FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2 (1981)
Starring Adrienne King and Amy Steel
The second in the "Friday the 13th" franchise has well deserved status as a fan favorite because it's the only serious F13 movie featuring Jason as the killer. All of the follow ups were basically gimmicky cartoons. F13 was such a phenomenal success at the box office, Paramount quickly turned around this sequel to cash in. The only problem was the killer of the first film--a vengeful mother who was angry that her retarded son Jason drowned while counselors at Camp Crystal Lake were having sex---was beheaded. The answer was simple: Make Jason the killer.
So they set the film five years in the future. Jason's body, it turns out, was never found. There's a legend around town that he saw his mother being killed. When a crew of new teenagers show up to create a new camp on the other side of a lake, Jason blames them for the death of his mother and the killings start again. He even kills the old man from the first film who loves warning camp counselors, "You're all doomed." Heck, he even kills a guy in a wheelchair.
This is a very different Jason than the one we're used to in the later films.
First off, he wears overalls and a bag over his head, with one hole that he can
look out. He's not an indestructible muscle man. He stumbles on a chair, gets
kicked in the balls, cowers at the sight of a chainsaw, and is even knocked out
by having a chair beat over his head.
He also has a makeshift home, complete with a toilet! It's here that he's erected an altar to his dead mother using her severed head as a centerpiece. He also uses the head as a prop, sticking it in the fridge of the lone survivor of the first film (King), so that when she opens it … well, it'll shock her just long enough so that he can brain her with what appears to be a screwdriver.
We eventually get to see Jason unmasked and he looks like a cross between a retard and a hippie, although whether this image of him was real or just a dream isn't clear.
"Friday 2" was naturally a massive box office smash, and it manages to deliver some of the same dread and fear of the first film. Disappointing was the fact that most of the gore effects, which appeared beforehand in publications such as Famous Monsters of Filmland, were cut by censors before the film was released. But Miner turned out to be a great horror director, and delivered a solid, serious "Friday" film. The events in Part 2 would mark the beginning of several days of rampage-killings by Jason, also chronicled in parts 3-4, films that take place back to back. By the time the rampage would end, about 35 sinful characters would be dead.
The third entry in the series came out just a year later and stacks up as a flawed but fun film, but more action packed. Plus, it was in 3-D. Unfortunately, the action would veer away from summertime camp horror, and toward another kind of camp. But where else is a series to go after two outings? Miner returned to direct.