Rob Hedden's Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
Rob Hedden's Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattanis IMO the most underrated sequel in the Friday the 13th franchise (with a ridiculous 3.9 average rating on IMDB). For Part 8, the producers and director Rob Hedden decided to relocate everyone's favorite hockey-masked serial killer to the slums and alleys of New York. Of course, Jason doesn't actually get to New York until around the film's 60-minute mark and spends the first hour of the film terrorizing a cruise ship full of teenagers on their way to the Big Apple to celebrate their high school graduation, and this is perhaps the biggest issue that most people have with this film. They feel the title is misleading and that the movie more resembles a cross between a Jason film and an episode of The Love Boat. Well, everyone's entitled to their own opinions of course, but I consider this one of the creepiest and most stylishly directed entries in the series, with Kane Hodder doing his hulking best as Jason.
Another thing I really like aboutPart 8is its clever stabs at black comedy, which are mostly subtle and genuinely effective without being overdone like some of the humorous bits in Part 6. Gorehounds will probably be disappointed, however, since Part 8 (like Part 7) was heavily censored of most of its ultra-gory content by the MPAA. I don't think the over-editing hurts the film nearly as much as it did Part 7, though, since 8 has a sense of style all its own and brings a refreshing (and creepy) change of scenery. Much the way Michael Myers was ultra-creepy wondering the corridors of a nearly empty hospital in Halloween II, the water-logged Jason Voorhees seems right at home stalking a moonlit cruise ship. The ship has an other-worldly atmosphere all its own, so I don't really mind that it takes so long for the film to reach its Manhattan destination.
Jason Takes Manhattan is also usually criticized for its use of a so-called "teleporting" Jason who seems to be everywhere at once, but to me it's more a symbolic way of making Jason seem truly inescapable. People take it too literally, along with the flashback/dream sequences. Jason doesn't literally turn into a little drowned boy at the end in the sewer -- it's just a part of Rennie's imagination. I won't say that this film isn't riddled with plot holes, but so is every other film in the series.
Moving on to the plot (always the weakest link of any Friday the 13th film), Jason is resurrected from
his watery grave at the bottom of Camp Crystal Lake bya bolt of electricityand proceeds to murder an amorous young couple on a small houseboat in what is one of the most unnerving murder scenes in the film. While Suzi and Jim are making love, Jason sneaks up on the couple with a loaded harpoon, startles them from their erotic bliss and shoots thepointed projectile across the room into the wall only inches from Suzi's horrified face. She escapes quickly through the window out onto the deck while Jason plunges the base of the weapon into Jim's gut.
We soon discover that Suzi (in a not-too-smart move) has hidden in thestorage spaceon the front deck rather than jump off the boat and try to swim to safety at the very-near lake shore. Needless to say, Jason quickly discovers her hiding place and pulls open the door to the tiny storage area, and Suzi finds herself trapped with no possibility of escape in an undeniably suspenseful murder scene, with Suzi thrashing and screaming her lungs raw as Jason slowly lowers theharpoon spearhe's pulled out of the cabin wall into thespace towards her and thrusts it into her chest. After his deadly duty is done and Suzi is fully impaled and lifeless, Jason callously slams the door closed over her corpse, marking the beginning of another full-scale murderous rampage that includes a total of17 on-screenvictims.
The morning after killing Suzi and Jim, Jason surreptitiously boards a cruise ship full of high school graduates en route to the Big Apple, which includes Rennie (Jensen Daggett), a lovely young writer whom Jason has psychic ties to. Also aboard is her stuffy Uncle Charles (Peter Mark Richman in an excellent performance) who is a biology teacher and is serving as a trip chaperone; her sympathetic English teacher Ms. Van Deusen (Barbara Bingham); and her handsome boyfriend Sean (Scott Reeves) whose father is captain admiral of the ship. There's also guitar-toting heavy rocker JJ (Saffron Henderson) who Jason smashes in the head with her own instrument; resident sexy blonde bitch Tamara (Sharlene Martin) who Jason shreds with shards of a broken mirror; and, of course, the absolutely essential creepy deckhand a la Crazy Ralph who warns everyone he sees of the impending carnage.
Friday the 13th Part 8 - Jason Takes Manhattan is my favorite Friday after parts 2, 1 and 4 -- in that order. It has enough imagination IMO to be entertaining without buckets of blood and features the most menacing Jason in Kane Hodder, and I rate it an 8 of 10.
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