Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)
Slip on your copper-coloured, shiny silk panties, spritz your bits, and bend over in a car to look for a hairbrush now, as we drive a clapped-out heap to Camp Blood for—you guessed it, 1981’s summer camp slasher sequel, Friday the 13th Part 2.
Known perhaps most notably for the pre-hockey-masked, The Town That Dreaded Sundown-homaging, burlap sack hooded Jason, and the calamitous yet hilarious (not to Roger Ebert) wheelchair machete murder, and its inexplicable, incendiary exploding title credit, Part 2 is the gory glue that holds my Camp It Up ’81 trilogy together. It includes an all-encompassing prologue flashback to the tale of Mrs Voorhees and her disabled son, which underpins the entire Friday franchise, and reminds audiences of the original’s key events. Namely, American telly regular on the CBS game show, I’ve Got a Secret, Betsy Palmer, as Mama Voorhees—chewing up the scenery with her giant dentures in a periwinkle blue Cosby sweater, and properly smashing Adrienne King’s face into the sand like it’s an exposed top turnbuckle. They then not only “recap the decap,” but also replay the iconic Jason popping out of the water shocker. It’s smart in the sense that we’re duped; prepped for the continuing journey of the original’s lead character, Alice, but they whack her at the beginning because in a slasher such as this, a through-line protagonist is quite unnecessary. It ain’t Janet Lee in Psycho, but definitely has forerunner to Drew Barrymore in Scream vibes.
Of course Jason isn’t a hulking, supernatural, toxic waste-dipped mutant freak at this stage—he’s a maybe 5’8″ short king, dressed like a farmer in overalls with a bag on his head, falling over awkwardly, and instead of just murdering someone instantly, he seemingly must wrestle with them for ages on the ground. He is certainly fallible. If you wait in a bush for Jason to round the corner, you can quite easily kick him in the bollocks and buy yourself some getaway time.
It’s got some sluggish, laborious chases—particularly the one involving the ranger chap. It’s too long, and not tightly-wound enough. There’s a ginger character in ridiculously short shorts, who looks like he’s going on safari with a tablecloth for a shirt. It’s got girls in bikini tops, a humorous cut from a Shih Tzu to a hot dog on a barbecue—there’s even an abandoned Halloween mask folks periodically pick up and put on.
Thankfully, amidst these carefree teen fools, there’s Ginny Field—a perceptive and tenacious final girl, played adeptly by Amy Steel. Alright, Part 2’s child psychology ending doesn’t entirely play, but it—I hesitate to say, cleverly homages Hitchcock’s Psycho with Ginny cosplaying as Jason‘s mommy by donning one of horror’s most iconic jumpers—next to Freddy’s. Although strangely, Jason is an unlikely main character to be here, as it is he who fans ultimately rooted for as the series continued. They would also regard the revolving door of teenage guest stars as mere fodder—eagerly awaiting the next effects set piece dispatch. Much to the bemusement of America’s dorkiest pundit duo, Sisk and Eebs, Friday nuts craved satisfying slayings as payoffs—even ranking the likes of The New Blood’s sleeping bag tree trunk bashing, and my fave entry, Manhattan’s rooftop boxer decapitation punch, as if they were a Goal of the Season montage on Match of the Day. What sort of warped, infantile mind would do such a thing?
The best kills in Part 2 include a claw end of a hammer to a sheriff’s bonce, a pre-Basic Instinct ice pick temple (and nose if you’ve seen the full, deleted effect) stabbing. Gene and Rog may not have got it, but poor paraplegic hunk, number 81, getting absolutely annihilated with a machete to the brow, lifelessly rolling backwards in his wheelchair, and awkwardly clattering down a substantial flight of rickety death stairs before bafflingly bleaching out to white is perhaps the maddest murder of the bunch.
To this day, there’s an infuriating censorship quagmire when it comes to the entire Friday the 13th series. Conspiracy theorists submit Paramount are actively ashamed of it, and refuse to reinstate the missing footage to give what Ebert called this “unpleasant, absolutely reprehensible, little sleaze pit of a movie,” or any of its slippery, deformed siblings uncut releases. This proper annoying wrinkle applies to almost every film in the franchise, which even on the latest 4K editions, have trimmed and truncated deaths. Some of the missing bits—The Final Chapter, for example, appear pristine and easily restorable, and others—namely Part 2 aren’t, due to their only remaining origin being an effects guy’s serendipitous, yet shabby VHS tape. Frustratingly, forty-eight seconds of celluloid is still undiscovered in a cutting room bin somewhere, or has since become guitar picks.
Friday the 13th Part 2 was released through Scream Factory on Blu-ray, but as with the rest of the slashed-canvas slashers in this set, the expunged butchery and bloodshed couldn’t be reintegrated into the movie due to either complete incompetence, sheer laziness, or an unattainable source print or negative. The Friday kills were always intended to be protracted, and in most cases were paced much better, with a more shocking nature—particularly Scott hanging upside down and getting his throat sliced in Part 2, which goes on forever and ever, and the graphic, ice pick driven through Alice’s schnoz at the outset, when the fourth-wall-breaking King discovers Pamela’s noggin in her freaky Frigidaire.
Sparing these scissor-happy splices, these now iconic films may have had a shot of standing alongside ’80s splatter staples, The Prowler, The Mutilator, Maniac, Intruder, and My Bloody Valentine, if someone could only get their act together, locate, and reassemble the missing sequences in the same manner. No one wants to watch a dulled version of a movie like this, but sadly, to this day—outside of fan edits, we have little choice. The best you can hope for is to pop over to YouTube afterwards, where some kind crank has recut the kills so they continue on seamlessly, albeit in their lower quality work prints—much like ’81’s My Bloody Valentine did in official releases until it was recently restored for the 4K. Fingers crossed we get uncensored cuts of all the Fridays at some juncture, but all signs point to highly unlikely. If they could’ve, they probably would’ve already.
