Friday the 13th Part 2 (Hor-RIFF-ic Productions)

Film Year:  1981
Genre:  Horror
Director:  Steve Miner
Starring:  Jason Voorhees and a potato sack

The Movie

*I HAVE SURVIVED WATCHING THIS MOVIE UNRIFFED*

Five years after the events of the original Friday the 13th Part 2 picks up at a counselor training center training horny boys and bra-less girls coincidentally around Camp Crystal Lake.  Of course this means women's clothes are coming off and victims heads are popping off.  Surely the presumed dead son of the killer from the first movie can't be responsible, can he?  Are you willing to bet a ten-plus film franchise on that?

This second round of Friday the 13th nonsense is pretty much more of the same crap that made up the first film, and yet it's somehow simultaneously both better and worse at the same time.  If I were to praise anything about this particular round it's that I love the way Jason Voorhees is portrayed as a campfire story that comes true, which gives this film an urban legend flavor that is leaps and bounds more interesting than the botched whodunit of the first film.  Because of that Jason is a more interesting antagonist than his mother, even if he's just a generic undead killer from now on.

But dragging it down is the fact that the film feels redundant.  Despite this added touch to the featured villain this film almost feels exactly the same as the previous.  Hell, for a good portion of the opening ten minutes in this eighty minute movie it just shows footage from the previous one.  It gets rambunctiously sillier as it goes on as well, leading up to a climactic scene that's almost too stupid to be believed.  The main character tricks Jason by putting on his mother's sweater so he'll think she's his mother.  I'm not sure what prompted her to do this, but it's one for the bad movie logic books that's for damn sure.

The kills get amped up and the nudity gets more graphic, so if you need that in your Friday movies then you'll get it.  This movie however barely exists at all, despite being the first film of a beloved horror icon.

The Riff

I imagine I might be accused of bias in giving a glowing review to Hor-RIFF-ic's first Friday the 13th riff.  To this I say ABSOLUTELY I was biased.  Seeing that particular film riffed was a dream come true.  Oddly enough I've never given much thought to riffing the sequels, probably preferring to think about it one film at a time.  I'm sure if you can make that first film funny you can make the others as well though.  Does Hor-RIFF-ic live up to the standards of their first release?

Ultimately they tread dangerous waters early on when they are forced to riff stock footage of the previous film.  They complain about riffing the same footage more than once and pass off the job of riffing it to their sync operator, Satan, in a fairly forced attempt to make the footage fresh.  I liked Satan's line about the "bad trip" during the canoe scene, but for the most part this sequence bombed.

The camaraderie of Gary and Erin bounce it back somewhat for the rest of the film, though the riff doesn't seem to have the same momentum as the first Friday.  The duo breaks out the bad puns quite a bit and they even seem to be in a musical mood at certain points ("Gory Days!"), though their delivery doesn't quite have much oomph to push this dry copy of the first film into being anything special.  Even when the film delivers the slaughter gauntlet climax Gary and Erin seem a tad bored by it more than anything.

Oh and there is also a surprisingly large amount of jokes about menstruation.  I don't even think Bridget and Mary Jo made this many during Naturally...a Girl.

That's not to say the riff is bad.  There are some great lines that took me by surprise, such as a girl searching for her wheelchair-bound boyfriend through a cabin, causing them to observe "Upstairs?  That's the one place you know he CAN'T be!"  There is also a chase scene between Jason and a cop halfway through the movie that probably has the best riff run of the entire track.

It's possible that if Hor-RIFF-ic stumbled with this film then it could probably be blamed on the film itself.  It's just not that inspiring, even in making fun of it.  I saw in that first movie that Gary and Erin are a swell riffing combo, though it's possible that maybe going back to this well could prove to be a mistake.  But there are still ten more Fridays in the series, and they just get goofier.  Maybe there is hope yet.

Average