Alice, the final girl from the first Friday the 13th, is murdered by an assailant two months after this initial spate of murders. It’s not hard to guess who this is as Alice had just found Mrs Voorhees’ severed head in her fridge.

A new bunch of counsellors are arriving at a camp close to Camp Crystal Lake where Mrs Voorhees slaughtered many teens (apparently five years ago) and was then beheaded by Alice. The site of this carnage is off-limits as stipulated by the local sheriff and the head counsellor. What could possibly go wrong?

Friday the 13th Part 2 provides us with further proof regarding this franchise. Don’t try and form a coherent timeline, and don’t ask how Jason is alive after he allegedly drowned. Just go with it and have fun.

And there’s plenty of fun to be had with this first sequel. I’m loving ‘baghead’ Jason before he adopts his hockey mask signature. His bag mask in this film is clearly a steal from the earlier film The Town That Dreaded Sundown but who cares? Jason wears it better.

I also love that this is teen Jason who hasn’t hit his stride as a horror badass yet and so makes some schoolboy errors here and there such as standing on a chair which he breaks as it’s too weak to support him. There are little moments of slapstick like this throughout the film.

There’s also a great vein of gallows humour which runs throughout the action such as when a dog walks up to Jason’s feet but then the film cuts to sausages being cooked on a BBQ.

Then there’s the kills. And they’re great! Tom Savini famously didn’t work on this film as he argued there was no Jason as he had drowned years before and so it didn’t make sense. But the effects here are just as great with all manner of gore and innovative murders whether it’s a neck slashing to someone suspended upside down or a machete to the face (of someone in a wheelchair too! Jason is fully inclusive when it comes to murder, I guess)

I love that it’s established that Ginny, the final girl, has majored in psychology before we get the grande finale. Because you’d need to have studied psychology to put Mrs Voorhees dirty old jumper on and pretend to be her. Was there a specialist module that taught this?! We even get Betsy Palmer back for this scene (wearing a black turtleneck in a black studio but with a light illuminating her face).

We even get to see something that isn’t touched upon in any of the other films- Chez Jason, a lodging that he’s apparently built for himself which houses the shrine to his mother that features her head as the centrepiece. Let’s just say that when it comes to interior decor, ‘shabby chic’ was foremost in Jason’s mind.

There are also little directorial flourishes during the film that are interesting. The sequence in which one of the campers goes to find a penknife to cut down her colleague involves her throwing a towel into the lens of the camera and then a further breaking of the fourth wall when she realises she may not be alone in the cabin as she looks straight into the camera and then looks left and right. This scene displays a confidence that you wouldn’t see in a lot of similar slasher fare.

A special shout out regarding the film’s artwork- an electro pulse outline of a faceless assailant holding an axe which is simplistic and utterly brilliant!

As we all know, Jason was defeated at the end of this film and so there were no more Friday the 13th’s made. Just kidding. The release of the next two films would coincide include with the Video Nasties moral panic which was fully raging at this time. CIC Video would release a cryptic press release telling fans that Parts 3 and 4 would be released but not just yet (guess why!) Parts 1 and 2 would be classified by the BBFC and would be passed uncut. There would even be more gore in the 1987 video release of the first film.

All films are now uncut in the UK. Common sense prevailed.

4 out of 5 stars