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12 Days of Friday, Day 8: Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan

Editor Alex Vo watches a Friday the 13th movie daily until the reboot.

by Alex Vo | February 9, 2009 | Comments

Jason is sent back to the lake at the end of The New Blood and he again fades into legend. After a Jason-skeptical couple accidentally resurrects Jason (through electricity, again!), he stows away on a cruise boat full of graduating high school seniors. As it departs for New York, the killings begins.

The movie opens with shots of Manhattan, a voice narrating, “It’s like this: We live in claustrophobia. The land of steel & concrete. Trapped by dark waters. There is no escape. Nor do we want it. We’ve come to thrive on it and each other. You can’t get the adrenaline pumping without the terror, good people. I love this town.”

Yeah, a Woody Allen movie, this ain’t. Actually, I’d say Jason Takes Manhattan is less a normal movie, and more of an experiment to discover whether audiences can be sustained for two hours on only the rawest Friday the 13^th elements — sex, violence, and Jason. Typically, Friday movies have an identifiable plot momentum in that they’re about Jason journeying back/defending Crystal Lake. Here, there’s no plot: Jason goes on the cruise boat and starts chopping peeps up just for the hell of it. It’s an endless, pointless, slow-as-molasses slough as the ship putts through the Atlantic.

The movie saves the best for the final act, when five survivors rowboat to New York. (Jason, meanwhile, teleports there; he’s like Nightcrawler in this one.) Within minutes, the survivors are mugged, while the hero, Rennie, is injected with heroin and then nearly raped. She spends the rest of the movie in a state of drug-induced hysteria, at one point hijacking a police car with her friends in the backseat. The car hits a wall within seconds, exploding, and killing Rennie’s teacher. Rather than reeling from her manslaughter, Rennie stares into a puddle, hallucinates that there’s a little boat on it, and then has a stupid flashback. This is a random and aggressively insane movie. It’s like the Tim and Eric Awesome Show of horror filmmaking.

The movie does, at least, have one notably famous kill. Julius, the school’s champ boxer, challenges Jason to a fist fight, which Jason responds to by knocking his head off with a single strike. Before that, though, Julius wails away at Jason for two hilarious, jaw-dropping minutes. If you ever wondered what it’d be like to see Peter Griffin fight the big chicken in a live-action movie, here you have it.

The action comes to a head down in the sewer, where the two final survivors have
taken refuge. A wave of toxic waste bears down on Jason, which devolves him back into a little boy. Uh, okay?

And thus closes Paramount’s involvement with Friday the 13^th; the studio sold the series rights after Jason Takes Manhattan failed to reverse the franchise’s diminishing box office returns. I hate to blame it on writer/director Rob Hedden because he obviously made a lot of concessions filming this but, come on, the movie ends with Jason Voorhees turning back into a kid. And he’s not even scary -looking! He looks like the Star Child in cotton jammies.

Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan Vital Stats:

Body Count: 19.
Survivors: 3. Including Toby, the dog.
Illegal substances featured: 3. Cocaine, heroin, crack. The last two make their series debut. Pot curiously absent.
Number of stalled cars: 0. (First time!)
Number of Jason-approved weapons: 14! Spear gun, spear, electric guitar, mirror piece, sauna rock, harpoon, machete, open electricity box, deck post, axe, heroin syringe, steam pipe, barrel full of sewage, wrench.

Memories of Crystal Lake:

Luke Y. Thompson of LYTrules: “What a classic case of bait and switch marketing! The irony is that I don’t think anyone would have minded if it had been promoted as “Jason on a boat”; that’s still a cool change-up of scene. But to promise New York, with great “I Heart NY” posters, then spectacularly fail to deliver (a brief shot of Times Square in the last half hour, and Vancouver subbing in every subsequent shot) was resoundly and deservedly mocked, especially considering that the ending is the dumbest of all time. The sewers fill with toxic waste, and that somehow turns Jason back into a kid? What? Highly notable, though, for being the movie debut of Kelly Hu (Lady Deathstrike in X2).”
Steve Barton of Dread Central: “Never mind the fact that Jason somehow managed to take a boat from a lake into New York City (and even then he’s only there for like 10 minutes). Though ridiculous, that’s not the most irritating part of this movie. This flick’s cardinal sin is the absolute lack of violence. For instance, a dude gets his throat slashed and we see not a single drop of blood. Are you kidding me? Were they hoping this flick would be tame enough to show on Nickelodeon? It’s downright insulting! Then, just when you think it can’t possibly get any worse, Jason is unmasked and looks like a friggin’ Madball! Who okayed the make-up here? What’s with the giant square Flintstone-like teeth? It’s infuriating! But wait! There’s more! Jason is then overcome by a deluge of toxic waste that turns him back into a little boy? Please … someone shoot me now. Thanks, I’ll wait.”

Tomorrow: did it just get a little hot in here? We take a trip down to Hell with The Final Friday!

Schedule of Fridays: