Friday Week: I don't wanna scare anyone, but I'm gonna give it to you straight about Jason

FRIDAY THE 13th PART 2

1981

Directed by Steve Miner

Written by Ron Kurz

Spoilers: high

Housekeeping note: obviously, the "week" part has always been a joke, but of course it's really not anyone's best practice to start a themed series and then fail to even get a second part out (or anything out) before seven days have elapsed.  In my defense, I've been busy, with 71 straight days of work (that's LXXI, for the Roman numeral-challenged crafters of today's subject's in-film title card), and then a big push against a deadline here at the end.  So I genuinely didn't have the time.  Now I have nothing but.  Life!

Friday the 13th had been a fairly big hit in 1980, but an extreme success in terms of a return on an investment, with the worldwide grosses for the genre-codifying dead teenager film multiplying its puny $550,000 budget well over a hundred times.  You don't sit respectfully by while that kind of bank rolls in, and so, by a quirk of history—exploited deftly by Paramount head Frank Mancuso Sr., who somehow saw in that rather self-contained slasher film the possibility of an annual event—Friday the 13th Part 2 was thrown headlong into production, and became the very first slasher sequel, giving birth to the trend that would support a whole hell of a lot of low-budget horror over the subsequent decade.  Now, Part 2's status depends somewhat on how narrowly you define "the slasher"—Dr. Phibes Rises Again was already nine years old, for example—and the quirk of history I mentioned is that it certainly wasn't the first sequel to a "true" slasher to have been contemplated, so it won the race in largest part because John Carpenter and Debra Hill had to be physically dragged back to do Halloween II, which therefore only finally filmed while Part 2 was playing in theaters.  A parallel process, it happens, had occurred with Sean Cunningham and Victor Miller, the director and credited writer of Friday the 13th, respectively, neither one of whom return here.  But from the ranks of Cunningham's collaborators rose Steve Miner, a lowly associate producer on the first film, who did not share his boss's attitude about it, while Ron Kurz, who'd polished (that was polished?) Miller's Friday the 13th script, happily took his own promotion.  Many years later, Cunningham would come crawling back; Miller seems to have stuck to his guns.

Of course, we don't need to suppose any outright hostility in them, and in Cunningham's case he'd have needed to be diplomatic about it, since his wife, Susan, still edited the movie that he'd declined to direct.  It could just be that generating a Part 2 to the movie about the vengeful old lady who gets her head cut off simply posed creative challenges that they didn't feel like meeting.  These are challenges that Miner and Kurz do meet, but by no means with much elegance—not even as much as was available to them, you'd think—but perhaps elegance isn't something to expect in any slasher sequel, nor even desire in a Friday the 13th specifically.  And so while it's fun to discuss, the klutziness inherent to sequelizing it only slightly matters.

So: it's astounding (perhaps especially for someone who already enjoys Friday the 13th a great deal) just how damned much of an almost-across-the-whole-board improvement Part 2 winds up, especially considering that the two best parts of the original film are actually worse here.  The first, of course, is that it's less effective at the thing that makes a slasher a slasher, with special effects makeup artist Tom Savini begging off (not, obviously, on account of any artistic qualms in his case) and replaced by Carl Fullerton, whose work did not, in fact, represent as precipitous a drop in quality and quantity of gore as the compromised cut of the movie that was released in theaters makes it looks like.  It's far more that the MPAA made Friday the 13th's sequel a priority target for its censorship efforts, threatening it with an X rating; we know now, through the VHS transfers Fullerton kept, that it was at least intended to be bloodier.  In one case it was intended to be much bloodier, in the deadly coitus dual kill that Miner and Fullerton purloined from Mario Bava's 1971 barely-a-proto-slasher A Bay of Blood, though if you bring your ear close, I'll tell you a secret—I prefer Miner and Fullerton's interpretation of it, even the theatrical cut's one.  The other best part of the original film that's not quite as good here is the music, and that's despite Harry Manfredini returning—it's less actionably similar to other people's thriller scores this time, but that only means it's more generically thriller music, and it appears, for whatever reason, to lean less upon the ki-ki-ki-ma-ma-ma innovation that is the iconic Friday the 13th cue.

Everything else is better*, which is apparent before the first scene is even done, which is something, considering half of the first scene is just manipulating footage from the first movie, seemingly on behalf of previous Final Girl Alice's (Adrienne King's) reintroduction and ongoing trauma regarding her battle with Mrs. Voorhees (Betsy Palmer).  We'll find out very quickly, however, that it's more a matter of just dumping a bunch of "previously on" information that is, in most respects, actively inimical to the story this time around, which is not about Mrs. Voorhees and contradicts most everything about Mrs. Voorhees.  Still, Miner's use of Cunningham's footage says, above all, "check this out, chief, I'm obviously a better director than you, and that was like your sixth movie, and this is only my first," kicking off with a spare piece of solid horror storytelling with a kid playing in a puddle, clearing the shot just in time for a giant man's booted foot to splash down into the same puddle, promising dire consequences for whoever it is we're looking for, and continuing on as we reacquaint ourselves with Alice, who slowly becomes aware of the ambient thriller atmosphere developing all around her and the "scared woman in an apartment" beats get hit and the camera does some rather interesting things, in the form of long takes bearing tension and movements implying stalking, punctured and made "safe" with meta-humor when she irritably exits a shower as if annoyed to find you following her into the bathroom, and "safer" still when she thinks it's just the cat that's presently been thrown at her face by a PA.  Which makes it, therefore, a perfect time for her to find Mrs. Voorhees's head in her fridge and have an icepick jammed through her skull.

Horror boilerplate, but it's also helping invent that boilerplate (this is 1981, for goodness's sakes), and "horror boilerplate, done expertly," is good for a Friday the 13th, the horror franchise that, I've said before, most feels like urban legend—and it's twisted up anyway, because I find it difficult to imagine anybody not getting a tremendous jolt when our presumptive heroine is dispatched before the ten minute mark has passed, thanks to one of the smaller challenges facing Miner and Kurz, an actor who actually was supposed to play their heroine, but for whatever reason couldn't commit to the full shoot.  (And that's definitely some horror boilerplate being invented here.)

The other challenge, the big one, which I haven't even bothered to say because it's so obvious, was figuring out how to kill some camp counselors this time, and who was going to do it.  Well, first we have to figure out why people are even going back to Camp Blood.  Technically, they're not, but to a facility next to it, still on the shores of Crystal Lake (now the Connecticut side, apparently), though maybe it's significant that the killer is truly activated only when Camp Crystal Lake's boundaries are trespassed.  In any case, Paul Holt (John Furey) has established "Packanack Lodge," and is presently training a new clutch of college-aged counselors, five years after the events of Friday the 13th, thereby making Part 2 the first science fiction entry in a franchise that eventually winds up in outer space but long before then had adopted a chronology that meant it was taking place in something like the mid-21st century.

There's so many of these counselors that it seems like making a slasher film out of them would be downright unwieldly, but, with more grace than you'd expect, the important ones—that is, the ones who'll be killed—are gently pushed into the narrative foreground.  As before, there are six doomed kids: Jeff (Bill Randolph, an appealing if-they-mated of Dan Shor and Jon Bon Jovi) and Sandra (Marta Kober, reputedly 16 years old at time of filming without them confirming her majority, big oops), a goofball couple; Mark (Tom McBride), wheelchair-bound but possessed of an admirably positive attitude; Vickie (Lauren-Marie Taylor), who'd like to admire Mark's positive attitude, if you know what I mean; Terry (Kirsten Baker), a hardbody with a full nudity clause in her contract (she also has a dog, Muffin); Scott (Russell Todd), a playful creeper; and, in fact, there is a seventh of apparent importance, Ted (Stu Charno), the weird-looking funny-guy (the tiniest "little thing that shows Miner is directing this movie with care": he puts in background jokes, like one of the Extra Counselors who probably never gets a line being blocked to demonstrate her cautiously-horny surprise when dorky Charno takes his shirt off, and turns out to be totally cut).  Yet, for unknowable reasons, Miner and Kurz did not dictate their prankster's death.  He remains in town later (on the excursion that lets Kurz winnow his script's butcher's bill down to a manageable amount), and then disappears without any fanfare to, evidently, get even more loaded.  Something about that seems simultaneously extraordinarily sloppy—he's been given an inordinate amount of screentime—and kind of fun, in a "toying at realism" sense, in that if you really did have a giant blob of twenty-something teens, some of them would definitely randomly wander off and survive by accident.

The last to arrive is Virginia "Ginny" Field (Amy Steel), a psychology grad student and Paul's girlfriend, who gets the most lines and the most scenes to play, throughout the waiting phase of this slasher film.  The question occurs to me suddenly: while many—almost all—classical slasher narratives identify their Final Girl (not necessarily a girl), by giving her more traits and dialogue, and a common trope in slasher criticism is sneering at how obviously she's being positioned as such... is it bad for a movie to identify its protagonist to its viewer?

Anyway, Ginny will prove to be one of the best, but this whole cast is a load of not-at-all-bad, which for a slasher movie means "great."  It's one way that Part 2 distinguishes itself from the original despite being almost the same movie: while the first film traipsed aimlessly towards naturalism—partly out of what I'm happy to accept was design, but partly out of a desire to not even try testing the limits of a bunch of young actors willing to sign up for a low-budget horror movie—Part 2 is more willing to test those limits and embrace being an 80s teen comedy, and as a result Kurz's screenplay and the cast's interaction just feel more structured and deliberate and, I suppose, "objectively good."  Ted is profoundly shocking, as a slasher movie clown who's actually fun, even socially-adept, starting off with a prank regarding an automobile that's just mean enough to be cute, and making corny "jokes" that—get this—make people laugh.

There's still a larkishness to everything here, but it has almost "real movie" vibes.  There's just not really much here that reads as slasher-style filler, even when it is, for instance Terry's apropos-of-little skinny dip into the lake (this movie is not a remake of A Bay of Blood, but you could call it a remix—I mean, sure, you can set a slasher on a lake, at which point "skinny dipping" is probably just the natural impulse; but the same exact shot scale and direction of movement? then again, isn't Mario Bava exactly the director you would want an inexperienced horror filmmaker to copy from?).  But while the purpose of that scene is, obviously, gratuitous nudity (which, to be fair, is also "symbolic vulnerability"), it does play directly into the plot, establishing the parameters for an entirely different counselor's death.  It's an efficient film, but it'd better be: it's 87 minutes long (eight minutes shorter than Friday the 13th!), and it's already luxuriantly spent 10% of them stalking-and-killing its former Final Girl.  But neither does it feel rushed; it's correct.  The approach pays off once we do get to the kills, which find a strong harmonized tone of the horrific, the humorous, and—if you allow it—the legitimately sad.  Mark, the paralyzed one, gets probably the single meanest-spirited kill in this whole, very long franchise, rendered into a pratfalling paraplegic bouncing down so many stairs it required two shots, and the absurd overprosecution of the murder of the most intrinsically-unthreatening counselor—that's only the "humorous" part.  The sad part is, well, our dude was about to get laid.  We'll never know if his continued confidence in his dick (or new confidence in his fingers) would pay off for him.  I said earlier, I liked Miner's version of the "forever wed" shish-ka-bob spear-through-the-lovemakers death better than Bava's original: that's because Bava's is interested, solely, in being lurid and sexual.  This one, with Jeff and Sandra, is more interested in feeling like two lives have been cut short, with just enough time for one of them to have her post-coital bliss destroyed by the fate she sees coming.  (I promised myself I wouldn't repeat myself too much about the "memento mori" quality I perceive in the early Friday films.  But there it is.)

So now the bodies have started to stack up, just like they did last time, except this time the killer isn't Mrs. Voorhees, mourning her lost son.  No, this time, it is her lost son—that's right, the Jason Voorhees (mostly Steve Daskewisz, sometimes Warrington Gillette; and still prototypical in his iconography, with a one-eyed Town That Dreaded Sundown sackcloth hood to cover his deformed face, and overalls to cover the rest of him).  This is a wildly stupid thing for a movie that has expended so much energy on being in continuity with its predecessor to do, retconning Jason's drowning into Jason's I-don't-even-know-what; whatever it is, he lives in a Goddamn shack in the Goddamn woods and apparently has for the last thirty-odd years, which means nothing in either the original film or this film makes one solitary lick of sense.  (They don't even take the easy out, which the franchise would eventually employ, "Jason is a supernatural revenant.")  It's a justifiable criticism.  But Part 2, very early, invites us to sit down to a literal campfire to hear the tale of this "Jason Voorhees," whom local legend has it still roams these woods, despite this being on-its-face insane, and while I'm absolutely positive it's entirely sloppiness and desperation, the feeling can be, if you let it, of our cast of ill-starred teens actively taking their place within that constantly-shifting rural folklore.  (The rupturing unreality of the film's bizarre denouement, while perhaps not so well-judged, even helps with that.)

But when you get down to it, what Friday the 13th Part 2 is really all about is its Final Girl sequence, and if Miner was demonstrating that he had more refined skills than Cunningham in his opening sequence, this is just rubbing the latter's face in it.  It's almost flawless just as a matter of construction—it does still have one brief moment where our Final Girl could kill her attacker, but doesn't (but not, contra Friday the 13th, three)—and, despite Fridays being the "basic" slashers, especially early on, it's also quite robustly creative.  On a Friday scale, it's even "psychological," redeploying the (iconic?) cable-knit sweater for a climax that it smartly goes about trying to square a circle with, aware that if Ginny's stratagem works, it's diminished Jason as a villain, but it has to almost work for Ginny to be an excellent heroine, and it's reasonably clever about how it resolves that quandary.  It's also just icky and weird and wonderful, finding a way into a Gothicky vein of horror in a franchise as far from "the Gothic" as is imaginable, insofar as it requires Ginny to don a rotting sweater stolen from a disgusting shrine to Mrs. Voorhees's detached head in an effort to usurp Jason's mom's power over our tottering man-child, with Daskewisz giving a great little cycloptic performance as a pitiful little boy in a mad killer's body.

And that's just the kicker.  The whole thing is outstanding, and exceedingly long—it begins no later than 1:08:28, when Paul gets incapacitated, and ends no earlier than 1:20:28, when Jason does (it arguably never "ends" at all).  So you see what I mean about how this needed to be efficient.  It covers hill and vale at lightning speed, with Miner and cinematographer Peter Stein managing an arclit nighttime that generates grotty shadows and productive obscurity, but always with sufficient light and mobility, and even artfully-deployed framing elements, to follow every beat of a complicated, tactical cat-and-mouse chase where those roles aren't even always that strictly defined.  What powers it more than anything else, though, is Steel, turning in one of the best Final Girl performances in slasher history, absolutely nailing a character who has been defined, heretofore, as an ineffective intellectual, and bringing that precise frequency to her woman-in-peril, terrified but thoughtful, evaluating her options but also really fucking slowly, in the way of an academic used to pondering.  Crucially, she's still smart, so that we get to watch the awesome spectacle of Steel adapting Ginny's whole personality in real time in the face of almost-certain death, incrementally making it less certain, at one point lunging right at the maniac with her own fucking chainsaw, while, at another point, straight pissing herself.**  But it says something altogether glorious about Ginny Field that "the heroine pisses herself" isn't even what you remember about her.

Score: 9/10

*Except maybe the weather.  Friday the 13th boasted some lucky skies to bolster its mordant mood.

**It's supposed to be a rat.  Yeah, that's what I would've told the MPAA, too.