Harefooted Halloween: Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan

What I Liked: Giving lead Rennie (Jensen Daggett (Major League: Back to the Minors)) haunting visions of young Jason drowning isn’t a bad idea.  As a child she was thrown into Crystal Lake in a harsh effort by her uncle to teach her to swim and little ghost Jason grabs her causing her to nearly drown.  Some character having a connection to Jason is welcome especially one that avoids having a blood link which would’ve been the easy thing to do.  These visions go unexplained for too long though in my opinion leaving you wondering what the fuck is going on until near the end.

What I Didn’t Like: Everyone always complains how the subtitle is “Jason Takes Manhattan” but so little of the movie is actually spent there and it’s a valid complaint.  To be fair the last half hour technically does take place in the Big Apple but 99.9% of it is in back alleys, docks, rooftops, sewers, etc.  Even the subway and diner scenes could be practically anywhere.  When they show Jason in Manhattan for real, this is unmistakably NYC, we did it folks, here he is, it’s less than a minute in Times Square.  And he looks as out of place as you can imagine.  The image reminds me of those dirty costumed characters that hang out there taking pictures with tourists.  The lesson learned from this is you can’t put Jason in a highly populated area.  He loses his menace.

And maybe I could get on board with such a strange premise if the rest of the movie wasn’t so terrible.  Now, trapping victims on board a ship with Jason is a perfectly acceptable idea.  There’s nowhere anyone can hide, no help is coming, parts of a ship can certainly be eerie and so on.  That’s not the issue.  The issue is having almost no plot again, making all your characters be extremely irritating, giving Jason teleporting powers and then having the guy stomp through one of the biggest cities in the world for no real reason other than the filmmakers thought it would be a good selling point.  The whole thing is so messy and lazy.  Here’s a quick example: some street thugs kidnap innocent high schooler Rennie and force her to shoot heroin at knife point but it doesn’t affect her at all.  She even drives a car right after.  What was the fucking point of including that?

The teleporting power I just don’t understand either.  The movie is clear that Jason can move from one place to another instantaneously yet he still chooses to stalk after his prey most of the time.  Like when the last group of survivors rows away in a lifeboat he simply stands there watching.  Why doesn’t he teleport into the boat and kill everyone?  It opens the door to this character being even more god-like which is completely unnecessary.

Overall Impressions: There’s an odd carelessness to this installment that’s very frustrating to sit through.  But I wanna be careful because this isn’t the film writer/director Rob Hedden (writer: MacGyver) intended to make.  Originally he wrote a lot more scenes using NYC landmarks like the Brooklyn Bridge and Madison Square Garden but the budget wasn’t there.  Well, if they couldn’t get the locations they needed to make the film work (particularly if you’re gonna advertise a specific locale in the goddamn subtitle) then they should’ve nixed the idea altogether.  Hedden wasn’t happy with the results and is just as disappointed as anyone in the final product.

Knowing the backstory doesn’t make the picture go down any easier though.  Like they use a large creepy cargo ship for a handful of people to go on a cruise, and only about ten kids from the graduating class go, and the dock they launch from is very obviously somewhere in the pacific northwest and not New Jersey, and NYC is devoid of people outside of Times Square, and one of the teachers/Rennie’s uncle (Peter Mark Richman (Naked Gun 2 ½)) is an absolutely insufferable asshole who does nothing but shit on everyone around him and etc.

I feel bad saying this because Hedden seems like a nice enough guy but this is a dumb fuckin’ movie that’s kinda shoddily made.  There aren’t many redeeming qualities about this entry.