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.

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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%

SPOTLIGHT ON:

"HOUSE OF WAX" (1953)

As the number one pick of IHdb's Top 30 3D Horror Films, House of Wax, stars Vincent Price as a disfigured sculptor who repopulates his destroyed wax museum by murdering people and using their wax-coated corpses as displays!

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After master sculptor Professor Henry Jarrod's (Price) unscrupulous business partner, Matthew Burke (Roy Roberts), demands more sensational exhibits to increase profits are refused, Burke burns the museum down to collect the insurance money, leaving to die in the inferno as he tries to save his beloved wax figures. Months later, Burke is murdered by a cloaked, disfigured killer, who stages the crime as a suicide - also murdered was Burke's mistress, Cathy Gray (Carolyn Jones) and whose corpse mysteriously disappears from the morgue. Around this time, Jarrod reappears in public, having miraculously survived the fire, and proposes to open a new Wax Museum - this time, filled with all the horrors and gory scenes of death from the past in a "Chamber of Horrors". Aided by his deaf-mute sculptor Igor (Charles Bronson), Jarrod's opens his new museum with additional funding from businessman, Sidney Wallace (Paul Cavanagh). In attendance is a talented young sculptor, Scott Andrews (Paul Picerni) and Sue Allen (Phyllis Kirk) - Sue was also best friends with Cathy Gray before her death/disappearance. Roaming through the museum's collection of lifelike wax figures, Sue can't help but notice the strong resemblance the Joan of Arc figure has to her departed friend Cathy - and Jarrod cannot help but obsess about how much Sue resembles his long-lost Marie Antoinette figure!

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House of Wax, filmed under the working title The Wax Works, was Warner Bros.' answer to the surprise 3-D hit Bwana Devil, an independent production that premiered the previous November. Seeing something big in 3-D's future, Warner Bros. contracted Julian and Milton Gunzburg's Natural Vision 3-D system, the same one used for Bwana Devil, and filmed a remake of their 1933 thriller Mystery of the Wax Museum, with significant changes; the earlier film was set in the year it was released (1933) whereas House of Wax was moved back to circa 1902; the entire newspaper angle and the characters played by Glenda Farrell and Frank McHugh were eliminated; and while the masked figure was only seen sparingly in Mystery, making his identity a bit of a puzzle, he is shown early and often in this remake, leaving little doubt that it is indeed the sculptor.

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Like CinemaScope and other wider-and-larger-screen formats, stereoscopic 3-D was an alternative technology which employed separate 35 mm film prints for the left-eye and right-eye images, projected by two separate but interlocked projectors and shown by the polarized light method and viewed through gray-lensed polarized glasses (as were most of the 3D films of 1950's before they were replaced in the 1970's with red-and-blue-glasses anaglyph 3-D prints, negating the need for special projection equipment and a non-depolarizing screen).

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Ironically, director André de Toth was blind in one eye and unable to experience stereo vision or the 3-D effects. “It’s one of the great Hollywood stories,” Vincent Price recalled. “When they wanted a director for [a 3-D] film, they hired a man who couldn’t see 3-D at all! André de Toth was a very good director, but he really was the wrong director for 3-D. He’d go to the rushes and say, ‘Why is everybody so excited about this?’ It didn’t mean anything to him. But he made a good picture, a good thriller. He was largely responsible for the success of the picture. The 3-D tricks just happened—there weren’t a lot of them. Later on, they threw everything at everybody.

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Among the foregrounded uses of 3-D in the film were scenes featuring a wax museum fire, can-can girls, and a paddleball-wielding pitchman. In what may be the film's cleverest and most startling 3-D effect, the shadowy figure of one of the characters seems to spring up out of the theater audience and lurch into the screen. To accompany its stereoscopic imagery, House of Wax was originally available with a stereophonic three-track magnetic soundtrack, although many theaters were not equipped to make use of it and defaulted to the standard monophonic optical soundtrack. The film also included an intermission, which was necessary to change the film's reels, because each projector of the theater's two projectors was dedicated to one of the stereoscopic images, and could only hold enough film for a little over 40 minutes of screen time.

Released in 1953 to huge anticipation and was to become one of the biggest films of the year. Made with a budget of $1 million (or a little under $9 million adjusted for inflation), House of Wax was a phenomenal box office hit earning well over $200 million in today's currency ($23,750,000 in 1953), and was a smash with the critics of the day as well - and revitalized the film career of Vincent Price. After this high-profile role, he was always in high demand to play fiendish villains, mad scientists and other assorted deranged characters in genre films such as The Tingler, The Masque of the Red Death and The Abominable Dr. Phibes.

Although long seen only in "flat" 2-D form on television and in occasional revival theater screenings, by the mid-1960s it was usually listed among the classic horror films and even touted as the best US horror film of the 1950s. Warner Brothers' restoration of House of Wax for a 3D Blu-ray release cost $300,000. The original negatives were unusable because of water damage and the "Warnerphonic" stereo soundtrack no longer exists. Although still, to this day, House of Wax is greatly admired by critics and audiences as a classic horror film!

ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE:   95%

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