Friday the 13th, Part 2

By Mark Englehart

As bad as Friday the 13th, Part 2 is, it's a work of art in comparison to the rest of the Friday the 13th flicks that came afterward. This installment officially introduced us to Jason Voorhees as the killer (if you remember Drew Barrymore's fatal phone quiz in Scream, you know that the killer in the first Friday the 13th was actually Jason's mother), and made the slicing and dicing even more generic. Survivor Alice is dispatched within the first 10 minutes, and we're left with plucky Ginny (Amy Steel, doing a fairly decent Jamie Lee Curtis impression) to do battle with the monstrous Jason. Ginny's part of a another group of horny teenagers (less intelligent as well as less attractive than their predecessors) who try to resurrect Camp Crystal Lake five years after the initial murders--a pretty mean feat, considering this movie was made only a year after the first one. Being a smarty-pants child-psychology major, Ginny tries to outwit the dim Jason, and at one point dons the bloody and moldy sweater of Jason's late mother (which is more disgusting than any of the killings beforehand) in an attempt to confuse the masked killer. Jason may not be the brightest bulb on the tree, but the only one who's going to pull the wool--or in this case, the burlap--over his eyes is Jason himself, who wears a sack with one eyehole throughout the movie to hide his deformed features (he finally found his way to a sporting-goods store and his trademark hockey mask appears in the third installment of the series). Directed by Steve Miner, who also helmed the next Friday the 13th film (in 3-D no less) as well as the more reputable House, Forever Young, and Halloween: H20.

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