You almost have to admire a movie that completely invalidates its own predecessor in the first few minutes.

WARNING: Once again, here be spoilers.

The first 6-7 minutes of Part 2 recaps the last several scenes of Part 1, and ends with the sole survivor of Part 1 (Adrienne King) getting a screwdriver to the head. After which, the killer politely removes her tea kettle from the stove.

Part 2 is full of unintentionally silly things like that.

But the big ol’ plot flaw is, of course, Jason Voorhees, ghost of the first film, ends up the slasher in this, and most of the remaining movies. He’s not a supernatural force, though, he’s a kid who grew up in the wild.

Wait, what? Didn’t his mother kill everyone for letting him die? Are you saying she wasn’t a mother-of-the-year candidate as she pretended? Jason wasn’t really dead at all?

This movie takes place five years after the last one, so that young Jason could grow up. Lest you find yourself inclined to give the film makers credit for even that, I remind you that Jason died in 1958. That was spelled out in Part 1. He dies, the there are murders the following year, the camp burns down.

So, were he not an undead creature, he’d be in his 30s by part 1. Unless we are to presume that the first movie takes place in 1960 and this one in 1965. (Pay no attention to the jogging suits!)

Well, a sequel was needed. This one has even more sex and maybe even more violence than the last and because there’s no need for a Scooby-Doo reveal, it has the more plausible hulking figure of a grown-up Jason doing his dirty deeds.

Oh, he’s gonna get those counselors back for…for…for…um…chasing him off and forcing him to live in the woods while convincing his mother he had drowned.

No drugs in this one, unless you count alcohol. Actually, if memory serves, there’s really not much drug use in any of the movies. That’s one of those things–like the virgin living–that comes more from fuzzy memories.

Much like the original movie, it doesn’t really matter who survives this one. But we know when Amy Steel starts to sort-of defend Jason that she’s the one. I love the little speech she gives when she’s trying to be sensitive to what Jason might have become, “What would he be like today? Out of control psycho? Frightened retard? Child trapped in a man’s body?”

Well, whatever he is, he managed to track down the survivor from the first movie, call her on the phone, pick the lock on the door to her house–remember, she’s having constant nightmares five years later, no way does she not lock the door–and ninja up behind her despite the hard-soled “casual elegance” shoes, which he’ll later change for a pair of shiny black ones.

So, obviously not “full retard”.

I believe this is the first movie to give us the full-on cheat shock. When the guy in the wheelchair–you heard me–gets it, the camera closes on him from front and back. There’s no one around. When it gets in close, an arm with a cleaver comes out of nowhere to chop the guy across the face. But in order for that angle to make any sense, Jason would have to be kneeling or crouching at a 45 degree angle in front of the guy, and we’ve already seen there’s no one there.

This pales compared to when he garottes ol’ Crazy Ralph from behind a large tree! Long arms, that guy, to reach with the garotte over the top of the tree and then bring it down in front of Ralph’s neck. Or maybe he nun-chucked it.

Stuff like this, which ultimately becomes the hallmark of the F13 series, really destroys any chance to achieve suspense, unless it’s the sort of suspense you get from wondering when Bugs Bunny is going to let Elmer Fudd have it.

About the wheelchair thing: It’s not until Kane Hodder takes on the role of Jason in the 7th movie that there are any rules to his behavior, and so the Jason of the early films is just not a very nice guy. Guy in wheelchair? Fair game. Children or animals? Fair game.

Blech.

This movie does less sproingy-body tricks than the previous, presumably because Jason doesn’t have his mother’s engineering savvy (though he does manage to make himself a nice rope-tree trap), but it has a particularly odd scene where Jason kills a couple in bed, hangs the guy’s body up on the wall, does something unknown with the girl’s, and then gets in bed and waits! Because he knows, I guess, that someone will come looking in that bed soon enough. (Nobody would think of letting a young couple be undisturbed for the night, I guess.)

What’s awesome is that he then hides all of the bodies, but without ever leaving the house. I think he even manages to take one of the bodies to his forest hideout, too, while in pursuit of the surviving counselors. You wish you were that creative.

Despite his teleportation skills, Jason’s pretty weak in this one. He gets knocked over by the slight Amy Steel, she kicks him in the groin, and she confuses him by dressing like his mother. (Hello, Oepdipus!) He stands on a rickety chair to fool the girl under the bed into thinking he’s gone. (Say what? What kind of killing-machine slasher doesn’t just drive his pitchfork through the bed, like he’s done so many times before?)

In a weak attempt to recreate the thunder of the original, the two survivors “kill” Jason–who wears a flour sack over his head in this one–only to crash through a window and grab the girl sans mask. (He looks like a cross between the Elephant Man and Jack Black as the farmer in this Mr. Show sketch, “The Farm House Musical”.)

Inexplicably, Amy Steel (“Ginny”) is left alive while the hapless John Furey (“Paul”) simply vanishes. No rhyme or reason, except perhaps to give the series a protagonist.

Somewhat amusingly, Adrienne King, the survivor from Part 1 wasn’t offered a big role in Part 2 due to a miscommunication–and Amy Steel wouldn’t take any role in Part 3 on her agent’s advice. At least Steel and Furey would go on to have real careers, even as F13 would go on to lack any semblance of continuity.

Gore-wise, this one is particularly uninspired. A lot of slit throats, an impalement (a twofer!) and members of the cast seem to just vanish. (They actually do: They go into town, never to return, not even when the police are hauling away Amy Steel at the end.)

The next entry in the series would rip off a few of the original movies’ deaths, but would at least provide some particularly creative new ones–and in eye-popping (heh) 3D. It would also be the first film not to take place on Friday the 13th. (Not that this ever seemed to be a prominent feature in any of the movies. Let’s be honest, they called it “Friday the 13th” because they needed a holiday and “Groundhog Day” just doesn’t sound very scary.)

In honor of the upcoming explosive remake of the film-series equivalent of “The Guest That Wouldn’t Leave”, I thought I’d review the original series. The remake already cracks me up, with the extended trailer being a second-long shot of everyone killed in the movie. (13 people, get it?)

Suspense is over-rated, I guess. Although one of those 13 looks like it might actually be the mad killer his own self, so there’s some suspense there if you don’t know that it’s impossible to kill a successful horror villain.

WARNING: I’m going to spoil like crazy since the movie is almost 30 years old, and it was pretty well spoiled on the day it came out.

As a little background, I should note that I rather despised this series as it was happening. I saw one in the theater. I saw the first one on TV because I’d heard so much about it. I saw the third one in the theater, because it was in 3D. (I saw, I think, all of the 3D movies that came out in the ‘80s, and they had two things in common: They ranged from bad to unimaginably awful, and the glasses made my eyes hurt.) That was about it until long after the series ended (the first time) in 1993.

For various perverse reasons that would require you to report me to Children’s Services, I’m not going to explain how it is that I’ve become something of an expert on the series. You’ll just have to take it on faith that I am, and that I’m very, very sorry for what I’ve done.

Anyway, over time, I began to appreciate the sheer awfulness of the films. They’re not just bad singly, they’re bad as a series. Jason Voorhees is an iconic slasher now, of course, but it took six movies to come up with the complete ensemble and “character” that he’s now recognized as–and which only lasted for the next two movies before the series ended with the ninth. (Though the modern “reboot”, of course, skips all that.)

The basic premise of the film is simple: Halloween had cost less than half-a-million to make and made nearly $40M, couldn’t similar returns be had for an even cheaper movie that stole the best ideas?

If you think I’m being snarky, I’m not really: One refreshing thing about F13 is that nobody making that first movie had any pretensions whatsoever. The various interviews of cast and crew that can be found start with, “Well, I needed the money and …” Betsy Palmer needed to buy a car (scroll to last question).

The story itself borrows more from Scooby-Doo than Halloween: Mysterious disappearances at a summer camp are caused by a completely unknown character who is unmasked at the film’s climax. (In the above article, Palmer says that she told director Cunningham that it was unfair only to show her at the end, but that he was right. I’m unconvinced. It did feel like cheating.)

As I said, they’re stealing from Halloween, which basically had a slasher who was hung up on sex and fond of posing bodies in freaky ways, so they base the story around naughty counsellors who have sex and smoke pot, and really does some very elaborate body posing. I mean, we’re talking wires and pulleys–it’s extensive.

Which adds to the absurdity when we discover that 54-year-old Betsy Palmer is the culprit. Not only is she able to easily dispatch virile young Kevin Bacon (and his prominent penis), she’s able to lift bodies into trees and cause them to fall out at appropriate moments.

She kills Bacon by grabbing his forehead from underneath the bed–hella long arms–holding him down, and driving a knife or spear through the mattress, through his spine and out through the front of his throat. And then turning it.

So, it’s not just a cheat, it’s a ridiculous cheat. And then Palmer finds herself challenged trying to dispatch the frail Adrienne King. Their fight scene is, admittedly, pretty intense.

Oh, what? You wanted to hear about Kevin Bacon’s penis? It’s not a big deal (ha!), he waves it around more than Harvey Keitel. It may be accidental in this film but during the swimming scene, he’s wearing a very, very tight Speedo-like brief. Did I mention that he’s circumcized?

The scene where young Jason Voorhees makes his appearance (to the “Love Theme from Friday the 13th”) is definitely a shocker though it, too, makes no sense. We have to assume that he is some sort of undead creature, since the whole impetus for the slaughters was his death. (Plus, the flesh is falling off his skull.)

Or we could assume it was just a dream.

The next movie will completely undermine any logical or even coherent supernatural explanations for what Jason is or was.

A lot of imagined slasher conventions grew up around this series. For example, because Michael Meyers of Halloween killed everyone but the virginal Laurie Strode, there’s this imagined cliché that the “good girl” is the survivor. But as a veteran of ’80s horror movies, I can assure you there seldom was a good girl. And in this, first in the series, Jason’s first modern victim doesn’t have a chance to do anything. She’s just killed for having the audacity to apply for a job at a summer camp.

The survivor, Alice (Adrienne King), is not a good girl, either. Although she’s not shown having sex with the camp director, the implication is there. She is shown smoking weed, too. Although the “one female survivor” trope is the rule for, I think, most of the movies, the big problem here is that the characters are bland enough to completely interchangeable.

Now, if the purpose of the movies is to showcase gory special effects, we can give at least the first movie its due: This was pretty graphic stuff for the time, and fairly convincing. Of course, as time has passed and movies have gotten shorter and shorter shots, those full 2-3 second gore shots have aged very poorly.

High definition makes it even worse: You can pretty much see how all the effects were done now. In fact, in some shots, the fake skin is so obvious as to make you wonder how you ever fell for it.

This movie duplicated Halloween’s box office success but lacked a director like Carpenter whose idea of hell would be producing sequel after sequel of the same crap. Hence, the next eight movies.

Believe it or not, the series goes downhill from here: Way down.