FRIDAY THE 13th PART VIII: JASON TAKES MANHATTAN (1989)

Yes, this is the Friday the 13th with the boat. Jason Takes a Cruise, more like. Let’s get it out of our systems before we explore why the eighth entry set in the Big Apple turned out so rotten.

After battling Michael Myers at the box office throughout the 1980s, Jason now faced Freddy Krueger. Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988) returned a healthy profit of $19M, but paled in comparison to A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988), which raked in nearly $50M. The down-to-earth backwoods slasher felt the need to step outside its comfort zone to match the new wave of successful films. Jason became a zombie and soon found himself fighting telekinetic teenagers. Generally, fans consider this last attempt to be a failure. Despite that, Jason himself, Kane Hodder, claimed that their Carrie-esque Final Girl “Tina was just so well received—nobody ever battled Jason like that.”

I’m inclined to agree. The third act of New Blood is better than anything Jason Takes Manhattan can muster. “I wasn’t a Friday the 13th Trekkie,” admitted Rob Hedden, the latest director and writer to be given the job after directing two episodes of Friday the 13th: The Series (1987-1990). This was the anthology series known for not featuring Jason. It did, however, give Hedden the new perspective that the franchise formula could be refreshed by simply removing a single established element.

Hedden thought “Can I take Jason out of Crystal Lake [and into] a big city?”, and it was producer Frank Mancuso Jr who replied, “Oh, Jason takes Manhattan!” A director, not a geographer, Hedden reasoned “no one knows exactly where Crystal Lake is anyway—it’s close enough to New York.” And with that, the ideas came flooding…

“A tremendous scene on the Brooklyn Bridge. A boxing match in Madison Square Garden. Jason would go through department stores. He’d go through Times Square. He’d go into a Broadway play. He’d even crawl onto the top of the Statue of Liberty and dive off. Of course, just about none of that made it into the movie.”

Rob Hedden, writer-director.

Hedden’s ambitions were cut short before production even began. Dealing with the reality of his fast-changing constraints, “one week in New York, if you’re lucky: half New York, half on the boat. Then it was the last third in New York. It just kept getting whittled down.’ Contrary to popular discussion, Paramount Pictures did invest more than usual into this Friday the 13th.

The last budget was $3M, and the proposed extra million for this stretched into an estimated total of $5.5M. The finale of New Blood climaxed with an earth-shattering kaboom, what could we get with nearly twice the budget? Well, a lot of boat and hardly any New York City. With hindsight, let’s consider the numbers against another NYC horror.

Factoring inflation of the US dollar since 1989, the budget today would be nearly $14M. Scream VI (2023), which homages this film, cost $35M. Ghostface didn’t take Madison Square Garden, Broadway, or the Statue of Liberty, and we never even saw Times Square like we do here. The ambition has to be applauded even getting Jason as far as he does.

“One day, Rob came to me and said, ‘Bryan, I want a point of view shot of a dismembered head!’ we found this company in Canada that makes Nerf balls. We had them create a giant four foot by four-foot Nerf ball we could put the camera in, and we just threw it right off the roof. Every time it bounced down into a giant trash bin, the whole crew just went, ‘Score!‘”

Bryan England, director of photography.

Judging each moment of Jason Takes Manhattan, Hedden captures the franchise’s sense of fun. However, just like Jason wielding an axe guitar or punching someone’s head clean off, the fun arrives only to disappear the very next minute.

A single take follows a nervous survivor through a darkened kitchen. A swinging knife in the foreground vanishes when the camera pans back a second time. It’s a false jump scare, so we move on. As the boat takes on water, a corridor floods suddenly, washing the two leads away. But Jason doesn’t effortlessly stride through the water, and the characters are unharmed, and we move on. Audiences were primed to enjoy what little Jason Takes Manhattan offers and then move on.

Out of all the Friday the 13th films that could’ve had extra runtime, this one didn’t need to be 100 minutes. However, several earlier entries aren’t far off in length. The original is 95 minutes, and its carefree summery pace works in its favour, effectively building suspense. This is one of the few occasions where I find myself conceding with the critics bemoaning stilted dialogue and stock characters.

The first act presents the biggest hurdle. Scenes littered with extraneous seconds of muted reaction shots drag out simple dialogue exchanges. I honestly double-checked scenes elsewhere to see if my copy had missing music, such was the deafening silence. Even the opening song, “The Darkest Side of the Night,” written specifically for the film, feels more like a lullaby. While these are comfort films for fans, they’re not designed to be sleep aids.

There’s a good reason why over half of the 10 scene highlights on the Movieclips YouTube channel are set in Manhattan. That’s the end, and the majority of the film’s runtime is spent on the boat. With slasher franchises all the rage, genre fans familiar with the tropes and clichés were cheering them on. Even they were likely fast-forwarding their VHS tapes to get to the exciting bits of this sequel.

Yet, Hedden creates a paradox: the narrative shorthand feels more conspicuous than ever. As if the director himself has his finger on the fast-forward to skip the boring stuff, but he also wrote this! Ignoring the details is not the same as turning them on their head. Jason Lives (1986) put the effort in planting the tongue firmly in cheek, Jason Takes Manhattan assumes it’s already there. Case in point, Jason’s resurrection in Part VI is a delightful pastiche on Frankenstein’s monster brought to life by lightning, Part VII brings him back with bizarre psychic powers, now he’s just hit by electricity again, there’s no charm to it, we just need something to get the story started.

This film opens, as do several others, with two teenagers sharing the well-worn campfire tale of Jason and his mother. The boy reassures his girlfriend with the classic line, ‘They’re just stories.’ After seven separate killing sprees, one might think the events would be a little more confirmed by now.

The boy also owns not just any hockey mask, but one sporting the exact battle damage Jason has sustained up to this point. Jason’s mask broke in Part VII, and he needs a new one. For some reason, it needs to maintain continuity, despite being two entirely separate masks. These are nitpicks, minor complaints, the quirks that lend a certain charm to a film like this. However, this slack filmmaking snowballs into some genuine head-scratchers.

Despite the stilted script, the cast remains likeable as usual. J.J Jarrett (Saffron Henderson) has a fun glam-rock persona, shot on camera by the nerdy Wayne (Martin Cummins), who then really shoots someone mistaking them for Jason. Eva (Kelly Hu) has a subtle quirk as a pretty girl who imitates the popular girl’s behaviour, even when it involves boys or drugs. Julius (V.C Dupree) shines as the athletic boxer who often takes charge, even over the Final Boy and their teacher.

Tamara (Sharlene Martin), the Mean Girl, stands out because of her cartoonishly spiteful stunts. Found doing coke by a disinterested Rennie (Jensen Daggett), she’s then nearly caught by their teacher. Tamara assumes Rennie is a snitch and, naturally, pushes her off the moving boat at night. This triggers Rennie’s backstory as the final girl, and she can’t swim. Meanwhile, Tamara receives no punishment whatsoever after nearly killing someone.

She’s no match for the infuriating attitude of Charles (Peter Mark Richman), their strict teacher and Rennie’s even stricter uncle. He never takes responsibility, no matter how ridiculous his complaints become. Sure, the fire alarm is just a trick by the killer, nothing to worry about. The sensible thing to do would be to grab a flare gun and chase down the wrong suspect while abandoning the children in his care? A character like this is annoying because the audience is cheering on the killer. We want him dead. And Charles does receive a wonderfully nasty death. But his constant grumbling wouldn’t be so grating if the rest of the cast weren’t so muted.

As lead actress Daggett reminisced, “We were like one big shipwrecked family.” This charming behind-the-scenes camaraderie is wasted when the cast is always separated for suspense. This has the adverse effect of resulting in a real lack of chemistry onscreen. When most characters are killed off, nobody else seems to care. Hell, half a dozen supporting characters are unceremoniously blown up off-screen. Do the heroes even bother to check if their classmates are definitely dead before jumping ship? Nope—they sail off on the only lifeboat.

The two leads have been left for last, as they’re the weakest. No offence intended to the actors, but typically, the Final Girls and Boys of Friday the 13th are written as wonderbread and the actors bring their own moxie. Sean (Scott Reeves) blindly supports his crush’s belief that Jason is real, and his arc of captaining the boat after his father’s death fizzles out as they reach dry land.

It’s clear they dropped Tina to avoid paying Lar Park Lincoln a better deal, as Rennie also conveniently possesses psychic abilities. These don’t even tie into her backstory—she just receives visions of young Jason in an attempt to liven things up. One might argue this invalidates my point that the film isn’t trying anything new, and perhaps some people find these entertaining enough. The issue is they don’t offer any new insight, like Ginny’s psychoanalysing in Part 2 (1981), and they similarly don’t serve to aid Rennie in the finale.

Almost as pointless is the crass detour where Rennie is shot up with heroin and almost raped within two minutes of arriving in the city. It’s a clumsy setup for two more generic Jason kills and a traumatic event Rennie shrugs off like nothing. Just another day in New York.

The true lead is Jason. The title isn’t Rennie and Sean Survive Manhattan. And while horror fans know every stuntman behind the mask, it was Kane Hodder who made a name for himself as the first to play Jason in multiple films. To quote my review of New Blood, “Hodder brought actual emotion to a silent antagonist.” His dedication to the performance never faltered, even if the quality of the sequels did.

“Kane was this happy-go-lucky, cool guy outside of work,” Reeves noted of the actor doing the most work in this. “When it’s time for him to do his thing—Jason took over. I’d walk out of my trailer and I’d hear all this death metal playing out of Kane’s dressing room.”

From lifting Kelly Hu by her neck so her head hits the ceiling, to kicking some punks’ boombox, every action from Hodder is deliberate, efficient brutality. Hedden’s earliest demand was keeping Hodder after the producers wanted a cheaper Canadian stunt performer. It might have been his best creative decision. When Tamara’s stunt double failed to smash the mirror she was thrown into, instinctively Hodder “just walked over to the glass and punched it. That was a total of-the-moment invention.”

Producer Randy Cheveldave described the raucous appeal of Jason in Times Square: “There was a crowd of close to 15,000 people. This woman in her mid-thirties, dressed in a business suit and briefcase—on her knees, tears streaming down her face, going, ‘Jason! Jason! I love you!'” For a stuntman who humbly takes his work seriously, Hodder “felt like one of The Beatles. I’d look over and they just went nuts.”

As good as Hodder is, Hedden’s screenplay and direction make this the Yellow Submarine of the Friday the 13th franchise. Why does Jason sneak into Tamara’s bedroom only to smash through the bathroom door? Why does he pull the fire alarm, putting everyone on high alert? Why does he take out the antenna conveniently right before an SOS is attempted? Is he afraid of the Coast Guard? Jason meanders through the boat like a bored ghost, then stomps through New York without a care. His arbitrary stealth transparently stretches out those 100 minutes.

When chasing Kelly Hu, the filmmakers were having a laugh. In the middle of the room, she finds herself trapped as Jason appears at every exit. Faster than she can turn her head, Jason travels across the room. Even as a self-referential gag, if he can do this so blatantly, where is the tension when the two leads run halfway across Manhattan?

Expectations were set then that, iconic locations aside, Jason would at least be taking a violent bite out of the Big Apple. New Yorkers not giving a damn about Jason is funny. But Hodder has perfected this zombified brute routine, and it’s already a mockery. Violence is reserved for mild acts like throwing a bartender against a wall or rudely shoving someone in the subway. At one point, Jason even trips over on the train and pulls himself up using a passenger’s knee!

As incredibly dumb as Jason Goes to Hell (1993) is, when a diner full of patrons and staff is established, Jason proceeds to massacre them all. Here, Jason flips his mask to scare off some punks. Silly, sure, and perhaps even the good kind, but we’re entering Freddy territory and Jason has never been this self-aware.

“Kane knows the lore. I’m the new kid coming in here. I would ask and Kane would say, ‘Jason would do this or that.’ He’d offer ways to move and position Jason in a scene to make his actions more effective.”

Rob Hedden, writer-director.

After a franchise highlight of knocking Julius’s block off, a cavalcade of baffling creative choices follows. Jason climbs down the building and retrieves the severed head. He mounts it in a random police car, unaware that the main cast will enter it. Jason kills the cop right next to the car, then teleports fifteen feet in front of it. He waits for Rennie to start the car, which mows him down. She sees a vision of young Jason and tries to run him over. She crashes into a wall. They get out, but she stays put, staring as if she accomplished something. The car explodes, and a flaming puddle triggers a flashback of Charles nearly drowning her as a child. None of this makes sense! But at least we’re finally in Manhattan now.

Hodder reaffirmed, “I’m protective of not doing anything on film that makes Jason look silly.” Yet, he admitted to loosening up on his second go-round. Playing a prank on the camera crew filming a quick shot of him opening a door, Hodder “had a large prosthetic penis hanging out.”

It could have been his last chance to enjoy playing Jason. Paramount once again considered putting down their cash cow, believing they’d milked Jason for all his worth. “I felt a real responsibility to make it a bookend to the original Friday the 13th,” Hedden explained regarding his conclusion. “The way I decided to do it was to have Jason finally die.”

Jason chases the final two down into the NYC sewer system, which famously floods with toxic waste every midnight. The ending “remains a controversial one,” Hedden admitted, “I don’t know if I succeeded or failed.” Hodder’s input that “Jason is not nearly as scary when the mask comes off” was overruled by producers who insisted audiences paid to see the monster unmasked. What they got has often been compared to a mouldy jack-o’-lantern, a slimy, misshapen face that looks like a papier-mâché bust Freddy made as a joke.

“I supplied those sons of bitches with so much information on the character, and then they didn’t follow it. The whole time I was molding it, I was playing a funeral song.“

William Terezakis, SFX assistant.

The two titans of horror would be competing once again. Jason Takes Manhattan opened two weeks before A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989). With Fangoria declaring it “the box office battle of the summer!”, the sad reality was two ageing legends past their prime. The eighth instalment became the lowest-grossing Friday the 13th film, taking just over $14M, only beaten by the uber-expensive flop Jason X (2001).

Hedden dodged culpability with the producers’ immediate warning that “before I even shot a frame of film, this movie would get trashed. I was prepared for the worst.” Even though he pitched the concept, Hedden argued the catch-22 situation he was caught in: “If I had that extra money and made a real Jason in New York movie, it still wouldn’t have made more profit. Let’s say it made another $5M at the box office. So what? It would have cost more, too. It would have been a wash.”

“We would simply not do another Friday the 13th next year, or maybe even the year after that. How many can you make? What new ideas can you reasonably come up with? Look at Star Trek. The most successful one we had was the one with the whales. It brought in mainstream audiences that normally would not see a Star Trek film. That never did quite happen with Friday the 13th.“

Frank Mancuso Sr, then-President of Production at Paramount Pictures.

Friday the 13th had its whale, the immortal, unstoppable colossus in Jason Lives. The follow-up was a letdown for many, but it pushed his newfound strengths to their limit. To even think that the allure of Jason in New York would draw in mainstream audiences, and then not deliver, is laughable.

And Mancuso Sr was right; after this lacklustre attempt, Paramount finally sold Jason off to New Line Cinema, the ‘House that Freddy Built’. But the two wouldn’t get to play just yet. Jason persevered on his journey of rediscovery and continued his ill-advised travels. Next time, Jason went to Hell, but for now, it felt like he’d dragged the audience through purgatory.

CANADA • USA | 1989 | 100 MINUTES | 1.37:1 • 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Rob Hedden.
writer: Rob Hedden (based on characters created by Victor Miller).
starring: Jensen Daggett, Scott Reeves, Barbara Bingham, Peter Mark Richman, Martin Cummins, Gordon Currie, Alex Diakun, V.C Dupree, Saffron Henderson, Kelly Hu, Sharlene Martin, Warren Munson & Kane Hodder.