The year was 1980. A little movie arrived on the big screen and became an instant sensation. The movie was called Friday the 13th. The slasher film borrowed heavily from Halloween, but director Sean Cunningham and writer Victor Miller took the fast growing horror-sub-genre in a new direction, but that is not the point here. The point is that the movie was a fast enough success that a sequel was shot and released just a year later. This film has taken on a classic quality of its own, as it added more to the bigger story of the series and introduced us, officially, to one of the most legendary big screen killers of all time.
Friday the 13th Part 2 begins with a protracted opening sequence featuring Alice, the lone survivor of the first movie. She is having a terrible nightmare, reliving the horrors of the first movie, which saw all of her friends murdered and her holding the reason for the killer's demise.
STOP: If you are unfamiliar with the first movie stop here, go watch it and then come back. If you like horror, there is no excuse for not knowing this movie.
Anyway, Alice killed Mrs. Pamela Voorhees, the mother of the boy who drowned in Crystal Lake. She returns years after his death to exact revenge on the camp counselors. Alice alone survived, and she is haunted by the memory. However, someone else is haunted by the memory. You see, Jason never drowned, he survived and has been living out in the woods with the memory of counselor neglect and the death of his mother by decapitation.
This opening sequence does a great job of recapping the first movie and building tension for the new tale of dead teenagers. As we are lead to the inevitable death of Alice, we follow her around her home in a long unbroken shot, with tension building every second. When is it going to come? When will the figure step out of the darkness and take his revenge? There are many moments where it could happen, but doesn't. The scene had me on the edge of my seat, it has been some time since I have seen the movie. I knew how she died, but forgot where. Nicely executed open.
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