Friday the 13th Pt VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
“Welcome to New York!” – Diner Waitress.
Much as I love the entire Friday the 13th series, this one has always been a particular favourite. Sadly, I never had the opportunity of seeing it on the big screen, my introduction was by buying ex-rental VHS tapes from a local video store back in the day. I had read a bit about it in the hallowed pages of Fangoria magazine, and I remember feeling a bit concerned that Jason away from Crystal Lake and dropped in New York made him just another problem for NY among several – whereas in Crystal Lake, he was THE problem. In the big metropolis he was just a statistic.
Boy, was I wrong.
Despite for narrative flaws, this is a film that I’ve watched over and over. And for a long time, it was the last Friday. This was the series closer. Paramount decided that the dwindling box office returns were a deadlier force than Jason himself and that was that. (Not to worry – as we all know, Jason always comes back and Paramount sold the rights to the ongoing characters to New Line, where Jason was resurrected a few more times – but that’s a story for next time.)
Not only was this eighth film notable for beating Freddy’s run (if you count New Nightmare) and taking Jason out of his usual stamping grounds, but also it marked the first time the same actor would return to the role of Jason. The menacing presence of Kane Hodder would once again hack and slash his way through a swathe of victims. And I have to add, this is my absolute favourite incarnation of Jason. There’s something about this one. Not only has Hodder honed his gestures and movements, but his appearance as, well, a waterlogged zombie and he never dries out throughout the film. And his footsteps sound both heavy and “squelchy”.
This version was immortalised in a sculpt by Todd McFarlane in the initial wave of his Movie Maniacs series, which I saw advertised in Fangoria and spent much of 1999 in pursuit of. There was only one of Jason in each box received by Forbidden Planet to make it rarer and more desirable to clowns like me, but they put one aside for me and he’s been menacing the study from a shelf ever since – pride of place.
But on to the film – apart from the Jason sound effect (“kee-kee-kee…ma-ma-ma”) nothing is heard of Harry Manfredini’s familiar score, there’s more of an eighties rock vibe, which fits the new location perfectly. The movie is set an undetermined time after Jason was dragged to his watery resting place by the vengeful spirit of Tina’s dead father at the end of the previous film. But we know it’s summer and the local high school students are having a trip to New York for their graduation party – and it’s coming up to Friday the 13th.
A luxury cabin cruiser lazily travels along the lake, with a young couple of graduates on board, eager to have their own celebration. As the cruiser draws level with the infamous camp, the boy drops anchor so he can get down to dropping a whole lot more with his girlfriend. The anchor drags along until it snags and damages a power cable, which in turn electrifies the boy of Jason, still pinned under the remains of the jetty – and shocks him back to life. The young couple really don’t last long after that. Jason remains on board, as the boat makes its way somehow to a port that connects to the Atlantic Ocean where a liner is ready to take the high school kids to the Big Apple. The ship seems privately chartered, because other than a handful of students supervised by two teachers, the only other people on board are the Admiral, First Officer, one sailor and a troublesome doomsayer of a deck hand who seems a direct relative of Crazy Ralph from the first two films. No catering staff or engineers. But it’s such a fun movie that I just overlook these details and go with the flow.
As the ship is about to leave dock, Jason sneaks on board – transferring from the cruiser containing two dead bodies that nobody seems to notice, except for the crazy old Deck Hand. So, undermanned liner setting out to sea. A victim rich environment. And Jason Voorhees. Anything missing? Oh, yes – there’s a storm warning. Perfect conditions for a Friday the 13th.
The victim contingent this time benefits from being more fully realised characters this time, repeating the formula in the previous film, where we get to care about the characters because we get to know a little bit about them rather than the “pretty girl who gets killed with an axe” anonymity of a lot of the previous victims in the earlier films.
The film centres around Rennie (Jensen Daggett) a troubled teenager. An orphan raised by her uncle who is also her schoolteacher. Her guardian Charles McCulloch is as pompous as his name suggests. Perfectly played by Peter Mark Richman he’s a petty, officious overbearing bully who is reluctant to give up the power he has enjoyed over his students these past few years. His sheer nastiness is countered by the kind, well meaning and supportive teacher Colleen Van Deusen (Barbara Bingham) who wants the best for everyone and is at pains to be the antidote to the fun vacuum that is McCulloch. Rennie has suffered a childhood trauma, and sees visions of a child drowning. A child we, the audience, know to be young Jason Voorhees.
Also on board, we have a would-be rock guitarist, who Jason beats to death with her own guitar, a young would-be film student, a vacuous prom queen stabbed to death by a shard of her mirror, the prom queen’s sidekick, murdered on a disco floor, and various other peripherals we don’t really get to know. By the time the storm hits, Jason has also killed the ship’s Admiral and his sparse crew. As Jason tears out the radio antennae, Kane Hodder told me a story during an interview I did with him for GoreZone Magazine a few years ago;
“Jason Takes Manhattan”. I’m on a cruise liner and I have to rip the radio antennae off so they’re out of contact. Well, I’m up high and there’d been some steps built that I can walk up to break the antennae off. I was trying to be scary and ominous and when I was stepping on them, I wasn’t looking where I was going, so I fell down, and I was all slick and wet so I slid along the deck on my ass. I was trying to look scary, but I ended up stumbling around like an old man.”
A now slimmed down cast abandon ship – but fortunately among them is Sean Robertson (Scott Reeves) son of the late Admiral Robertson, who had intended that Sean take over the ship and had given him a navigational computer as a graduation present – he finds their way to New York after a day’s rowing. But their night isn’t about to get any better – Jason has followed them. (Whether he swam, or just walked along the sea bed, I don’t know – but the thought of him walking relentlessly on the ocean floor is an un-nerving one.)
They don’t actually get to NYC until the film’s last thirty minutes, where the pace goes up from its already brisk speed. This is the longest film in the series, at 100 minutes, but it sure doesn’t feel that way. The cast are immediately mugged by a couple of crackheads who take Rennie with them. Jason appears just in time to prevent her rape, even stabbing one with his own needle. The otherwise ineffectual McCulloch finds a cop, but involving the poor guy in a case that involves Jason just means he won’t see the end of his shift. Meanwhile, the school’s champion undefeated boxer Julius (V.C. Dupree) challenges Jason to a fight and batters his knuckles to a pulpy mass on his opponent’s hockey mask before being decapitated with one uppercut.
McCulloch, who it is revealed is responsible for Rennie’s trauma by pushing her into Crystal Lake in a ham-fisted attempt to teach her how to swim, which is where she saw the vision of child-Jason for the first time, and ever since, is himself drowned. Jason holds him upside down in a vat of green, noxious looking fluid that just screams toxic – plus it has a dead rat floating in it. Van Deusen, sadly doesn’t make it either, incinerated in the cop’s burning police car.
Jason pursues Sean and Rennie through subways, diners, and Times Square before the final confrontation in the NY sewer system, just as it’s being flushed with a toxic, corrosive fluid that literally dissolves him back to being a child, and he dies.
And that was that as far as Paramount were concerned the character had finally been laid to rest. And all in all, it’s a pretty satisfying final ending. I was happy with it.
But you can’t keep Jason down for long.