Mike_Bracken's Full Review: Friday the 13th - Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan
Friday the 13th Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan: Paramount Pictures
Rating: USA: R/ UK: 15/ Australia: M
By 1989, the popularity of the American slasher film was finally waning. After nearly a decade of watching promiscuous teens being carved up by a plethora of unkillable psychopaths, audiences had finally tired of the formula that drove these films. That didn’t stop Paramount from trotting out their venerable slasher icon Jason Voorhees for yet another tour of duty, though. Once again proving that there’s really very little truth in advertising (remember, these are the same people who gave us the fourth installment entitled Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter), Paramount served up Friday the 13th Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan (which really should have been subtitled Jason Takes a Vacation since Jason spends about 15 minutes of screen time in NYC), a film that is undeniably the worst in the series.
When two horny teenagers (who happen to be cruising around Crystal Lake in a really big boat) drop anchor, they unwittingly snag a power line on the bottom—a power line that winds up resurrecting the undead Jason, who quickly dispatches them and then drives the boat to a nearby port. At said port, a class of high school seniors are about to board the aptly named freighter/cruise ship, the Lazarus. Here we meet all the standard clichéd characters—the rich girl who’s easy, the film geek, the smart Asian girl, the athlete, a rocker chick, etc. Don’t concern yourself with these people—all of them will soon be dead. Instead, focus your attention on the virginal heroine Rennie (Jensen Daggett), misunderstood hunk Sean (Scott Reeves), and Rennie’s uncle/school principal (and all around jerk) Charles McCulloch (Peter Mark Richman)—these are the characters who will be around by the time this ship finally reaches NYC.
Once everyone’s on board, the real fun begins. Jason stalks and kills many of the teens (and the crew) before finally sinking the ship. The few remaining survivors then hop a lifeboat and row into New York harbor, where they emerge looking as fresh and clean as if they’d just woke up. Of course, Jason’s followed (walking on the bottom a la Highlander, perhaps?) and soon he’s loose in the big apple, which isn’t nearly as exciting as it sounds. Can Rennie defeat the evil Jason once and for all? I know the suspense is undoubtedly killing you…
Calling this entry the worst of the series is really saying something, because, let’s face it, this series hasn’t had a whole lot of entries that you could actually call ‘good’. However, there’s like a weird cosmic convergence thing happening here—when the planets align and you make a film with a bad script, bad direction, and bad actors, you will create a movie that sucks in epic proportions—which is exactly what has happened here. Nothing, and I mean nothing, works in this movie, which is pretty amazing since slasher cinema is often so formulaic that it’s almost impossible to screw it up.
Honestly, I’m at a loss concerning where to begin—pointing out the flaws in this movie is certainly a daunting task.
Rob Hedden directed this entry and wrote the film as well. The direction is actually almost good in the early going, with Hedden capturing some really nice shots of British Columbia, complete with slate gray skies and banks of fog. Unfortunately, though, we’re soon trapped on the boat with the insipid cast of characters and a bloodthirsty Jason. There’s a very limited number of sets on this boat, and frankly, none of them look all that realistic. Hedden and crew can’t decide if this is supposed to be a cruise liner or a gussied up freight ship, a fact that leads to some rooms looking fancy and almost pristine, and other parts of the ship looking pretty disgusting.
However, that’s only one problem. Once our survivors leave the main ship and row for shore, continuity becomes a major issue. It’s painfully obvious that the scenes of the cast rowing in the boat are filmed in a small pool on a soundstage—there aren’t even any waves in the water.
Things get even worse when we get to New York (which looks an awful lot like a combination of soundstage and a Canadian city like Vancouver). Hedden apparently doesn’t think much of the big apple, as every scene he shoots is either in a garbage-strewn alley (complete with cavorting rats) or a garbage-strewn city street. Muggers and blasé citizens are the only people around, and none of them are bothered by a big, slimy looking zombie guy in a hockey mask prowling the streets. Worst of all, they even go as far as to intimate that toxic waste fills the sewer every night at the stroke of 12. To say this film presents an incredibly stereotyped view of the big city is a major understatement.
Weighing in at one-hour-and-forty-minutes, this is the longest film in the series to my recollection. The pacing here is glacial, making the film feel a lot more like four hours in length. Kills come early and often, but the major subplot (Rennie’s fear of water and these odd visions she keeps having of a child Jason drowning) is pointless and uninteresting. Factor in that Hedden never really resolves what the visions are all about (nor an offhanded comment from the deck hand who keeps saying that Jason is on board to kill these kids because they’re ‘the last’ or something to that effect) and you get a film guaranteed to leave you scratching your head even before the nonsensical and confounding ending (which always reminds me of the starchild sequence at the end of Kubrick’s 2001. Oh yeah, I can’t forget to mention that lots of lightning lights up the sky after Jason dies—maybe he was a Highlander-style immortal and all of this was the quickening).
The performances might be even worse than the direction, though. Jensen Daggett is about as interesting as a six hour debate on the merits of supply side economics—spoken entirely in French. No one expects high caliber acting in these films, but the heroine does have to be at least somewhat interesting—and Daggett isn’t, a fact which kills this film deader than most of Jason’s victims.
Traditionally, the male leads in these films are almost secondary characters—and that’s the case this time out. Still, Scott Reeves doesn’t bring much of anything to his performance, either. It’s flat and bland and totally nondescript as well. As for the rest of the cast, well, let’s just say it’s more of the same.
Kane Hodder becomes the first guy ever to play Jason more than once. Hodder’s a hulk of a man who does an admirable job playing the character (which basically means he can walk well, stand around and look menacing, and pantomime murder in a believable fashion). Jason never runs after victims anymore (he gave that up way back around part 3 or 4), but he doesn’t even bother walking in most of the scenes here. No, apparently Jason has picked up the ability to teleport this time out, popping up in one place, then quickly reaching another spot ahead of his prey in mere seconds. It’s just one more way that this film manages to insult its audience’s intelligence.
Gore-wise, the film falls victim to the overzealous MPAA who was cracking down on gore in these films at the time. Like part 7, Jason Takes Manhattan is a relatively bloodless affair. Jason stabs some kids with shards of glass, axes one, kills one with a guitar, throws one into a giant circuit breaker, and impales one on a speargun. My favorite sequence has a guy punching it out with Jason on a rooftop (hitting a guy with a hockey mask on has to be hard on the hands) before Jason punches his head right off his shoulders—that’s about as good as it gets this time out.
On the downside, there’s a really awful looking throat slashing—and I mean awful in the sense that the FX shot looks terribly fake, with the knife clearly not touching the actor’s throat, and the wound opening way after the fact. This lack of gore also hurts the film mainly because the idea of seeing a really violent death roughly once every ten minutes helps draw attention away from the other problems with the film. Take that out, and the other faults become all the more glaring and there’s nothing to hold the audience’s interest.
Harry Manfredini hands over the musical reigns to Fred Mollin this time out (Mollin collaborated on the last installment). I generally like Mollin’s work, but it’s not all that impressive in this film. The orchestral score is decent, but the lame pop rock tracks by no-name bands really kill the mood. All in all, I missed Manfredini’s jarring strings here.
To tell you the truth, I think I’ve really only begun to scratch the surface on everything that’s so awful about this film. Trust me when I tell you that I could spend literally hours here adding to this piece and expounding on its myriad number of problems. However, it’s not worth the effort. In short, everything here is pretty bad—the direction, the acting, the writing, the whole nine. I’d give this film zero stars if I could, but since I can’t, Friday the 13th Part 8: Jason takes Manhattan gets one star from me. Avoid this one at all costs.
First on a cruise ship packed with teens heading to Manhattan, then in the Big Apple itself, Jason Vorhees returns to continue his bloody slicing and ...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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