Review of Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) by Bill M — 19 Oct 2017

The first in a very long line of sequals, and notable for the first appearance of deformed ( and mentally challenged?) jason vorhees himself (sans hockey mask, he has a sack on his head instead for some reason) coming back from his watery childhood grave to SPOILER.

...avenge his killer mom from part one...END SPOILER. this is a virtual retread of the first film with exactly the same set up and events (this time at a camp near crystal lake) made less than a year later to cash in on the massive success of the first, and it's mostly laugthably stupid, seriously, this is a perplexingly stupid film, and it's worth watching for just how unitentionally funny it is, jason is useless and wierdly clumsy in this, he falls over things, gets kicked in the balls, tricked multiple times, and keeps fucking up, in one bit his stands on a chair waiting for the "final girl" to come out from under the bed so he can pitch fork her to death, "and the fucking chair breaks"! sending him amusingly crashing to the floor and letting the girl escape, at this point it's hard to see how this bumbling, potatoe sack head retard become the hulking, unkillable, brutally efficient hockey masked retard he becomes later.

Also the ending makes no fucking sense, in a desperate attempt to recreate the firsts stand out shock ending, we get whats obviously from the start a dream, given away by the fact that the dog that got disembowled earlier in the film is stangely back and alive, but then after we get a final bit thats seems to contradict the whole dream thing, by having the same outcome, it's just odd and very confusing as to what they were trying to do.

"Bbuuuuuuutttt...(and your probably wondering why this still gets a passing three star grade) it's all great fun, with all the (even by that point) enjoyably cliched convetions of the slasher movie, you get great, crowd pleasing death scenes for all the obnoxious young characters, full frontal female nudity! (yay tits! you cant not have tit's in a film like this, it's a rule!) and addmittedly even a few surprising scares, some of the scenes of the final girl being chased by jason at the end are genuinly tense and jumpy, and well executed, this may even be an enjoyable improvement on the origional in some ways.

A very fun popcorn splatter flick, thats a very good cheesy laugth, and as with the others is best watched drunk and with friends. As a final note, there are actualy some characters I didnt want dead, a rarity in slasher movies, why did old walt gonreys doomsayer "crazy ralph" have to go, he was hilarious and furthur films could have benefitted from more of his oddness and hilarious warnings, he was such a strange and funny prescence in the first two films, so thats a shame they killed him and the wheelchair bound sports guy and the girl who likes him didnt deserve their horrible, mean spirited ends (yes they kill a guy in a wheelchair).

In the end i'll take bad 80's horror films over bad modern ones any day of the week.