Tonight I watched Friday the 13th: Part 2 (1981).

This is a very solid follow up to the original, despite beginning with an interminably long recap of the first film’s ending. Alice (Adrienne King) is recovering at home, two months after the massacre at Camp Crystal Lake, when an anonymous stranger appears to stalk her through the house. One ice-pick later and our Final Girl is gone, less than ten minutes into the movie. It’s a slightly clunky opening, but it gets us where it needs to, and establishes a theme of regularly-paced jump scares and fake-outs that will continue throughout the film (and the franchise).

Five years later, Paul (John Furey) is a Camp Counselor at Camp Counselor Camp, where he teaches Camp Counselors to Counsel Campers. He has chosen to do this at a location on the same lake as Camp Crystal Lake (the lake is not called Crystal Lake, it has a Native American name that is shown on some maps, but I couldn’t make it out) despite apparently knowing all of the details of the massacre, including the fact that Alice was killed two months later. His assistant, Ginny (Amy Steel, who did a great job in this, it’s a little odd that she never had a really big role in anything again, despite working consistently for most of the last forty years) is far more concerned about the possibility of a murderous Jason roaming the woods, and uses her Child Psychologist training to construct a pretty accurate profile of the killer (She does drop the R-slur once in this scene, which is upsetting, although the word was still widely used in a clinical sense at the time this movie was made, and given the degree to which Ginny’s psychology background becomes important, I think that was the intended reading, rather than her just casually belittling the disabled) while getting sauced at the local New Jersey Honkeytonk and Casino.

The rest of the Camp Counselors in training (although not really, because they’re all experienced counselors, I genuinely don’t understand what the concept of Paul’s program is, other than Adult Camp) are a mix of fairly one-note but fun characters. I particularly enjoyed the flirting between Vickie (Lauren-Marie Taylor) and wheelchair-bound Mark (Tom McBride). Ted (Stuart Charno) is a confident weirdo, and although the film doesn’t really point this out, he survives the movie by being an alcoholic, staying out to drink after hours against Paul’s orders, and never returning to the camp. Come to think of it, there were a bunch of other counselors in the back of his truck that also all survived. I guess the moral of this one is don’t have sex, but do drink excessive quantities of alcohol.

Walt Gorney returns as Crazy Ralph, and Betsy Palmer appears in some excellent special effects sequences as Mrs. Voorhees (as well as the too-long opening recap/dream sequence), lending some additional continuity with the first film. Apparently this series, like Halloween, was originally envisioned as a horror anthology that would center around the concept of Friday the 13th, but unlike Halloween, no entry without Jason was ever created, and in fact Sean Cunningham left the project after it was decided that the follow-up would be a direct sequel. Steve Milner, who was a producer on the first film, stepped into the role of Director, and did a solid job, in my opinion.

The kills in this installment are varied and interesting, with the violence earning the film an X rating until 48 seconds of footage were cut to bring it down to an R, mostly from a scene in which two young lovers are impaled with a prop spear (the fact that one of the lovers turned out to be 16 at the time of shooting, something that had apparently not been known to the crew at the time, also led to some cuts). The practical effects aren’t quite as impressive, and I’m pretty sure Tom Savini didn’t return for this one, so that tracks. On the other hand, the camera work is excellent in this installment. Much of the tension is created by the tight framing of shots around the characters (primarily the young women) and the deliberately voyeuristic way in which the camera follows and pushes in on them, seeming to draw us into their space while excluding everything in the periphery, ensuring that a scare could arrive from any direction and we would never see it coming.

The final sequence, beginning when Ginny discovers Jason’s shack in the woods, is terrific. Her child psychology background pays off in a creepy and inventive way, and she never feels like a helpless damsel in distress, instead fighting back with an arsenal including a chainsaw and the machete that Alice used to behead Mrs. Voorhees five years prior. The actual ending is kind of frustratingly ambiguous, much like the first film, although given the fact that a series was now very much the goal, I suppose they were just trying to keep as many options on the table as possible.

Overall, I give this movie 4/5 stars. Despite being a little lackluster in a few areas, I think this is a slight improvement on the original, and a more complete film in general. It is a little weird to think that this series, which is still essentially a Hicksploitation slasher franchise at this point, would one day get a sequel where Jason kills people in space, but the seeds of that character and the tone of the series that led to that place, are detectable here, in their infancy, for both good and ill.