Killtoberfest 6 – #4: Friday the 13th Part 2

Ginny: “I mean, he must be out there right now, crying for a return. For resurrection.”

Friday the 13th Part 2 is why people who hate slasher movies hate slasher movies. I don’t hate slasher movies, but if the next ten sequels in this franchise are this bad, I just might change my mind. This entry is almost enough on its own. It’s not just a bad sequel, it’s both of the two most common kinds of bad sequels at once. Stultifyingly identical to the previous year’s original, Part 2 somehow also manages to ignore everything that made its predecessor smart and effective. It’s illogical not only in narrative terms but even in the visual language, cheating geography, physics, and perspective; it presents the same cardboard characters and banal murders without the tone and framing that made them work last time around; and it wastes its setups and payoffs. Worst of all, everyone’s fashion sense is atrocious. The answers to the four questions this time around are “It’s not,” “It’s not,” “They’re not,” and “They’re not,” because none of this is different and we’ve seen it all before. Just not this poorly done.

Let’s start with the story, because you have to start somewhere. The film opens with one its few clever touches, a child singing “The Itsy, Bitsy Spider,” which, as a song about the eternal cycle of watery death followed by resurrection, is cheekily on point. (Why a little boy is wandering the streets singing long after dark is best left unpondered, or chalked up to, “I dunno, it was the ’80s?”) Then we see a pair of legs which are exceedingly ominous, or so the score tells us. They are pretty generic legs, dark shoes, blue jeans, not exactly scary. Going from the original’s invisible killer to “here are some body parts for you to fear” is a tough leap, and Part 2 doesn’t make the jump.

Anyway, these legs end up stalking poor Alice, who’s still recovering from being the sole survivor of the summer camp slaughter. We know she’s still having trouble because she’s having extremely expository nightmares that neatly summarize everything we need to know about Mrs. Voorhees and her dead son, Jason, which is helpful for the audience but not really for her, because she’s never going to need this information. Whatever creepy jerk owns those legs stalks Alice around her apartment and waits until she opens the fridge to find Mrs. Voorhees’ rotting head inside before stabbing Alice in the neck. I was going to say, “stabbing poor Alice,” but since she’s out before the titles she’s actually the luckiest person in the movie. Good for you, Adrienne King. Run away and never return.

What’s good for King, though, is bad for the movie, bad for the franchise, bad even for the genre. In the original Friday the 13th, Alice was the prototypical Final Girl, the one whose bravery and quick thinking allowed her to survive while everyone else didn’t. Despite her fear, she fought back and ended up killing the killer. She got to win. In this sequel, she almost seems to be punished for that. Her confrontation with Mrs. Voorhees was genuinely interesting, in part because the two women sidestepped the all-too-frequent construction of horror movies, especially slasher films, to be primarily about men hurting women–subject matter which can often be problematic when combined with the vicarious thrills of watching underdeveloped characters be violently and creatively murdered. Alice’s murder here, particularly after an opening that expresses quite clearly that she’s still struggling to overcome the trauma of her previous experience, is in some ways an even worse message than David Fincher’s fuck you in the opening minutes of Alien 3. That was a frustrating betrayal of Aliens and its surviving characters, this is like a fuck you to the whole idea of the Final Girl as special or worthy. Alice is offed, this time by a man, and a new Final Girl is slotted in. The slasher tradition of resourceful female protagonists is one of the sole truly progressive, redeeming elements of the genre, and Part 2‘s prologue flips that whole idea off with both fingers. And it doesn’t even do it well.

The prologue of any film should establish what it’s going to be–tone, style, strategies, theme. Part 2‘s prologue does that exactly, which is to say it’s both boring and full of manipulative, cheating bullshit. In terms of narrative logic, I’ll let Jason Pargin (aka David Wong, formerly of Cracked) explain:

In stark and disappointing contrast to the original Friday the 13th, Part 2 has only one remotely consistent visual strategy, and it’s a frustrating one. The previous movie played intelligently with point of view shots, sometimes using the killer’s perspective, sometimes a victim’s perspective, sometimes an omniscient one. This film’s notion, apparently, is that what we really want to see is a closeup on the victim’s face as they look out and see–well, apparently nothing, because we never see a reverse shot from their viewpoint and they don’t react. We get this shot several times just in this prologue, first when the camera approaches Alice’s shower curtain, only for her to dramatically yank it open to see–well, apparently nothing. Cut to the next scene. Later she’s heard a noise (which of course is the cat) and walks slowly down the hallway, peering around for intruders, and again, the film refuses to show us what she’s looking at. It’s so violently antithetical to the voyeuristic, observing nature of the previous film’s camera that it must have a reason… and it does. But that reason is, as I’ve suggested, bullshit.

To recap: before the opening credits we’ve already gotten several bad filmmaking decisions, a routine cat fake out and, though I hate to speak ill of the dead, Alice’s ridiculously ugly plaid-blouse-over-turtleneck combo:

So much for the prologue. Now it’s five years since the events of the first film (although nobody bothers to tell us that today is once again a Friday the 13th), and Camp Crystal Lake is once again reopening–wait, no, it’s not. Some other camp near Camp Crystal Lake is opening, apparently for the first time since the murders, so that a bunch of experienced camp counselors can be trained there on how to be… camp counselors. No, I don’t get it either. But I would like to see a movie where Jason stalks the construction workers who have to build all the new cabins. Call it Friday the 13th Part XVII: Jason Gets Into a Zoning Dispute.

What matters is that this is an all new campsite, far enough from Camp Crystal Lake for lead counselor Paul to joke about the killings but close enough for Jason Voorhees, he of the sinister legs, to take offense at his new neighbors. And no wonder, because they moved the summer camp over, like, a foot and a half. This is the laziest effort to avoid a curse since the suburban developers in Poltergeist decided all the bad Indian burial ground juju was in the gravestones and not the angry, angry skeletons underneath.

Paul doesn’t do a whole lot of training (“we’ll get serious tomorrow,” he tells a bunch of people who won’t live long enough to get serious), although he does spread some misogynist lies about bears being attracted to menstruation. While he blathers on about bear safety (additional tips include “change out of your smelly clothes” and “women, don’t wear perfume”), we’re introduced to our new crop of teens ready for this year’s harvest. My review for Friday the 13th may have given you the impression that I knew all the characters’ names, but trust me, that involved a lot of internet research (the series fan Wiki is surprisingly robust). Here there’s even less reason to pay attention, because if anything most of the characters are even shallower and less developed. With the help of the internet once more, let’s see. There’s sexist Paul, hunky Scott, hunky guy in wheelchair Mark, sweetly forward Vickie, prankster Ted (this movie’s version of the last one’s prankster, Ned), Jeff who wears a hat and who I swear must have been cast because he kinda looks like the original’s young Kevin Bacon, Terry who is harassed by Scott and objectified by the camera, Sandra who has no distinguishing characteristics other than her relationship with Jeff, and rounding out the numbers we have Crazy Ralph, who returns to do a little more doomsaying and then get offed by Jason–his survival in the previous film seems to have been an oversight. (So much so that I was very surprised to see him alive in Part 2 and had to go edit the part of my earlier review that mentioned his death.) Or maybe I made some or all of those names up! Nobody cares and it doesn’t matter.

There’s a certain kind of horror movie where you root for the characters to get killed because the murders are gruesome and exciting, the highlight of the movie; and there’s a certain kind of horror movie (like the original Friday the 13th) where you root for the characters to get killed because you’re cleverly seduced into believing they have it coming. Part 2 is the kind of horror movie where you root for the characters to get killed because you know each death gets you one step closer to the end credits. That makes the film’s propensity for chain-yanking fake outs of the most basic and cliche type even more obnoxious. Sometimes it’s just boring, as when a police officer chases Jason through the woods and ends up exploring one of the Camp Crystal Lake cabins where Jason’s hiding some real gross shit, and we just want the cop to hurry up and die already but he doesn’t. Sometimes it’s a matter of getting there before the movie thinks you will, as when it telegraphs badly that Jason is going to burst in through the window behind them and not, as the characters foolishly assume, the door in front of them. These instances are frustrating but not unfair. They’re just ill-advised–since each little stalking sequence is meant to be an exercise in building tension, releasing the tension halfway through with a fake out jump scare just saps the real Jason scare of its impact.

On the other hand, sometimes Part 2 resorts to breaking the laws of spatial geography and perspective in order to engineer a fake out from pure nonsense, and that’s the most annoying of all. Two examples stand out as being especially egregious.

The first involves Mark and Vickie, my favorite characters in the movie simply because they have slightly more complexity than the others. Movie romance is supposed to engage us on some level, that’s the whole point of it. In Friday the 13th when couples paired off, we understood the biological impulses that compelled them, and the camerawork helped us sentence them to movie death for the pleasant sin of premarital fun. Part 2 has no meaningful directorial perspective, so that when Jeff and Sandra hook up we feel neither arousal nor sanctimony. In contrast, Mark and Vickie’s little romance is actually sweet and involving. Mark is in a wheelchair thanks to a motorcycle accident, but his attitude is positive (when asked if he’ll ever walk again, he tells Vickie, “I’m not going to spend the rest of my life in this chair,” and even though Jason proves him wrong, it’s still a nice character detail) and his upper body is, as I’ve said, enjoyably hunky. After Mark defeats all comers at arm wrestling, Vickie challenges him to video game hockey. “What are we playing for?” Mark asks. “Position,” says Vickie, smiling. Later she asks him if it’s just his legs that don’t work or, you know, and the fact that it’s the girl coming onto the guy here, and in such a warm, earnest way, actually made care whether they lived or died (and whether they got to fulfill their amorous plans along the way).

This makes it doubly frustrating when Mark gets macheted in the face before he and Vickie can get down to it. Not only does Mark deserve to get laid at this point, but Mark is looking forward when he dies. The problem for Mark, and the most frustrating aspect of the movie, is that the movie pretends that when Jason is offscreen, he’s invisible, even when that makes no goddamn sense based on geography and eyelines. Mark is outside in the rain, looking for an absent Vickie, when he hears a noise. There’s a shot of him looking forward, and we expect Jason to come up and kill him from behind:

Instead, the blade is swung in from the front, and Mark goes tumbling backwards down a flight of stone steps:

The entire blocking and staging of the scene relies on Mark being attacked from the front, but logic dictates that this is impossible, because Mark should be able to see Jason coming from that direction. It’s a cheat, pure and simple.

Equally offensive is the fact that Vickie has gone off to change into something sexier, and this is what she decides fits that definition:

These two kids deserved better.

The other person who deserves better is Ginny, this movie’s Final Girl (sort of–Paul’s fate is unknown at the end, and at any rate he’s with her through the climax of the film). Ginny gets another bullshit nonsense scare courtesy of off-screen Jason’s magic invisibility powers, and she also gets the short end of the characterization stick. For a significant portion of the movie, her defining attribute is that she gets to camp a little late the first day, because her car won’t start. Raise your hand if you figured out immediately that later on in the film she’d be sitting in that same car while the engine chuffed uselessly and Jason came after her. Now put your hands down, literally everybody. As a payoff it’s too obvious and not significant enough (like the original, Part 2 has the final girl facing down Jason several times in several places, and this isn’t the most important), and as a set-up it says absolutely nothing about her character. Ginny’s one piece of real characterization is a good one–even if it feels imposed on her by the script, since it has nothing else in her unwritten personality to attach to.

Part 2 is desperate to build up some kind of mythology for its killer. The original film had a vague list of bad events–a drowning, some killings, bad water–and Mrs. Voorhees’ mad quest for revenge, motivations which poured out in a couple of interesting, deranged rants. Part 2 has Paul (oh, how I loathe him) spend all day warning the counselors about bear safety and then all night trying to scare them around the campfire with the spooky tale of Jason Voorhees:

“I don’t wanna scare anyone, but I’m gonna give it to you straight about Jason. His body was never recovered from the lake after he drowned. And if you listen to the old-timers in town, they’ll tell you he’s still out there, some sort of demented creature, surviving in the wilderness, full grown by now… stalking… stealing what he needs, living off wild animals and vegetation. Some folks claim they’ve even seen him, right in this area. The girl that survived that night at Camp Blood, that… Friday the 13th? She claimed she saw him. She disappeared two months later… vanished. Blood was everywhere. No one knows what happened to her. Legend has it that Jason saw his mother beheaded that night. Then, he took his revenge, a revenge he continued to seek if anyone ever enters his wilderness again. And, by now, I guess you all know we’re the first to return here. Five years… five long years he’s been dormant. And he’s hungry. Jason’s out there… watching… always on the prowl for intruders… ready to kill… ready to devour… thirsty for young blood.”

That’s when fucking Ted jumps out of the bushes in a Halloween mask. Because of course he does.

Paul claims his intention is for the campers to get the legend out of their system, but his plan goes awry immediately when Sandra convinces Jeff that they should go explore the old camp. They find what appears to be the remains of Terry’s dog, Muffin, but decide not to tell her, because they’re dicks. (Later on, Terry will look halfheartedly for Muffin before deciding to go skinny dipping in the lake, at night, by herself. I mention this here, when it’s completely irrelevant, because it’s equally pointless in the movie, shoehorned in just so the film has some nudity in it. Terry doesn’t even get attacked there.) Note: Muffin turns up later alive and none of this is ever explained.

At any rate, Paul turns on a dime from telling campfire stories to telling Ginny later on in the local honkytonk that come on, Ginny, Jason is just a legend. Ginny, or the screenwriters using her as a microphone, is several beers into expertly psychoanalyzing Jason from first principles:

“What would he be like today? Some kind of outta control psychopath? A frightened retard? Child trapped in a man’s body? He’d be grown by now, right? And you know the only person he’d ever known was his mother. Never went to school, so he never had any friends. I mean, she was everything to him. …I mean, I doubt Jason would have even known the meaning of death. Or at least until that horrible night. He must have seen the whole thing happen. He must have seen his mother get killed. And all just ’cause she loved him. I mean, isn’t that what her revenge was all about? Her sense of loss, her rage at what she thought happened? Her love for him?”

I don’t quibble with Ginny’s framing of the narrative, just with the sense that these thoughts aren’t emerging from a real human being, but rather from someone who’s read the script and is desperate to characterize a bland, mute killer. Even so, when walking exemplars in ’80s douchebaggery Paul and Ted roll their eyes and dismiss Ginny’s musings as drunken nonsense, it makes me want to punch them on her behalf.

Part 2 does a lot of things wrong, but the fact that we don’t see Paul die, or even know if he does, is tops on my list. It’s like they’re trying to fail to satisfy my bloodlust. What the fuck, movie.

Anyway, Ginny’s Godburst of inspiration when it comes to Jason pays off beautifully in the only interesting scene in the whole film, but before that, we have the second most egregious example of the film’s bullshit “out of frame, out of sight” philosophy of scares. Paul and Jason are wrestling around on the ground while Ginny watches, timidly calling out “Paul? Paul?” instead of trying to help, or going for a weapon, or hell, even running away to get help and save herself. The geography of the room is clear: she’s watching them wrestle. She can see them. But a few moments later, the point of view shot we get from Ginny’s perspective is straight on at eye level. Because the shot is not at an angle, not looking down at the two on the floor, Paul and Jason are off-screen and therefore apparently invisible, because when Jason stands up into frame, Ginny reacts as if surprised. Ginny could see Jason the whole time, and shouldn’t be shocked by his sudden appearance in the shot. So how is the audience supposed to be? It’s this kind of reliance on “murder wizardry” that gives the entire slasher genre a bad name. The original Friday the 13th didn’t have to cheat, and was far more interesting as a result. The effect, too, of Jason’s illogical abilities, is to undermine this new Final Girl almost as much as it does the previous film’s. If camera tricks make Jason seem extraordinary, how can an ordinary female protagonist prove special enough to rise to the occasion?

Even Ginny’s crowning moment of triumph gets ruined (and all so Paul can save her, ugh!). Running from Jason, she stumbles into the cabin where the cop died earlier that day, and the camera finally shows us what he saw: Jason’s weird, creepy shrine to his mother. This includes Mrs. Voorhees’ severed head (looking none the worse for wear from its adventure in Alice’s fridge four years and ten months ago) posed above the neck of her mom sweater from the original film, as well as several of the corpses Jason has collected tonight. In what I can only term a wholly absurd payoff to what I didn’t think was actually a thematic throughline, Ginny follows in Alice’s and Vickie’s footsteps by donning another ugly sweater. This time, it’s the right sweater: Mrs. Voorhees’ sweater. Using her gross new look and her understanding of Jason’s mental state, Ginny manages to confuse Jason into believing that she is, in fact, his mother.

I may have hated this movie, but even I have to admit, that’s a pretty cool moment, tapping into what little emotional substance there actually is behind the killers in these films. So it’s pretty frustrating when the movie doesn’t allow this to work out at all. Jason spots Mom’s head behind Ginny, and snaps out of it, preventing Ginny from beheading him with his own machete (which would have been a real badass maneuver on her part) and necessitating Paul to re-emerge from, uh, the invisible world of Out-of-Frame from which he never came back after the last time he tackled Jason to the floor and, well, tackle Jason to the floor again. As a result, Ginny merely wounds Jason and there’s one more dumb scene of Jason attacking them someplace else before the now-obligatory scene of the survivor being tucked away in an ambulance by police and medical professionals.

Sure, order is restored in the end, but when the disorder is so slapdash, it doesn’t make much of an impact. As a horror movie villain, Jason leaves a lot to be desired. Never mind the bullshit, definitely-not-literally-supernatural manner in which he teleports to and from and around his victims. Never mind the way that the film tries to make the stretch of Jason conflating these teens with the one girl who killed his mom make sense by comparing it to the equally contrived stretch of Mrs. Voorhees conflating her victims with the counselors who let her son die decades before. Never mind, even, his boring, not-scary legs and the film’s choice to show them instead of relying on the POV shots Friday the 13th had used so effectively the year before.

Even discarding all of that, the character himself simply doesn’t make sense, doesn’t follow from the previous movie and breaks the underlying logic of the mythology. Mrs. Voorhees told Alice that her son Jason drowned because nobody was watching him, they were all too busy having sex and doing marijuana. Paul tells the counselors that Jason’s body was never found. Well, if he was never found, how do they know he drowned? If he’s alive–and he certainly seems to be flesh and blood–then he didn’t drown at all, did he? And if so, then what really happened that day? Why wouldn’t he just come home? Doesn’t this put a big crimp in Mrs. Voorhees’ entire revenge scheme? Irresponsible teens didn’t kill her son after all. Jason just ran away from camp, for reasons unknown, and then continued to live there without human contact, for reasons unknown, until decades later (and the fourth or fifth time his mother returned to Camp Crystal Lake), he saw his mom die. Two months after that, he apparently rode his bike across town, mom’s severed head in tow, to kill Alice. Five years after that, he starts killing more young people around the camp (not to mention Crazy Ralph). Because… why exactly? Nothing in this movie supports the idea that sexy young teens are too wild to live, either stylistically or narratively, and now it’s not clear that they had to die five years ago, either. Just because it’s a horror movie doesn’t mean it can’t make sense–Michael Meyers is replaying the killing of his sister, Freddy Krueger kills kids to get revenge on their parents, sometimes Hannibal Lecter gets peckish late at night when the stores are all closed. They all have their reasons. This series wants its killer to avenge his mother by killing the kind of people she only killed to try to avenge him when he clearly never needed avenging in the first place. It’s nuts.

All of that nonsense might be excused if it he were entertaining, but Jason isn’t even fun. I realize that’s subjective. But Mrs. Voorhees was like a one woman Special Ops team. She set traps, laid in wait, sabotaged the generator, and was smart enough to trick Alice into thinking she was a friend. Jason just walks up to people, unfairly invisible, and kills them with a variety of weapons, of which only the machete that was used to behead his mother is even thematic. At one point he uses a spear, which, why does a summer camp even have a spear? Later on he’s wielding a pitchfork, the sort of weapon that should be solely reserved for horror movies about living scarecrows and crazy cannibal farmers, where at least it would fit the whole gimmick. Jason is boringly mute, not to mention stupid–just look at the scene where, instead of stabbing Ginny through the cloth roof of her car, he stabs his pitchfork through the roof over the passenger seat so he can reach down and open the passenger side door, the moron–and the most forethought he ever demonstrates is by setting one snare trap on the ground. Sure, it catches hunky Scott, but how hard is that, really?

If this boring, poorly conceived character manages to go on for another ten sequels, what does that say about slasher movies in general? Why come up with a creative villain, like Freddy Krueger, if audiences are satisfied with any old jerk with a knife?

The final icing on this shit cake of a movie is that Jason’s iconic look, the hockey mask that even a non-fan like me knows and appreciates, hasn’t come into focus yet. Instead, he wears some kind of bag or pillowcase on his head with the eyes cut out, looking for the life of me like the goofy Klansmen in Django Unchained:

Near the end of the movie, I was on the verge of wondering why Jason needed to hide his face when nobody at Crystal Lake could possibly recognize him, since he was last seen as a young child 28 years ago. Mrs. Voorhees walked around killing people without bothering to wear anything over her head, leading to several instances of soon-to-be-victims going, “Oh, it’s you,” before they get stabbed. But then I watched as Jason burst into the room in the penultimate scene, bag free (for no reason), revealing a hideous, deformed face:

In the immortal words of Hermes Conrad, “That just raises further questions!” Was he born this way and nobody ever mentioned it before? Did it happen the day he didn’t drown? Or did it happen later while he was living in the woods? Did he try on some perfume one day and get mauled by a bear? So many questions!

But Friday the 13th Part 2 isn’t interested in supplying any answers, just as it’s apparently uninterested in supplying theme, art, characters, satisfaction, or logic. Perhaps they’re all invisible, waiting just off-screen, biding their time until Part 3. One can only hope.

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Every year, Kyu attempts to watch and review 31 horror movies in 31 days. This year, it’s Killtoberfest 666, because you know the body count will eventually get that high. Check out past Killtoberfests along with this year’s reviews, and be sure to follow us on Twitter @insidethekraken to track Kyu’s progress.