- Release year: 1989
- Director: Rob Hedden.
- Producer: Randolph Cheveldave.
- Screenplay by: Rob Hedden.
- Cinematography by: Bryan England.
- Music by: Fred Mollin.
Synopsis: after being resuscitated with electricity (yet again), Jason swims out of the lake and into a boat that is hosting a group of teenagers on a field trip to New York.
Shotgun Commentary: the type of slasher where you have to put up with the most annoying characters way longer than you want to.
Review
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan is pretty much an advertisement for the city as a horror film set. Being the space where most city-based love stories and alien/monster invasions happen is not enough for New York. Not when you can also utilise its worst bits for horror!
That is the essence of this feature. It is a movie that begins with a sequence of all the gooey, filthy corners one can find in New York, accompanied by a Blade-Runner-on-the-final-speech (1982) type of intense voice that “poetically” talks about the location in the most nihilistic way possible.
A film that begins like that tells you two things. 1. They are actually taking themselves seriously. 2. They pay attention to the cinema taking place around them. Sadly, none of these statements come with an improvement of quality. This instalment is not too far ahead of the previous one.
A gooey crusade
The main update of this instalment is Jason’s looks. Oh, and there’s a boat. But honestly, the locations stop being relevant a long time ago, when Jason decided to go to a random city just to kill the last survivor of the first Crystal Lake massacre in Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981). Since then, the only must-haves have been Jason, teenagers, and behaviours condemned by most religions, drugs and sex, mostly.
So, getting back to the point, Jason is trying a new style. Gone are the blood soaked clothes and burnt, decaying skin from the peak of the 80s. It’s time to say hello to the 90s, and with this decade comes the goo and the slime. Ah, the 90s, what a time to be alive. You are no one in the serial killer sphere if you don’t feature copious amounts of goo in your work. It doesn’t matter that you literally just came out of a lake and the water should’ve cleared that up. No, Jason can’t be caught dead on a last-season outfit, so the vegetation of the lake is now goo. In fact, it is the same goo that covers ALL of New York. Deal with it.
A feast of clichés
On this adventure, the chastity crusader will face some of the worst acting seen in the saga to date. The first couple of dead teenagers easily win the worst-performance award, but not for lack of trying from the rest of the cast. It is hard to tell whether it is the writing or the acting that fails, but the most probably answer is a delicate combination of both.
The boat has nothing but one-dimensional characters. The Bella-Swan-looking (Twilight saga) final girl who has lots of issues and could not be more bland or uninteresting, the cocky jock with a gang of irrelevant extras, the love interest with ridiculous daddy issues, the annoying male teacher who is just the irredeemable worst, the self-centred prom queen, an Asian-looking student who is good at science, and an incredibly passive female teacher.
Whatever you are imagining with this description, you are totally right. There is literally nothing more to them, no complexity, or charm, or anything worth engaging for. The only somewhat curious fact is that the Asian student is played by Kelly Hu, who would go on to play the role of The Sorceress in The Scorpion King (2002). If you are reading this, and you don’t know what is the film I just mentioned, I highly suggest you look it up, it’s a lot more fun than this film. Anyway, you can tell a lot about a film whose only point of interest is that a somewhat famous actress appears in it for a couple of scenes.
Welcome to Crazy Town
The laziness of the character creation also seeps into the story. While the victims’ journey is a lot more complicated than usual, with location changes and many twists and turns, most of it makes no sense. It is a valiant try, but the script clearly needed A LOT more work. Some scenes are absurd, the rules of what hurts Jason or not are even more unclear than in previous instalments, and the character don’t just act absurdly, their actions are utterly unexplainable.
All in all, Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan is a film that didn’t need to exist. It is not relevant to the franchise, and it brings no upgrades to the overall narrative. As a fun little gooey experiment, its existence could be excused, but it is definitely one of those films that get totally forgotten amidst the others of the franchise.
Advice to take from this movie:
- Funny murders are not enough to make a film with no logic watchable.
- Remember the 80s? When seeing naked teenagers trying to bribe teachers with sex was a thing? Yeah, no need to bring it back. Ever.
- Don’t say yes to drugs. Jason will come and choke you to death.
What’s your take? Have you watched Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan? Don’t hesitate to let me know your thoughts in the comments section below, or leave a message in my contact page! For more reviews and cinema-related articles, check out the rest of my blog! 😀