Written by Ron Kurz
Directed by Steve Miner
Paul (to everyone): "Jason's out there ... watching .... always on the prowl for intruders. Waiting to kill ... waiting to devour ... Thirsty for young blood."
I'm slowly working my way through this franchise and I was looking forward to this sequel. Mainly because it's the first one that actually has the not so dead Jason Voorhees (Steve Daskewisz/Warrington Gillette) front and centre as a villain. Let's just say that his first proper outing's a bit of a mixed bag.
Following the events of the first movie, a traumatized Alice (Adrienne King) wants to regain control of her life. Unfortunately for her, she ended up being Jason's first kill and spanning a trend of survivors being bumped off in follow up movies. It's also a rather anticlimactic death for the character.
Anyways with Alice out of the way, there's a time jump and Crystal Lake has reopened again with a fresh batch of young adult for Jason to bump off, one by one. Not to mention a new final girl named Ginny (Amy Steel).
One of the positives about this dry run for Jason movie was that I found Ginny to be a slightly better protagonist than Alice. She seemed to be open to the idea of Jason skulking around and killing people and when faced with him, the movie delivered one of its most interesting moments in the franchise.
Having Ginny impersonate Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer) in order to buy herself time from being killed by Jason was both reckless and clever in equal measure. Saying that, Ginny also had her hunky boyfriend Paul (John Furey) to help as well.
In terms of characters, I don't really feel this sequel had a lot of memorable new players. None of the other camp counselors were bad, just not very interesting so to speak. I did however like the brief return of Crazy Ralph (Walt Gorney) but even he suffered from sequel death syndrome.
- Ginny was revealed to be majoring in child psychology. It does explain how easily she played on his feelings for his mommy.
- Jason wore a burlap sack for this movie. His iconic hockey mask being introduced from the next one onwards.
- Unlike another horror franchise, the cute dog actually survived. Nice one, Muffin.
- Chronology: The pre title was two months after the first movie, then we got a five year time jump.
Friday The 13th Part 2 was a sequel I had greater expectations for and was a tad disappointed when it didn't really live up to them. It had its moments but wasn't quite as good as the first one, even though Jason got some good kills and I liked Ginny as a final girl.
Rating: 6 out of 10
No comments:
Post a Comment