Much like its predecessor, critical reception to the film was initially negative. It has a 34% approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes among 32 reviews. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote that Friday the 13th Part 2 is "a cross between the Mad Slasher and Dead teenager genres; about two dozen movies a year feature a mad killer going berserk, and they're all about as bad as this one. Some have a little more plot, some have a little less. It doesn't matter."

In one scene where Daskawisz was wearing the burlap flour sack, part of the flour sack was flapping at his eye, so the crew used tape inside the eye area to prevent it from flapping. Daskawisz received rug burns around his eye from the tape from wearing the rough flour sack material for hours. The use of the sack hood was similar to the 1976 film The Town That Dreaded Sundown.

Principal photography took place from October 3 and finished in November 1980, and primarily occurred in New Preston and Kent, Connecticut. Special effects Artist Tom Savini was asked to work on the film but declined because he was already working on another project, Midnight (1982), in addition he didn't receive well to the concept of Jason as the killer in the film. Savini was then replaced by Stan Winston. Winston, however, had a scheduling conflict and had to drop out of the project. The make-up effects were ultimately handled by Carl Fullerton. Fullerton designed the "look" for the adult Jason Voorhees and went with long red hair and a beard while following the facial deformities established in the original film in the make-up designed by Tom Savini for Jason as a child. Fullerton's look for the adult Jason was abandoned in the sequel, Friday the 13th Part 3, despite the fact that the film took place the following day and was helmed by the same Director, Steve Miner. Some fans have theorized that the sequence where we see Jason with a beard and long hair reflects a "dream" rather than a reality because the following sequel picks up with the events showing his face having not happened, and therefore what was represented was Ginny's guess at what he looked like under the burlap sack rather than what he actually looked like, which would excuse the lack of continuity.

The film was released theatrically on April 30, 1981, bringing in $6,429,784 its opening weekend. It played on 1,350 screens and would ultimately gross $21,722,776. It was the 35th highest-grossing film of 1981, facing strong competition early in the year from such high-profile horror releases as Omen III: The Final Conflict, The Howling, Scanners, Wolfen, Deadly Blessing, The Funhouse, Halloween II, My Bloody Valentine, The Prowler, The Fan and The Hand.

A novelization based on the screenplay of Ron Kurz was published in 1988: Hawke, Simon, Friday the 13th Part II: A Novel, New American Library, New York, 1988, ISBN 0-451-15337-5

A total of forty-eight seconds had to be cut from the film in order to avoid an X rating. This film received a deluxe DVD release in February 2009, but the edited footage was not included. Most noted by censors was the murder scene of Jeff and Sandra, who are impaled by a spear while having sex in a bed (a scene many have compared to a scene in Mario Bava's A Bay of Blood), which the censors found particularly graphic. When Actress Marta Kober, who played Sandra, originally did a scene with full frontal nudity, Paramount discovered she was underage and the scene was completely deleted

In 1982, Gramavision Records released an LP album of selected pieces of Harry Manfredini's scores from the first three Friday the 13th films. On January 13, 2012, La-La Land Records released a limited edition 6-CD boxset containing Manfredini's scores from the first six films. It sold out in less than 24 hours. Waxworks Records released the Harry Manfredini-composed score on vinyl in summer 2015.

Like its predecessor, Friday the 13th Part 2 had difficulty receiving an R rating from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). Upon reviewing the film, the Classification and Rating Administration (CARA) warned Paul Hagger, an executive at Paramount, that the "accumulation of violence throughout the film" may still lead to an X rating even if substantial cuts were made.

In 2014, the film ranked at number one on a list of the 100 Greatest Slasher Movies on the genre website Vegan Voorhees.

Originally, the film was supposed to end with Mrs. Voorhees' head opening her eyes and smiling towards the camera. However, Miner removed the scene out of the final film as he never seriously considered it for the film’s actual ending. To this day, the footage of this alternate ending has yet to be released.