Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) Directed by Rob Hedden
As you know I did a review of Part 2 earlier in my marathon, and I praised it as better than the original. Well with every good sequel there are a slew of awful sequels, this being one of them. Is this the worst Friday movie? No, but it is probably the second worst, I still say Jason X is by far the crappiest one. On paper, Jason Takes Manhattan is a rather interesting idea that could’ve been pretty entertaining. The movie fell short, lets see why.
The basic premise is that a group of “teenagers” again I use that loosely, are going on a senior trip to New York on an old cruise ship. Apparently this senior class only consists of like 6 kids. Anyway, our good buddy Jason stows away on the ship and terrorizes the kids and runs amok in Manhattan. Again, it sounds like a cool idea. Imagine Jason hunting down people in New York City, the possibilities are endless. The only problem is that Paramount didn’t want to fork out the cash to shoot enough of the movie in New York so what we got was Jason killing kids on a cruise ship for an hour, then the last half hour is in New York. I heard that most of the movie is basically shot in Vancouver. It should Jason Takes Vancouver for over an hour and teleports to New York for twenty minutes.
We get a mix of lame characters complete with some odd rocker girl that gets killed with her own guitar. The final girl is another odd choice, she’s a terrible actress and her character just falls flat and boring. We see a young Kelly Hu play the one dimensional Asian girl. One of my major beefs with this entry is that most of the kills are boring as shit. Jason chokes the Asian girl to death, CHOKES! No blood, no stabbing, just chokes her and throws her down. Not what I want to see Jason do, he’s a brutally savage killing machine, he should’ve at least crushed her throat shut or spun her head around on her body, instead he just chokes her. During the trip a bad storm rolls in and the ship starts taking on water after Jason has racked up a good body count. The final girl’s asshole uncle tries to hunt down Jason. Of course during the whole movie they know its Jason, but the uncle never believes them. The ship eventually ends up going down and they get in a life raft and paddle to New York. Jason follows eventually coming to shore in a dock.
The last half hour the group runs the streets of New York & Vancouver trying to get away from Mr. Voorhees. We finally get some iconic scenes of Jason on a the subway, Jason in Times Square (named for the good times you have there, btw), and Jason staring at a billboard with his face on it. Apparently the director had tons of scenes in NYC planned out, but Paramount again was unable to allow it due to budgetary restraints. One scene sticks out to me. Jason is walking down the street and kicks a boom box out of his way, its rather comical and the group of punks yell at him for it and threaten to kick his ass. You immediately think…”Oh many Jason is going to slaughter these dudes.” Instead what happens is Jason slowly turns, pulls up his mask and the punks are like “ugh, nevermind its cool man.” Then Jason just walks off. What a shitty scene, it is so far outside of the Jason character that it is just absurd. The ending is just as bad as the rest of the movie, I won’t ruin it for you but I’ll just say this…”every night at midnight this sewer floods with toxic waste.” Ok, lets dig into this. A sewer, in New York, floods at precisely midnight every night with toxic waste. The biggest most famous city in the greatest country in the world, has a sewer that floods with toxic waste every single night. Wow, just wow! Its just accepted too, like oh, ok that’s fine, I totally get it. No way this would happen, and why at midnight? Does the waste have a curfew? Like oh shit I have to hurry up its midnight, time to flood the sewer! Do the Ninja Turtles know about this? Is the toxic waste just ooze? I can’t, I’ll just leave this here and let you guys ponder the rest. This movie is dumb, not unwatchable but believe me I roll my eyes quite a bit watching it. I give it a D. You’ll have to excuse me it is currently 1pm, and my living room fills with toxic waste in five minutes, so I have to go.
