Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
(On TV, October 2019) Keep your expectations in check, Friday the 13th fans: Despite the grandiose subtitle, Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan only makes it to New York City in its last third, leaving the rest of the film to take place on a cruise boat filled by teenagers. (How we get there is a stretch even by the lax standards of the series, given Crystal Lake—formerly situated at least two states inland—now being connected to the ocean.) It’s not a particularly good entry, although it makes up in craziness what it doesn’t have in quality. The last act (located in Manhattan but shot in Vancouver) is by far the most interesting: The first act is just dumb and ham-fisted in how it assembles all the plot pieces, while the extended cruise that makes up most of the movie is just one dull kill after another. Things get warmer once we make it to the late-1980s Big Apple, filled with graffiti, criminals and toxic waste. In the film’s highlight, Jason makes it to Times Square (where he pettily kicks down a punk gang’s boombox), but you do have to get through a lot of nonsense featuring generic characters before getting there. The heroine herself is one of the series’ blandest, and some of his victims don’t get any development whatsoever. Kelly Hu has an early role here, but she doesn’t get much to do before being thrown away from the story. By this time in the series, seven instalments in nine years (not to mention a burnt-out slasher genre), it couldn’t keep the same conventions and so this instalment does try to shake things up … to no positive effect. The ending, which resets Jason to child form, wasn’t really followed up in the following entries in the series, each of which struck out in different directions by ignoring much of the established so-called continuity. There’s a fair case to be made for Jason Takes Manhattan being, in bits and pieces, the craziest episode of the series so far … but it’s not consistent craziness, and that often does make it a chore to watch. Of course, if you’re not a slasher fan, there is only a strict minimum here to keep you interested.