 3, in replaying the end of Part 2, instead showed Jason pulling the machete out of his shoulder and crawling away as Ginny and Paul leave him for dead in the shack. In addition, near the beginning of Part 3, a news broadcast reports the body count at eight, thus excluding Paul from this count. Originally the film's ending was after Ginny was loaded into the ambulance, it would switch to Mrs. Voorhees's head, which then opens its eyes and smiles, indicating that Jason had killed Paul; however, the ending was scrapped at the last minute for being too fake.
Much like its predecessor, critical reception to the film was initially negative. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote that Friday the 13th Part 2 was "a cross between the Mad Slasher and Dead teenager genres; about two dozen movies a year feature a mad killer going berserk, and they're all about as bad as this one. Some have a little more plot, some have a little less. It doesn't matter." However Bloody Disgusting said in its review of the Bluray release, "It doesn't exactly stray far from the formula of the original film — neither do most of the other sequels — but Friday The 13th Part 2 still stands as an iconic and important entry in the series due to the introduction of Jason as the antagonist of the series and the usage of Italian horror films as an inspiration for its death scenes — most notably, the spear copulation death from Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood."
We all know that despite the reviews, the Friday the 13th saga would go on for another 10 films between 1983-2009, proving that Jason Voorhees was definitely here to stay!
ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE: 32%
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