PART II runs at under ninety minutes padded out with at least three minutes intercut from the end of the first movie; final girl Alice (Adrienne King) still relives her battle with Betsy Palmer's Mrs Voorhees as a nightmare two months after fleeing Camp Crystal Lake. Her resulting death as first victim to Jason not only begs the question of how he tracked her to her home, (and why he bothered to place his mum's head in her fridge) but gives us a poor indication of what the movie has in store. Miner's workmanlike shooting of the stalking and stabbing is free of any tension or thrills. As we will see unfold, this first casting conception of Jason (Warrington Gillette sporting a John Merrick-style flour sack over his head) disastrously sees him as a regular joe height-wise and devoid of any physical threat level in his victim pursuit.
We then cut across to Crystal Lake where a whole new crop of counsellors are undergoing a training week led by Paul (John Furey). It's fascinating sociologically to look at the casting demographic of these eighties teen movies. The youngsters represented are almost always exclusively white-bread heterosexual, with enough blonde males and females to be mistaken for a Carpenters concert or an Aryan recruitment rally. The tokenism of ethnic diversity is indicative of its time. Nowadays, aside from having black, Chinese and Asian names, there would be a nod toward the LGBT+ movement, albeit with the awkward shoehorning in that may one day have us judged as similarly backward. Oddly, there is one long shot in this film on the dock where you see both a black and a Chinese counsellor - but if I'm correct they're never seen again! If inclusivity was the notion, their later absense surely scuppers that box-ticking. What we do get however is a somewhat sitting duck of a wheelchair user (Tom McBride) to suggest disability's representation.
A spread of the usual stereotypes is the best this movie can do, covering the templates of the babe, the hunk, the joker, and the responsible big brother etc. Either way, they're all ultimately kill fodder in a game of musical chairs. Sadly, these are handled with the dullness of a butter knife. This may have been due to even greater censoring by the MPAA to get the vital 'R' rating, a continual bugbear over the series, and the loss of prosthetic FX whizz Tom Savini who was off doing THE BURNING for Miramax.
Gradually the teens are whittled down by Jason to a final duo of Paul and Ginny (Amy Steel). Miner can't resist taking a leaf from Cunningham's original by providing us with some equally inexplicable climax plotting. Stumbling across Mrs Voorhees's severed head ceremonially placed on an altar in the barn, the cornered Ginny tries to trick Jason by vocally impersonating his mother whilst wearing her jumper (aided by new insert footage of Betsy Palmer). Jason stops and tips his head curiously at this, a' la Michael in HALLOWEEN. Why even Mr Sackhead would fall for this non-lookalike is bizarre enough; as it transpires, due to moving, Ginny sabotages the ruse anyway by revealing the head.
She saves Paul from a pick-axe impaling after machete-ing Jason in the shoulder. A misdirection gag sees Miner try a shock ending of Jason smashing through the cabin window to claim Ginny, but then we cut to her later being loaded alive into an ambulance. This sloppiness competes with the senselessness of part one's ending: why hadn't Jason finished her off? And what the hell happened to Paul? (Apparently these oversights were to be addressed with Steel brought back for PART 3, however the money didn't talk loud enough to tempt her).
A more important question to Paramount was how successful this sequel might be in determining a possible franchise future. They were answered with a box office take of $21.7m from a budget of only $1.2m.
Thus, Jason's future was assured, and with the benefit of an old gimmick of the 1950's was at least given a much-needed boost for its third installment...
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