Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
To some extent reviews are superfluous to movies like the Friday the 13th series. For fans, all that matters is whether the film ticks certain boxes. If all you want to see is Jason Voorhees (Kane Hodder) murdering yet another group of teenagers who dabble in alcohol, drugs, and premarital sex, Jason Takes Manhattan delivers. It’s a film that knows what it is and does what’s expected of it — unless you expect most of the action to take place in New York City, but we’ll get to that.
This being the eighth Friday the 13th film in eight years, even Jason aficionados were growing tired of the formula at this point. Writer-director Rob Hedden tried to shake things up by taking the action away from Camp Crystal Lake. He pitched the studio two concepts: one involving Jason on a boat, the other setting the killer loose in New York City. In the end Hedden combined both ideas — partly because setting the entire film in Manhattan would have been prohibitively expensive for a franchise that was still cheap exploitation fare at heart. The result gives neither idea its due. Especially considering the title and marketing of the film, the fact that Jason only shows up in New York in the last 20 minutes is a disappointment. The action in the Big Apple is also more interesting, making the film feel like a missed opportunity.
Overall, Jason Takes Manhattan can be summed up as: same old, same old. The film is more funny than scary. True, the series had flirted with self-parody at least since Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives. But watching Jason slice, choke, burn, drown, and decapitate his way through the cast, my reaction to each kill wasn’t fear, but laughter. These movies are fairly one-dimensional. The characters don’t really matter. And the formula is so predictable, Part VIII often plays more like a gory comedy. We know what’s coming at every turn; all that matters is how Jason dispatches his prey.
In a recent retrospective of the Friday the 13th movies, Jay Bauman of RedLetterMedia accurately described the series as “cheap junk”. Jason Takes Manhattan is just another movie that offers cheap thrills to its 1980s teen audience, with plenty of sleaze and gratuitous violence, but also some self-aware humour. As a fan of ’80s glam metal, I enjoyed the guitar noodling of rock star wannabe J.J. Jarrett (Saffron Henderson), as well as “The Darkest Side of the Night” by Metropolis, the cheesy AOR song that plays over the credits. Jensen Daggett’s Rennie is an effective final-ish girl, and the film includes the feature debut of Kelly Hu. However, the presentation of young Jason contradicts series canon, and the ending makes little sense. For better or for worse, this is just another Friday the 13th film. Take it or leave it.
4/10
