Friday the Thirteenth Part 2

1981–82 were pivotal years in horror.

So many great movies—The Beast Within, The Thing—and some genuinely cursed gems such as Poltergeist and Twilight Zone: The Movie came out in this pivotal gateway era. But it wasn’t as if we didn’t have fair warning. After all, 1979 alone saw Alien, Phantasm, and Friday the Thirteenth—the original badass slasher—alongside Halloween II, all stalking out of the cinematic woods, hatchet in hand, ready to divest the viewer of his screwy, sweaty, popcorn- and JuJuBee-stuffed noggin. It was a grand, glorious—if utterly terrifying—time of wonderment, oh my brothers.

(And that’s only to mention a very few. We also got Hell Night, Prom Night, Nightmare, and The Funhouse.)

The greatest sights of Friday the Thirteenth Part 2: The Sequel are the thoroughly fascinating talents displayed by actress Marta Kober, who spends a great deal of time wandering around the other Camp Crystal Lake—conveniently located on the other side of the lake—in a bathing suit top. Marta is a special effect in her own right, and she went on to appear in film and television shows such as "Magnum P.I.," "Matlock," and "Law & Order."

Having gone to high school with such actors as Ving Rhames and Wesley Snipes, she also played in a punk band under the name “Marta Scorsese”, performing in the Steve Albini–produced project The Bomb, alongside Jeff Pezzati of Naked Raygun. (She also appeared in Slumber Party Massacre III in 1990.)

Fascinating young woman. And—by the way—in a sort of Traci Lords twist, Marta later revealed she was only sixteen when she made Friday the Thirteenth Part 2, necessitating an utterly terrified studio scrambling to remove her nude scenes post-haste.

(She was doing the convention circuit as late as 2021, but reports suggest she may have fallen on hard times due to substance-abuse issues. We can’t track much more than that. If so—sad.)

Getting back to it: the film opens on a nice rainy day, with a kid unaccountably playing outside at night as sinister legs—Jason’s legs, we suppose—walk from the rain-sloshing gutter, across the street, to the house occupied by Alice Hardy (Adrienne King). You’ll remember Alice ended Part One by decapitating Mama Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer) and then getting sucked under the lake by Jason, who’s lurking down there like some mutant menace from a monster movie. Which, I suppose, he is—after a fashion.

Mama Pamela’s severed head makes for a nice little nosh, sitting int he fridge along with the leftover soufflé in a Tupperware bowl, one supposes.

FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2 | Jason's Mom (1981) Movie CLIP 4K

Cut to the chase: a bunch of horny young’uns head to the other Camp Blood to train as camp counselors. Bad move. The trainer relates the Legend of Jason, and there’s a sort of Arnold Horshack–cum–Dustin Diamond type who likes to tell jokes and pull pranks. A lot of nude and semi-nude flesh is flaunted while Jason—more precisely, the worm’s-eye view of his legs—stomps through the woods, looking for vengeance.

The whole thing leads to a surprisingly gothic climax, and although Jason has yet to don his iconic hockey mask, he does stalk and slash with a burlap sack over his head, tied at the throat with rope and featuring a single slit for an eye—evoking images of The Elephant Man, released just a year earlier.

The ending borrows from Happy Birthday to Me (1981), starring Melissa Sue Anderson. Or maybe they were ripping each other off. At any rate, everyone—even dear, sweet little Marta—gets sliced, diced, poked, punctured, and exsanguinated (drip, drip), except for the Final Girl, Ginny (Amy Steel), who disappears into a waiting ambulance.

But did we give away too much?

I don’t think so.

Suffice it to say, Friday the 13th Part Deux is passably good mid-entry slasher fare, with enough breasts and blood to make for a fine Saturday-night distraction. It advances the saga of the undead-adjacent Jason as he evolves from hideous, inbred hill-jack mutant returned from the grave into a cleaner-cut—but still rugged—mask-wearing psycho slasher cult icon with an ugly Hills Have Eyes face.

Or maybe Overdog. You know—from Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn. But that didn’t come out until ’83. So maybe it just missed the mark.

Directed by Steve Miner, with a screenplay by Ron Kurz, based on characters created by Victor Miller. Oddly, Sean S. “Last House” Cunningham opted out of producing the sequel. We’re sure he had his reasons.

Friday the 13th - Part II

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My book: Silent Scream! Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. CAligari, Metropolis, and Edison's Frankenstein--Four Novels by C. Augustine

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