| Friday the 13th Part II | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Steve Miner Sean S. Cunningham (Additional scenes) |
| Produced by | Steve Miner |
| Written by | Ron Kurz Phil Scuderi |
| Starring | Amy Steel John Furey Adrienne King |
| Music by | Harry Manfredini |
| Cinematography | Peter Stein |
| Editing by | Susan E. Cunningham |
| Distributed by | Paramount Pictures |
| Release date(s) | May 1, 1981 |
| Running time | 87 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $1.05 million |
| Box office | $21,722,776 |
Friday the 13th Part II is a 1981 slasher film directed by Steve Miner, who also directed its sequel, Friday the 13th Part III and several other popular horror films. A sequel to Friday the 13th (1980), it is the second film in the Friday the 13th film series. It was a moderate box-office hit, opening on May 1, 1981 in first place. The film was the first to feature Jason Voorhees as the main antagonist, a trend which would be repeated for the rest of the series (with the exception of the fifth film).
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Alice (Adrienne King), the only survivor of a murder rampage at Crystal Lake, is brutally murdered when an adult Jason Voorhees stabs her in the head with an icepick after she discovers the severed head of Pamela Voorhees in her refrigerator. Jason did not drown in the lake as Pamela had initially believed, and had witnessed her death. The act drove Jason out of hiding in the nearby forest to kill his mother's killer and anyone who crosses his path.
Five years later, a group of teenagers come to Crystal Lake to reopen the site and set up a new camp. As Paul (John Furey), the head counselor, tells the story of Jason, one of his friends leaps out of the woods in an attempt to scare the campers. After regaining their composure, Paul tells the counselors that Jason is dead. However, Jason, whose face is shielded by a burlap sack, is stalking them. While standing by a tree, Crazy Ralph dies when Jason garrotes him with a chunk of barbed wire. Officer Winslow is next to be victim, and is killed with a set of claws from a hammer into his head. Jason then begins to attack and kill the campers. He kills troublemaker Scott by hanging him by his feet before slitting his throat with a machete. He then kills his female companion Terry offscreen.
A wheel chair-bound camper named Mark dies when he is struck with a machete and thrown down a flight of stairs. With a spear in hand, Jason moves up to where lovers Sandra and Jeff are having sex. Sneaking into the room, he impales the couple with the spear going all the way through the bed and to the floor. An investigating Vickie is murdered with a kitchen knife into her stomach. A survivor, Ginny (Amy Steel), is pursued by Jason into the woods and finds his shack containing a shrine to his mother with the severed and mummified head of Pamela Voorhees atop a shrine, surrounded by numerous candles and mutilated corpses, including the body of Alice.
When she hears him approaching, a frantic Ginny locks Jason out, but he breaks in wielding a pick-axe. Ginny's quick thinking has allowed her to dress in Pamela's sweater and manipulate Jason's small intelligence to think she is his reincarnated mother long enough to kill him in a surprise attack and escape. Unfortunately, Jason wises up after he sees his mother's severed head, and attacks Ginny. Paul suddenly arrives, and wrestles with Jason. As Jason is about to kill Paul, Ginny drives a machete in Jason's shoulder allowing them to escape. They, armed with a broken pitchfork, hide in a cabin. While they are distracted over a neighbor's dog that wandered in, a still alive Jason breaks in through a window, finally revealing his hideously deformed face. After a time, Ginny later wakes in an ambulance with no recollection of how she escaped, leaving Jason on the loose and the ultimate fate of Paul unclear. The final shot shows Mrs. Voorhees' head to show that Jason's murderous rampage is not over yet.
Adrienne King, was pursued by an obsessed fan after the success of the original, Friday the 13th. King, wanted her role small as possible.
Steve Daskawisz was rushed to the emergency room when Amy Steel hit his middle finger with a machete during filming. Steel explained: "The timing was wrong, and he didn't turn his pick axe properly, and the machete hit his finger." Daskawisz received 13 stitches on his middle finger. The finger was covered with a piece of rubber, and Daskawisz and Steel insisted on doing the scene all over again.
In one scene where Daskawisz was wearing the burlap flour sack, part of the flour sack was flapping at his eye, so the crew used tape inside the eye area to prevent it from flapping. Daskawisz received rug burns around his eye from the tape from wearing the rough flour sack material for hours.
The final scene where Jason crashes through the window has been dubbed one of the classic moments in horror cinema history. This, as well as the scene where Jason raises his knife before killing Vicki, were featured in the 82nd Academy Awards' tribute to horror montage.
The film's ending has been a source of confusion for fans. Writer Ron Kurz has stated that Jason's window jump was intended to be set in reality and that Paul was killed offscreen.[1] However, the beginning of Part III, in replaying the end of Part 2, instead showed Jason pulling the machete out of his shoulder and crawling away as Ginny and Paul leave him for dead in the shack. This arguably retcons the scene of Jason's window jump into a dream. In addition, near the beginning of Part III, a news broadcast reports the body count at eight, thus excluding Paul from this count.
Rumors sparked that John Furey left before the film wrapped as his character does not appear in the end. In truth, his character was not intended to have appeared.
In an unused ending, after Ginny questions where Paul is, the scene switches to Mrs. Voorhees' head, which then opens its eyes and smiles, indicating that Jason had killed Paul.
Following the success of Friday the 13th in 1980, Paramount Pictures began plans to make a sequel. First acquiring the worldwide distribution rights, Frank Mancuso, Sr. stated, "We wanted it to be an event, where teenagers would flock to the theaters on that Friday night to see the latest episode." The initial ideas for a sequel involved the Friday the 13th title being used for a series of films, released once a year, that would not have direct continuity with each other, but be a separate "scary movie" of their own right. Phil Scuderi—one of three owners of Esquire Theaters, along with Steve Minasian and Bob Barsamian, who produced the original film—insisted that the sequel have Jason Voorhees, Pamela's son, even though his appearance in the original film was only meant to be a joke. Steve Miner, associate producer on the first film, believed in the idea and would go on to direct the first two sequels, after Cunningham opted not to return to the director's chair. Miner would use many of the same crew members from the first film while working on the sequels.[1]
The film was released theactrically on May 1, 1981, and it has since become a cult classic. The film was released internationally to home video on VHS and DVD.
Like the first film, Friday the 13th Part 2 received great commercial success but was widely panned by critics.
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave Friday the 13th Part 2 half of one star out of 4, stating: "This movie is a cross between the Mad Slasher and Dead teenager genres; about two dozen movies a year feature a mad killer going berserk, and they're all about as bad as this one."[2]
Based on 30 reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an overall approval rating from critics of 33%, with an average score of 4.4/10.[3]
A novelization based on the screenplay of Ron Kurz was published in 1988: Hawke, Simon, Friday the 13th Part II: A Novel, New American Library, New York, 1988, ISBN 0-451-15337-5
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