Now remember this is 1981, the heyday for slasher films, so a sequel released less than a year after the original was common place here! The first film did so well that a sequel was planned immediately.
Friday the 13th Part 2 starts off with Alice (King), the lone survivor of the original film, is having a nightmare complete with flashbacks to the original film. It is obvious that she is having problems with her experience. After a lengthy conversation with her mother over the phone, she begins to get ready for a shower, but finds Mrs. Voorhees severed head in the refrigerator and then immediately has an ice pick shoved into her temple, credits roll!
We jump to a camp counselor training area where a bunch of teens (again) are at Crystal Lake, not very far from the camp of the original film. Paul (Furey) is the leader of this training area and warns the kids not to go there, but two of them decide to anyway, finding a dead dog in the process. We also learn that it has been 5 years since the events in the original film. Don’t ask me why they decided to do this, maybe it had something to do with maybe not being able to go near the lake because of the murders? I don’t know. Anyway, Jason is now fully grown and covering his face with a burlap sack with one hole for his one eye (yeah, I know), he hadn’t gotten his trademark hockey mask yet. So he is killing left and right, as usual.
Friday the 13th Part 2 was one of those rare sequels that was almost as good as the original. Halloween II the same year was another example of this. Friday the 13th Part 2 was a worthy sequel because it felt so much like the original, though we got new characters, a somewhat new location and a new killer, a killer that we loved simply because his motive was probably the most simple: You have sex, you die. You do drugs, you die. That simple!
Though Sean S. Cunningham and Victor Miller were gone from the picture, the movie still had some great moments. Even some borrowed from Italian horror movies like the scene of the two people being impaled as they have sex. Whoever came up with that idea was a flat out genius. The movie is a must see if you want to see a great sequel to a great horror film. If you want to see the Friday the 13th films, then you have to see this one.
