Jason Voorhees, perhaps more than any other slasher villain, has had his modus operandi hampered by the MPAA to such various degrees that it would be impossible for a real-life criminal profiler to make sense of him. In some movies, such as Part IV and VI, he is allowed to overkill and mutilate, while in others, Part VIII and Part XIII, he has to tone things down for reasons that
have nothing to do with himself.
The political climate, Siskel and Ebert, and various other factors lead to Jason operating the way he does in any given film, and this makes him one of the most inconsistent and bizarre slashers in the genre.
Part 2 is where Jason makes his first appearance, and because Friday the 13th was especially gory, Jason will have to kill the counselors of this movie with less violence than his mother used to kill counselors on his behalf. It is for this reason that Part 2 is one of my least favorite sequels, yet it has a few special moments – any die-hard fan will know what they are – to make it worth watching.
It starts with Alice having a flashback dream of the end of the first movie, which is perhaps the goriest sequence in this movie but one – Alice’s death included. A prologue of the events of the previous film is always a good way to kill five minutes when a movie knows it’s characters are too annoying to be afforded ninety. She wakes up from her nightmare – it is a curious thing, never explored in slasher movies to my knowledge, when final girls suffer PTSD – and takes a shower. She is spooked by a prank call and then a cat, then discovers Mrs. Voorhees’s head in the refrigerator. I am happy for a second that she is shocked it is there, because this means she did not take it with her as a trophy. Jason grabs her by the throat and stabs her in the temple with an icepick. How Jason tracked her down while carrying his mother’s head – which was not seized as evidence, and begs serious questions as to what happened to the rest of her – is not a question easily solved and best left to academics who can unravel these things with Lacanian psychology.
Then the credits roll, with the Friday the 13th logo appearing again, only this time it explodes when Part 2 crashes into it from behind, thus demonstrating how Part 2 feels about Friday the 13th.
A couple is on their way to a counselor-training center on the same lake as Crystal Lake, operated by someone who thinks they can bypass Jason’s victim selection with the subtle distinction between camp counselors and counselors-in-training. The couple is warned by Ralph as the others were warned before them, which is an amazing thing because Ralph’s foreknowledge should have made him a person of interest by now. On their way to the camp they are stopped by a tree in the middle of the road, which I suspect Jason put there but might have fallen on its own and was scripted in later with the clever device of having the actors move it while geting paid for one job when they are doing two.
The camp is run by a man named Paul, who dresses like the Brawny mascot and probably uses paper towels for toilet paper because towels absorb more shit than paper. A handful of counselors will behave as if this movie is a summer-camp comedy and take their chances at love, the irony being that if they knew they were in horror movie they would fuck like rabbits and effectively transform it into a porn. This fact must be especially painful to the characters who die right before they are about to have sex, but even more so to those who had a chance but decided not to, and perhaps the most painful of all to those who survive and might not ever have sex again.
Paul gives a brief speech to the counselors about safety, saying that “axes, knives, lanterns, saws. They can all be trouble”, which are weapons no one will use against Jason, and are thus superfluous for Paul to mention and even more tragic that he did. He also tells the women not to use perfume – a rule a counselor named Vickie will violate later. The counselors will be training the campers in “survival, first-aid, boating, archery, rifle range”, although none of that will be going on while of all the dying, drowning, and impaling is going on first. After Paul’s speech, his girlfriend, the final girl Ginny, arrives in a jalopy.
At a campfire that night Paul decides to “give it to you straight about Jason.” The skinny Paul has to share about Jason is this: his body was never recovered, and he is believed to be living in the wilderness like a wild child. Paul tells them about Alice’s murder as well, and then backslides a legend into her murder by giving Jason the motivation of killing her to avenge his mother. It has been five years since Friday the 13th, which would set this movie in 1986, when it was released in 1982.
Paul tells the counselors that Crystal Lake is off-limits.
Later that night, Mark – a counselor in a wheelchair that Vickie has the hot bananas for – arm wrestles a fool who thought he could beat a horny teenager in a wheelchair. Paul and Ginny make out while Ralph watches them from behind a tree, having figured out that since they are all doomed he might as well peep on them to see how things are going. He is strangled by Jason with a garrote, having predicted everyone’s doom but his own. He dies with a look of embalmed serenity, having either voided his bowels or had an orgasm Jason induced with unintentional auto-erotic asphyxiation. The camera does not show Ralph below the waist, and he was peeping, so I assume he was masturbating.
While the counselors are jogging the next day, a dog named Muffin is lost. Muffin maybe runs into Jason but his fate is left uncertain. A couple – Jeff and his girlfriend Sandra – investigate Crystal Lake, where I believe they intended to have sex while the other counselors are swimming, thus the reversal of the situation that almost killed Jason and will ultimately kill them. They find a dead animal that is too mangled to tell the species of, which at the least means that someone – maybe even one of their fellow campers – eats wild animals. They are caught by a Sheriff who took a long shot assuming the counselors would explore Crystal Lake, and knowing how dangerous that is, explored it himself in order to catch them.
Jeff and Sandra decide to not to tell Terry, Muffin’s owner, about the dead animal they found.
The Sheriff sees Jason dart across the road and chases after him, discovering a shack in the woods where Jason has been living that no one has found. He explores the shack to see if they are any teenagers foolish enough to explore it as well, and finds a shrine to Mrs. Voorhees just before Jason hits him on the back of the head with the spike of a hammer that makes him howl with rage.
That night some of the counselors go out for a night on the town, and since most of them survive, I won’t mention them again. Jeff and Sandra are not allowed to go, being punished for going to Crystal Lake with death although Paul does not know what he has done. A counselor named Scot decides to stay behind so he can continue to flirt with Terry and is thus effectively killed by her, and she stays behind to see if she can find Muffin and is thus effectively killed by Jeff and Sandra. Mark stays behind because “a drunk in a wheelchair spoils everything” and Vickie stays behind to fuck him.
Jason perhaps should have waited until all of the counselors came back drunk to start killing.
While Terry is skinny dipping alone, Jeff and Mark arm wrestle until Vickie cuts in and challenges Mark, who at first thinks she wants to arm wrestle until she produces some video games. Vickie knows what Mark uses his good arm for, and it ain’t Pong. Vickie is also not very subtle about her advances, saying that the winner of their video-game duel will win “position”, which is disingenuous because even if Mark wins, he has only won the only sexual positions his paralysis allow him to have.
Scott steals Terry’s clothes, figuring that the surest way to get in her pants is to make sure she never gets back inside them herself. He gives them back, then gets caught in a rope-trap that hangs him upside down from a tree. Jason has acquired some Mark Trail skills. Terry leaves to get a knife to cut Scott down, extracting a promise from him first that he’ll “knock it off”, which Scott probably took as “it” being “the dust” Terry wants knocked off her that he is about to be the first to bite.
While she is gone Jason slits Scott’s throat as he hangs, which should bleed him out rather quickly. Jason uses the backside of the machete, so he must sharpen both edges because he cooks with one side and doesn’t want to contaminate it. When Terry returns she threatens to kill Scott if he doesn’t stop, then discovers that he is dead and screams into the camera. It is odd that, being the character I have seen enough so much of that there is little left to the imagination, she dies in a way that leaves everything to the imagination.
At the bar where the other counselors are drinking, Ted – Paul’s redheaded friend – thinks that it is ridiculous that Jeff and Sandra were punished because “some girl panics and falls out of a canoe. It’s absurd.” It would be absurd, if seven people hadn’t been murdered by a woman decapitated by the girl who fell out of a canoe. Ginny wonders what Jason might be like: “A frightened retard? A child trapped in a man’s body?”
Back at the Lady Chatterley’s Chatterbox subplot, Mark explains how he was paralyzed: he was in a motorcycle accident, but he doesn’t intend on being in the wheel chair for the rest of his life. Too bad, Mark. Vickie, of course, only has one thing on her mind, and Mark assures her that it works, although he doesn’t elaborate on how well it works. They agree to sleep together and Vickie leaves to get her things.
Jason watches Vickie change into panties that don’t match her bra into panties that do, and she also sprays perfume on her vagina after Paul said not to do this, and she will have to sit upside down in the wheelchair in order for Mark to appreciate it.
Mark gets impatient back at the main cabin, hears some thunder and mistakes it for Vickie. As he wheels himself outside, Jason slaps him across the face with the backside of the machete – Jason will handicap himself with he kills the handicapped – and this sends Mark rolling down the stairs from the force of the blow. Any cop who might find his body later might judge, from the swollen size of his left arm and undefeated arm-wrestling reputation, that Mark hit himself with the back of the machete when a snake jumped into his wheelchair.
Jeff and Sandra, who finish making love upstairs, are impaled together with a spear. Jeff was on top of Sandra and thus did not see the blow coming, but Sandra did, much as she probably saw Jeff coming as well. One can’t help but wonder how this death scene would have happened if Jeff and Sandra had been doing it doggy-style, which would leave both Sandra and Jeff penetrated.
Paul and Ginny leave the bar, Ted staying behind, not to be seen again.
Vickie goes into the bedroom where Jeff and Sandra were killed, and Jason pops out from under the covers and cuts her on the thigh. She backs into Jeff’s body, which is hanging on the wall with a pillow sheet, and he has a bored look on his face that suggests he died more puzzled than he lived. Jason kills Vickie by stabbing her with the knife turned upside down. Jason removes Vickie’s body, as well as Jeff and Sandra’s.
When Ginny and Paul arrive, Jason attacks Paul with the spear that must have been harder to pry out of Jeff and Sandra than it was to pry Jeff out of Sandra afterwards. Ginny hides, then finds Ralph’s dead body in the pantry where he has his orgasm-constipation game-face on. Jason must have been watching Ralph closely in order to remember where he hides.
Ginny gets in a car that Jason stabs with a pitchfork trying to get to her, then he tries to grab her and she kicks the door on him. When he follows her, she hides in some bushes and kicks him in the balls when he comes around the corner. No one kicks Jason in the balls in any of the other movies, and it works well in this one. Perhaps he doesn’t have them when he becomes a zombie in Part VI.
She hides under a bed, then pees when she sees a rat, which Jason notices and tries to take advantage of by standing in chair that collapses on him when she crawls out from under the bed. He also breaks his pitchfork doing this, and he might as well take off his damn pillow-case mask because he can’t look more like a fool after this.
Ginny runs into the woods, where she finds Jason’s shrine along with the dead bodies of the Sheriff, Terry, and another body too decomposed to identify – which could be a body from Part I, and if that’s the case, I hope its Ned’s. She puts on Mrs. Voorhees sweater and pretends to be her when Jason breaks in, which temporarily fools him until he notices his mother’s mummified head behind Ginny, blocks the blow she was about to give him with the machete, and then slices her leg.
Paul makes another appearance and wrestles with Jason some more. While they are fighting, Ginny sneaks up behind him and slices Jason on the shoulder with the machete. Ginny takes his mask off before they leave.
While Paul and Ginny recuperate at the main cabin, Muffin returns, having perhaps hidden in the woods until all the commotion died down and especially until Terry died down. For a twist ending, Jason jumps through a window and gabs Ginny – the machete still stuck in his shoulder – and pulls her outside.
Ginny is taken away on a stretcher, implying that this was a dream, and it therefore could have been a dream that included Muffin and if Jason is anything like Michael Myers, this could mean Muffin was eaten. The movie ends with a shot of Mrs. Voorhees head.