Poor Alice (Adrianne King)! Weeks after being found as the only survivor of the Camp Crystal Lake massacre that left all her co-workers and companions dead, Alice is being forced by Paramount Pictures to relive her trauma by having footage of the first "Friday the 13th" constantly looping into her subconscious (bastards!). Nightmares ensue, but one of them turns out to be the prelude to Alice’s unexpected departure from the series when she discovers Mrs. Voorhee’s head (which she decapitated at the end of the previous movie) looking hauntingly at a picture of her son Jason as a missing kid in the milk carton next to her. Well, that’s not really true either. But the point is... well, that a pointy screwdriver is driven into the woman’s sinus area. That and she likes tea, which her killer politely takes off the stove before disappearing into the night from which he came from. Who says the psychopath son of a deranged serial killer can’t have manners in the kitchen (someone else’s kitchen)?

Revealing only his big shoes (you know what they say about insane serial killers with big shoes!), one-eyed cloth mask (which comes off at the end) and long-sleeved flannel shirt, "Friday the 13th Part 2" gives birth to the on-screen antics of Mr. Jason Vorhees (played here by Warrington Gillette). Cold, silent and deadly, Jason’s first victim is rightfully the woman that killed his own mother. That’s the way your sick, twisted and undeveloped brain would rationalize things too if you had been raised by an insane woman (or a Republican household), and then saw her being decapitated while she was trying to avenge your apparent drowning 23 years earlier. Never mind that the nine Camp Crystal Lake counselors she slaughtered had nothing to do with Jason drowning, or that the ‘Five Years Later’ title that follows the death of Alice means "Part 2" takes place in 1985. If Jason saw mom do it, then it must be OK to kill random strangers that dwell into the forest area surrounding Crystal Lake. You know, like the idiot cop that spots Jason crossing the road, chases him into the woods without first radioing for back-up (as 99.9% of real-life police officers do), meanders into Jason’s home and ends up being hammered (literally) for his forced-upon idiocy.

Fresh meat arrives into Jason’s world as young trainees gather for some remedial indoctrination at a so-called Counselor Training Center that shares a view of the same lake where Camp Crystal Lake was. Contrary to common misconceptions by many "Friday the 13th" fans, these folks aren’t in the same location where the first movie took place (just the surrounding area). The leader of the group is Paul (John Furey), a guy smart and self-assured enough about himself to be an item with Psychology graduate student Ginny Fields (Amy Steel). Ginny arrives in a barely-functional lemon of a VW Beetle (FORESHADOWING!), charms the pants of everybody and joins the team alongside boyfriend Paul. After establishing conclusively that these guys and gals are (a) horny, (b) stupid and (c) too curious for their own good (two of them try to sneak into Camp Crystal Lake as soon as they’re told by Paul to stay away from it) the group is separated when Paul lets those that wish to go into town for one last night of drinking and partying. A small group stays at the Counselor Center to pass to time playing videogames, going skinny dipping or just plain fuck.

What happens next I’ll leave up to your imagination, but I must say I was utterly shocked by the surprise cameos of Julie Andrews, Sylvester Stallone, Steve Martin, Martha Graham (as a kabuki forest creature from the lake) and the nude scene between Lance Henriksen and Teri Garr... WOW! OK, OK, I’m lying; Jason shows up, grabs whatever sharp object is near him (machete, kitchen knife, spear, etc.) and lays waste to most of these folks in a calculated, methodical and brutal way. Paul and Ginny walk into this madness, and Jason knocks the living daylights out of Paul while the psycho and the lady in distress find themselves in yet another rehash of the first movie’s stalked-prey-running-for-her-life routine. Unlike the bland and unappealing Adrianne King though, Amy Steel can actually act! Plus she’s a doll and easy on the eyes (or at least she was back in ’81). This makes Ginny’s cat-and-mouse encounters, near-escapes and ultimate showdown with Jason one of the highlights of the entire series. You really care about whether Jason gets his filthy paws on this clean and neat all-American girl, and are slightly-anxious that she might not make it out alive. "Part 2," after all, kills the survivor of the first "Friday the 13th" at the start of the movie!

It’s a testament to how green director/producer Steve Miner (an associate producer in the first "Friday the 13th"), screenwriter Ron Kurz and associate producer Frank Mancuso, Jr. (son of the studio’s head) were at the time they made this movie that, except for Mark the wheelchair-bound athlete and the aforementioned Ginny/Paul duet, the characters in "Part 2" are even less appealing and likable than the sorry bunch of nobodies from the first movie. Walt Gomey’s Crazy Ralph character is brought back from the first movie for a couple of weird scenes but is promptly wasted because (a) he doesn’t have anything new or interesting to say and (b) Jason gets rid of him around by end of the third reel (thus killing any continuity in the series besides Jason’s). Even with padded footage from the first movie, "Part 2" is also quite short (87 min.) and recycles most of the same camera angles and music cues from the first one. Though a little more graphic and a lot less implied (only one off-camera death compared to the first one’s four), you’re basically seeing the first "Friday the 13th" except it’s now the son of the woman that did the killing then doing all the hacking and slashing.

At least Miner and Kurz were smart-enough to include a handful of myth-building scenes that not involve killing, but evolve the Jason Voorhees legend. In one memorable scene (one of the best in the entire series) Paul and one of his assistants scare the shit out of the counselor trainees by reciting, in a believable and ominous tone, the legend of how Jason came to be. This is a priceless and simple reminder that, at its core, the horror movie genre encapsulates lifetimes of similar folk tales and cautionary parables passed from generation to generation (usually in camp fire tales like the one depicted here). In another scene Ginny speculates what the battered psychology of Jason might be like if he saw his mother being killed, which is ridiculed by her drinking companions but eventually ends up being her salvation during her one-on-one with Jason.

It might be cheesy and ridiculous to think that Ginny could talk a demented psycho out of killing her by pretending to be his mother (a cameo by "Friday the 13th’s" own Betsy Palmer), but the injection of pop-psychology into the otherwise-mindless slaughter of unlikable people gives "Part 2" a simple elegance that is missing from more than half the sequels produced after this one. I’ll take Ginny talking Jason out of killing her over the latter being resurrected by a lightning bolt anytime, anywhere, anyday (yes, even if that day is Friday the 13th). "Part 2" is watchable (did I mention Amy Steel rocks?), and features one of the most menacing-looking movie villains I’ve ever seen duking it out with the prettiest and most appealing female nemesis he ever had to face. So what if the man grabs his clothes from the rejected pile of clothes at K-Mart? You don’t see much of Jason in "Part 2," but you can certainly FEEL the man’s presence even when he isn’t even around. You can’t say that about "Jason Takes Manhattan."

BODY COUNT: nine (five men & four women, one of them off-camera).

ANIMALS KILLED: one (remains of what appears to be a dog).

MOST GRUESOME DEATH: a cop gets the sharp end of a hammer stuck in his hypothalamus just as he discovers Jason’s shrine to his mom’s head; talk about finding the last thing you want to see before dying, and then actually croaking right then and there. Ughh! Rolling down some steep stair down some stairs with a machete stuck in your face also kinda hurts, me thinks.

LEAP OF LOGIC: What the hell happened to Paul (John Furey) and Muffy, Ginny’s boyfriend and dog respectively (although the latter term could easily apply to both :-P)? He’s there when Jason busts through the window to grab Amy, and then we don’t ever see him again either at the end of "Part 2" or at the beginning of "Part 3." Did Paul fight Jason to the death in order to free Ginny? Did Muffy bite Jason or Paul, infecting either one with rabbis? We’ll never know!