Friday the 13th 2 (1981)
Starring: Betsy Palmer, Amy Steele, John Furey, Adrienne King
Director: Steve Miner
Synopsis: Slasher sequel with fair body count!
Reviewed by: Omar Khan

"cynically manipulative" Time Out

"vast crowd pleaser" Creature Features

"fairly splattery" Splatter Movies

"no surprises" Blockbuster Video

"more bloody exectutions" Maltin's

 

Apart from the all-too-brief appearance by the wonderful Betsy Palmer, who pops up in a handful of flashback sequences, there is very little here that rises above the ordinary.

I must confess to having a real soft spot for this film, however, and I still enjoy revisiting it now and then. It has survived the test of time surprisingly well. The film never pretends to be anything other than what it is: an out-and-out slasher with the emphasis firmly on brutally inventive kills and the familiar stalk-and-slash build-up of tension. Coupled with Harry Manfredini's memorable score and Jason's first appearance as an adult—complete with his startlingly effective sack mask—the film remains a solid and entertaining entry in the genre, with very few dull moments.

The other great pleasure is the return of the superb Mrs Voorhees, even if only in flashbacks. Betsy Palmer's brief appearances lend the film a surprising amount of weight. Her mannerisms, her wonderfully unhinged performance and, of course, that unforgettable severed head in the refrigerator are forever etched into the memory. Wonderful stuff to stir the soul.

Betsy Palmer will always occupy a very special place in my heart, and that has as much to do with the lady herself as it does with Friday the 13th. In 2007, my own slasher film was invited to screen at the New York Horror Convention, where it was receiving its New York premiere. To my utter delight, I learned that Betsy Palmer would be appearing before our team took to the stage.

I travelled all the way from Pakistan knowing exactly what I wanted to do.

I nervously approached her table at the convention, where she was signing photographs of herself as Jason's mother, alongside pictures from many of the non-horror films she remained equally proud of, including one with former President Ronald Reagan. After all, she wasn't always Mrs Voorhees. In her younger days, she had been a beautiful leading lady, even if her career never quite reached the heights it deserved.

My stomach was tied in knots. What would she be like? Would she have any time for me? Would she like the gift I had brought halfway around the world?

Taking a deep breath, I introduced myself and presented her with a Pashmina shawl from Pakistan. It proved to be the perfect icebreaker. She immediately embraced me, thanked me repeatedly for the gift and invited me to sit with her. We chatted for quite some time about this and that, her eyes twinkling throughout as photographs were taken with her proudly wearing her new shawl draped over her shoulders.

I bought several classic Friday the 13th photographs for her to sign, all of which still adorn my walls today. I floated around the convention for the rest of the day, utterly star-struck and walking on air. Becoming friends with Jason's mother is probably the closest I have ever come to genuine horror movie royalty.

Even now, nearly twenty years later, that meeting remains one of the happiest memories of my life. Watching the first two Friday the 13th films still transports me straight back to that wonderful afternoon. Betsy may have left this world, but she continues to live on in the hearts of horror fans everywhere—and certainly in mine.

Steve Miner, who would later go on to direct such enjoyable films as Halloween H20 and Lake Placid, was clearly still finding his feet when he made this picture. The film often feels like a succession of elaborately staged death scenes loosely stitched together, without enough overall cohesion or sustained suspense.

The real stars are Harry Manfredini and the special-effects team. Manfredini's score, an entertaining if scarcely disguised blend of Psycho with a dash of Jaws, screeches away relentlessly in an effort to generate menace where the script often cannot.

Equally impressive are the make-up and gore effects, although many of Tom Savini's most gruesome creations were unfortunately left languishing on the cutting-room floor after being judged too extreme for audiences of the day.

The plot itself is business as usual. A group of obnoxious, sex-obsessed teenagers arrive at a camp close to Camp Crystal Lake—Camp Blood itself—and proceed to disappear one by one in satisfyingly rapid succession. Quite frankly, most of them deserve exactly what they get. The only real question is whether Jason will don his trademark hockey mask. He doesn't. Instead, he wears the now-iconic burlap sack over his head, which proves every bit as unsettling and, in many ways, even more frightening than the hockey mask that would later define him.

The great tragedy surrounding this film is the loss of the censored footage. So much material was removed by the censors, and unlike many other horror films, those excised scenes appear to have been discarded or destroyed altogether. They could have made a magnificent bonus feature—or better still, been restored to the film itself for a definitive home-video release. Sadly, that opportunity seems to have been lost forever, and slasher fans around the world are poorer for it.

Viewed objectively, this is an uninspired low-budget effort and a good example of what gradually went wrong with so much of 1980s horror: an over-reliance on gore and jack-in-the-box shocks instead of atmosphere, suspense and genuine dread. It didn't even launch any major future stars as the original film did with Kevin Bacon—unless, of course, one considers poor old Crazy Ralph to be a star!