I watched the entirety (only 87 minutes) of Friday the 13th Part 2, and no hockey mask.
How is it that the thing we know most about Jason Voorhees does not even occur until the third movie in the series? Though at this point I'm wondering if I can even expect it then.
So what does Jason look like in this movie?
Well he runs around with a burlap sack on his head, a little bit like a murderous scarecrow. And yes, that is more than a little bit funny.
It makes me wonder if they got notes on this movie. It was still popular, still making money. If the sequel took only a year after the release of the original came out, the third followed the second by only 15 months. But something was missing to take this to the next level.
It took an extra three months to think of the hockey mask and to factor it into the script.
But let's talk about what's actually in this movie rather than what isn't in it.
As you will recall from my first Friday the 13th post, in which I explained that I am going to watch this series all Halloween month, this was actually the movie I started watching first on Thursday night, for only five minutes before I decided it would be better to just start over and totally refresh myself on what had happened in a movie that I hadn't seen in probably 30 years. Well, I don't know that I really needed to do that. There is so much recap of this movie in the opening minutes of Part 2, it puts the "previously on" segments of modern TV shows to shame. Like, there might be four whole minutes of footage from the first movie, spliced in while the girl who survived that movie tosses and turns in bed as part of a post traumatic nightmare. You really needn't have watched the first movie at all.
Well, spoiler alert, she doesn't survive for long. Jason comes to stick an ice pick in her head. End of the road for previous movie's Final Girl.
Now obviously we haven't built up a huge amount of affection for that character, such that her death is a shock to our system. But I do wonder if this was one of the first times that we saw a character survive the previous movie at great paints to her psyche, only to be offed in the first few minutes of the sequel. I suppose such disposability would become something of a genre staple.
Really, this whole film is disposable. If I said I thought it would be basically a remake of the first movie, that's pretty much correct. The distinction, plotwise, is that the horny teenagers -- who don't seem to be quite as horny this time -- are not actually trying to reopen Camp Crystal Lake. They are attending a school for camp counselors on another shore of the lake. As if a maniac like Jason Voorhees would confine himself only to the actual grounds of the camp.
I don't want to suggest that this movie is horrible. There were some touches I liked, especially some filmmaking choices by director Steve Miner. His camera setups are generally good, and it doesn't look as cheap as its predecessor in some important ways. I thought there was some clever dialogue too. One moment I remembered is that after two of the prospective counselors are caught by local police breaking into the condemned Camp Crystal Lake on a dare, the guy running their counselor school, who is not as concerned about the legend of Jason, says he will punish them by preventing them from having seconds on dessert that night. Anyway, there are a few things like this that elevate it somewhat.
Though I do think it is quite disappointing to go through another Friday the 13th movie without the hockey mask. We do get the "J-j-j-j" sound affect, another Jason trademark, but without the menace of the man in the hockey mask, it just feels lacking. Let's just say I'm ready for some classic Jason Voorhees nonsense in the next film.
I also think it's funny that the movie ends in almost exactly the same way as the first, except this time, it's Jason, sans burlap sack, jumping through a window to grab somebody, rather than jump from out of the lake. Let's just say the effect is lessened considerably.
This Final Girl also awakens, not dead, to survive to the next film.
But, I'm guessing, not for long.
No comments:
Post a Comment