The First Ever FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series - Movie #10: Friday the 13th Part 2

The rules for horror movies, according to the Scream franchise, anyway, are: you get killed if you have sex, you get killed if you drink and the killer is not who you think it is; for sequels, there's going to be a higher body count and more elaborate kills.  I'm finding it very entertaining to watch the classic slashers like F13th and Halloween after having watched the Scream movies - now I better understand where they're coming from.  For my money, Scream was paying attention because Friday the 13th Part 2 pretty much follows the rules.

This second installment in the series, Friday the 13th Part 2, is a return to Crystal Lake, but next door to "Camp Blood," as the site of Jason's initial rampage is now known in town. After the cold open dispatching of the first movie's final girl (oops - SPOILER), a bunch of taut-bodied young folk assemble at a camp counselor training camp where for the next couple of weeks, they'll learn how to be better camp counselors.

At first, everything is fun under the sun: hiking in the shortest shorts imaginable, swimming, arm-wrestling, jogging in tube tops. But then, as half the gang heads to town for beers and dancing, Jason, wearing a stylish burlap sack over his head, makes his move, swiftly dispatching the six left behind (plus the town lunatic who's peeping in the girls' cabin windows). When Final Girl Ginny and her boyfriend Paul get back from the in-town boozing, it's time for the big battle with Bag-head Jason. And in the aftermath, as they joyfully greet a lost little dog, thinking that the bad guy has been defeated, Jason - sans burlap sack - crashes through the cabin window, dragging Ginny off to her (presumable) doom.  I admit it: even though I totally knew it was coming, I jumped about three feet when he came in through the window.

Side note: how friggin' lucky were you if you were one of the camp counselors who stayed in town for after-hours partying when Ginny and Paul went back to the lake? Seriously - like five or six kids totally dodged a bullet there - or machete, to be more precise - by not going back early. There's a lesson to be learned from that, I think.

While Friday the 13th Part 2 was enjoyable enough (I did watch it on AMC so there were no actual nekkid boobs or graphic on-screen violence; I don't know how the cable television cut compares to the original), I think I'm done with this series. I just don't like slashers. I find them boring. Everyone who isn't the Final Girl or the Slasher is just uninteresting, time-wasting fodder. The plots are bare-bones, with everyone just wandering around waiting to get picked off. And I confess that I prefer the zingy and imaginative tauntings of Freddy Kreuger to the mute, monolithic monomania of Jason Voorhees (and also Michael Myers). I am given to understand that in later iterations, fans tend to cheer for the increasingly over-the-top ways in which Jason dispatches his victims ... while I can see the charm (??) in that, I got other things to watch.

Like Nazi zombies on skis - next: Dead Snow.