3. Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)
Steve Miner’s 1981 sequel was obviously hustled into production to cash in on the massive success of the first film a year prior, but it still manages to hold its own. After Jason Voorhees (no longer a zombie boy lurking in a lake, but a mountain of a man who’s taken up his mother’s mantle of vengeance) kills off O.G. Friday survivor Alice in a pre-credits sequence, the movie shifts not to Camp Crystal Lake, but an adjacent summer resort five years after the massacre, where Jason’s story has literally become a campfire tale.
Child psychology student Ginny (Amy Steel) arrives to help run a counselor-training program full of eager teens in short shorts—and her education ends up being her most valuable survival skill when Jason starts annihilating everyone in the area. How else would she have gotten the idea to role-play as Jason’s mother (even donning the grubby sweater the woman was decapitated in…eew!) to confuse the killer in the nick of time?
