Steve Miner has balls the size of Cleveland. I know, I've seen them. They're on display here, in the fact that he took on the daunting task of filming a sequel to the runaway slasher hit "Friday the 13th" (and in how he dared to film a "remake" of the classic Zombie opus "Day of the Dead..." I think that movie is a huge pile of shit, but I give kudos to him for making it even knowing all the flack he'd get from the original movie's rabid fans). This slasher sequel was made cheaply after Paramount execs choked on their own vomit seeing how much money they made on the original Friday the 13th. With those kind of numbers, you knew a sequel was in store, and so we get this movie. Is it successful? Does it live up to the name created by the original? Yes and no.

Initially, I hated this movie. I tried watching it twice and fell asleep both times because I thought it was so boring. It just seemed to be rehashing everything the first movie did better, and while that is a valid criticism, the movie does some things very well, which I noticed when I finally managed to keep my eyes open through its whole running time. There are some good death scenes on display here. There's a poor guy in a wheelchair who predictably dies a nasty little death when Jason rather lazily wheels him to his doom. The spear through the copulating couple is also a great scene (though that bastard Miner stole it from a far superior Italian horror flick, I didn't know that at the time I saw this movie, and I appreciated the effort). The opening sequence of this movie is creepy if one ignores how stupid it is. All in all, there's some cool gore on display here, and if you want to see some teens get picked off, this is one way to achieve that goal.

Ironically, the criticism applied to the original Friday the 13th, that the movie is just an excuse to watch some stupid teens die horrible deaths, is far more applicable to this movie than to that film. Even if that was all the filmmakers intended with the first film, I found a lot of value in that movie, whereas this flick merely rehashed scenes other people have done better and included some original scenes that were just plain stupid. Take he scene from the first movie where the girl wanders off in bra and panties to go to the bathroom. While that was stupid, it at least had a pretense to reality; there was no bathroom in the cabin in which she was staying, so even though she could and should have peed outside, she wanted to use the bathroom.

Second, what the fuck does psychology have to do with anything here? Because one of the characters is a psychology major, she wants to get inside Jason's head and figure out why he's evil (but how do they know about Jason? How did the story spread? He wasn't the killer in the first movie and only one girl survived that film, what, did she tell everyone in the world so they'd know about Jason for this movie? It's dumb). Even dumber is how she spend the whole movie musing about how she wants to know how Jason feels, and then she decides to use that to defeat him in the end of the movie. That's right kids, the killer is killed with...psychology! Boo! Are you scared yet? All the psychobabble did was make me want the movie to be shorter. No wonder I fell asleep during this movie the first few times I tried watching it.

I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that this is not the most successful entry into the series. It does nothing but rehash deaths from the original Friday the 13th (and other movies) and make them much more boring, and it psychobabbles its way into mediocrity. If you want to be a completest with your collection you'll probably buy it, and it's not the worst movie in the world, but it's certainly not anywhere near as good as the original.