Day Two of our Friday the 13th series and we continue with, appropriately enough, Friday the 13th Part 2 - the sequel that was never meant to be a direct sequel.
We start off with our heroine from the first movie, Alice, trying to put her life back together after the events of the first movie. This attempt comes to an abrupt end when she suddenly finds Mrs Voorhees' head in her fridge and then gets an ice pick through her temple for good measure (Adrienne King, who played Alice, only agreed to reprise her role if she was only on-screen for a short amount of time as she was dealing with a stalker who had broken into her apartment and was making her fear for her life). We then skip to five years later (which puts the canon year as 1984) and a group of counselors are gathering at another camp along the shores of Crystal Lake for a course in how to be a better counselor. Crazy Ralph is still around, happy to tell anyone he sees that they're all doomed, and around the campfire stories are told of the events of the first movie and how somehow now Jason survived his drowning back in the 50s and grew up living wild in the woods. He saw his mother decapitated and now swears revenge on anyone who enters his territory...
Originally, the film's producers hadn't wanted to make a direct sequel to Friday the 13th; they had instead wanted to create an anthology series centred around the Friday the 13th superstition. When the first movie turned out to be a sleeper hit, however, and the ending stinger of Jason rising from the water to pull Alice down with him proved to be so popular, they changed their plans and came up with the mythology of Camp Crystal Lake and Jason that we all know today. Tom Savini didn't return to do the makeup effects this time, unfortunately; instead he chose to work on the similarly-themed slasher movie The Burning, and didn't return to the Friday the 13th franchise until part 4.
In some ways, Part 2 is more important to the overall series than the original, as it is the first one to properly feature Jason, who of course was to become the series' primary antagonist from then on. Of course, there were still some kinks in his personality that needed to be worked out; Jason wears a burlap sack on his head for most of the film and not the hockey mask we've all come to associate with him (Burlap Sack Jason was actually designed to look as close to the portrayal of the Texarkana Phantom from the film The Town That Dreaded Sundown), and at this point in the series he is still very much alive.
Part 2 also got into a lot of trouble with the censors. One female character was supposed to have a full-frontal nude scene until they discovered that she was underage and so that scene was scrapped entirely. And then of course there was the infamous scene where a couple making love are impaled together on the bed by a spear (a scene almost certainly taken whole cloth from Mario Bava's Bay of Blood). That and some of the other gore scenes got the film briefly on the Section 3 list in the UK, although obviously it didn't get banned outright and no doubt the publicity helped it gain a few more viewers. It is a pretty brutal film; there are more counselors so there's a higher body count, and more of the deaths happen on-screen and in considerably more gruesome and even mean-spirited ways (although spoiler alert: the dog does survive).
There is really only one major flaw with the plot and continuity of Friday the 13th Part 2. I am willing and able to accept that Jason survived drowning back in 1957 and went to live in the woods, unseen and unnoticed by anyone for all those years. I have a problem with the idea that he was able to track Alice down, make his way to her house, kill her and then get back to Crystal Lake to resume his hermit existence without a single person noticing him. Especially wearing that burlap sack.
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