WARNING! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!
A thought occurred to me as I saw the events of Friday the 13th Part 2 unfold. This has to be where the whole entire subgenre of beautiful and stupid people in beautiful places being hacked to death has come from. Well, maybe not. This must have been the first film to solidify it. After all this is one of the first "slasher" sequels. This film was released the same year as Halloween II and fared a little better with critics. Not much mind you. Rotten Tomatoes gives Halloween II a 30% approval rating while this film has received a 33%. Truth be told this isn't even the worst slasher movie I've seen. That title belongs to Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter.
This film essentially takes off where the first one left us. We're given a series of flashbacks, which inform us what happened last time in case you missed it or just didn't care enough to remember, thanks to a nightmare of Alice Hardy (Adrienne King) the survivor of the first film. Incidentally Alice does not show any signs of a nightmare (turning her head side to side and whimpering emphatic and forced no's and pleases) until the camera has focused on her. I can't help but imagine Steve Miner, the film's director, standing beside the bed saying, "Okay, Adrienne remember. Don't react until I say so." Everyone knows that nightmares happen on cue. She's of course killed after a shower and while making tea by having an ice pick jammed into her temple by an unknown assailant (duh, it's Jason). We fast forward who knows how long. Camp Crystal Lake has been shut down however there is another camp nearby and on the same lake that is preparing to open. At least I think it is. The film doesn't make it real clear as to whether it will have visitors or just counselors for a training course. It doesn't truly matter. The purpose of these teenagers going there is so they can get drunk, arm wrestle, make out and go skinny dipping for no apparent reason other than to have someone get naked. After a couple of nights of debauchery and stupid decisions a killer in a burlap sack and plaid shirt (maybe the Elephant Man was a lumberjack?) begins picking these people off one by one until one survives.
Remember how I said that these were beautiful and stupid people? The stupidity is nearly overwhelming. In one scene two of them drive up to a gas station ecstatic that they found a gas station. They then proceed to run almost a block away to use a pay phone. Why not just park in front of the phone? It would certainly keep them from parking in a no parking zone to avoid a towing which happens and which they only care about enough to chase for thirty feet before they get a new ride to the camp. If it was me I'd get that ride down to the impound to get my truck back. In another scene a girl (our skinny dipper played by Kirsten Baker) searches for her dog. She calls the dog's name twice before another stupid but beautiful teenager tells her that lunch is ready and she promptly gives up searching for her beloved pet and skips lively to eat lunch. How did any of these folks reach their current ages? I guess it's easier to assume that they lived in bubbles.
I'd like to mention this for a brief moment. Over the course of the film's 87 minute runtime there are 12 people (pets are people too) killed. Three of them bite it in the opening flashbacks, one dog is shown disembowled and eight new airheads bite the dust. If you should happen to do the math that's approximately one dead being for every eight minutes of screen time. Just think if this was a twelve minute short film. There'd be a death a minute and the movie would be over after twelve minutes.
Can you tell I am in a bit of a biting mood?
★
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