Friday the 13th Part 8
Friday the 13th Part 8 is lie and a cheat. It is hated by a large percentage of fans unforgivably and unforgettably because, whereas it claims, and was marketed as, taking place mostly in New York – Jason Takes Manhattan – in reality it only has roughly five minutes of New York in it. The movie itself mainly features Jason killing kids on a cruise boat – which is actually a tugboat, another lie – and only spends about twenty minutes in an actual city, not even New York either, but Vancouver. It’s as if the original movie was shown to an overeager editor, who made the first fan-trailer ever except it was about a totally different movie where Jason is actually in New York, then the producers saw the fan trailer and said “Fuck it. That’s the trailer and the tittle and we don’t give a shit.”
The movie itself isn’t all that bad. It’s more campy and commercialized than the previous movies, and can fairly be said to mark the deterioration of the franchise into dismal gimmicks it was never thereafter entirely to separate itself from. After this movie, the franchise was sold another studio. This provides me the convenient excuse of dismissing the other movies as non-cannon and thus I can ignore them, which I will. For me, Jason died finally and for good and all in 1989 and there is simply nothing else to say about it.
Jason was submerged in Crystal Lake at the end of Part 7, which has in the interim become a boating resort because a couple on an actual yacht are floating around when they accidently wake him up. He kills the couple, one again with a harpoon – what is with this movie series and harpoons? – but then, instead of enjoying the pleasures of the yacht and corpses, he apparently goes swimming.
Later he hops on said tugboat like a plague rat and proceeds to kill Dracula-style the graduating class onboard heading to “New York”. It would be a lie to say this movie doesn’t have a bloated corpse of a cast. There are way too many kids, yet way too few to make you believe it’s an actual graduating class. If you’re going to tempt me with Jason on a cruise ship killing off the class of 1989, I want to see a Carnival Cruise ship and bodies dropping like Titanic. Considering that the movie saved money by not shooting in New York, I can understand why fans hate this movie. They spared a lot of expense.
Anyway, it’s pointless to go through most of the characters because they only matter in death. The main character is Rennie, who is apparently such a writing prodigy that her teacher gives her one of Stephen King’s pens. Oh whoopie. Maybe she could write a better script for Maximum Overdrive with that thing without the benefit of cocaine. There’s also an Asshole Teacher, who will unfortunately survive late into the movie.
The deaths on the tugboat are hit-and-miss, depending on what you want out of a kill. There’s a pretty good one when Jason puts a steaming rock through a guy’s chest in a sauna. But most of them leave much to be desired. The kills, mostly off-screen or implied, are nowhere near the gore in the previous movies, which begs the question – what, after all, are we supposed to care about?
Well, Jason is something of a gossip queen in this movie. The structure of the plot on the boat involves personal relationships to the extent that Jason is the deux ex machina, as it where, od their resolution. We have a metal head, who for some 80s reason sees the tugboat as the perfect set design for her solo music video, which she has the AV nerd film in various awful locations. Jason intervenes and decapitates her with her own guitar, mercifully sparing her many viral videos in later life what would have made her decapitate herself with same guitar anyway.
The AV nerd gets caught up in a convoluted plot that is so overbearing it doesn’t belong in a Friday the 13th movie and shows how far along the writers had run out of ideas. Two girls decide to snort cocaine on the boat – GOSH! – and although Rennie declines, are still caught by Asshole Teacher. This causes one of the girls to use the AV nerd with sexual innuendo to set a trap for Asshole Teacher for blackmail. She pretends to seduce the teacher while the AV nerd films it, then blackmail him. Her plan works, but the AV nerd is still spurned, which isn’t a good idea, ultimately, to promise things and then renege those promises from the only person who can permanently fuck both you and Asshole Teacher over for life.
ANYWAY, she’s killed and he’s killed and enough of that.
The funny thing is that Jason keeps popping up, in between beats and transitions of all this nonsense, as if he’s following the detailed events and purposefully interrupting them just to fuck with people. This is why the boat drama is infinitely entertaining. It’s like Pride and Prejudice if Jason hopped up and killed Mr. Collins after his failed marriage proposal.
A thing often mentioned, though, is that in this movie Jason can teleport, and often he does. Here and there and everywhere, just like a Gummy Bear.
A few kids survive the assault, and get on a lifeboat to float away to New York. This is where the movie gets absurdly dumb. They spend a very short time in New York before running afoul of a gang. This scene, I must say, was one in which I had my best impromptu riff ever, way back in my bad days in 2005.
Hoodlums approach the group, and one focuses on Rennie. Right as he pops open his switchblade, with that signature leer you would expect, I joked:
“Hey baby. Ever heard of Stockholm Syndrome?”
Guess you had to be there.
The rest of the movie is Jason teleporting and kicking over boomboxes with no fucks given and all winding up in the sewer. The sewer is flooded daily with nuclear waste, and it is this very waste that kills Jason, or rather – reverts him back to a baby boy. I don’t know. I don’t care.
Part 8 isn’t as bad as it’s critics would have you believe. It isn’t the worst, but it has serious flaws. It has one of the best kills, where Jason decapitates a boxer with one blow, but has a lot of lame cheesy shit too. It’s one of those movies that divide the fanbase along lines of taste. Either you think the franchise is actually suspenseful and thrilling, and thus hate it, or you find it funny and something to make fun of, in which you love it. Neither is right or wrong.
I give it four stars.
Friday the 13th Part 8 is lie and a cheat. It is hated by a large percentage of fans unforgivably and unforgettably because, whereas it claims, and was marketed as, taking place mostly in New York – Jason Takes Manhattan – in reality it only has roughly five minutes of New York in it. The movie itself mainly features Jason killing kids on a cruise boat – which is actually a tugboat, another lie – and only spends about twenty minutes in an actual city, not even New York either, but Vancouver. It’s as if the original movie was shown to an overeager editor, who made the first fan-trailer ever except it was about a totally different movie where Jason is actually in New York, then the producers saw the fan trailer and said “Fuck it. That’s the trailer and the tittle and we don’t give a shit.”
The movie itself isn’t all that bad. It’s more campy and commercialized than the previous movies, and can fairly be said to mark the deterioration of the franchise into dismal gimmicks it was never thereafter entirely to separate itself from. After this movie, the franchise was sold another studio. This provides me the convenient excuse of dismissing the other movies as non-cannon and thus I can ignore them, which I will. For me, Jason died finally and for good and all in 1989 and there is simply nothing else to say about it.
Jason was submerged in Crystal Lake at the end of Part 7, which has in the interim become a boating resort because a couple on an actual yacht are floating around when they accidently wake him up. He kills the couple, one again with a harpoon – what is with this movie series and harpoons? – but then, instead of enjoying the pleasures of the yacht and corpses, he apparently goes swimming.
Later he hops on said tugboat like a plague rat and proceeds to kill Dracula-style the graduating class onboard heading to “New York”. It would be a lie to say this movie doesn’t have a bloated corpse of a cast. There are way too many kids, yet way too few to make you believe it’s an actual graduating class. If you’re going to tempt me with Jason on a cruise ship killing off the class of 1989, I want to see a Carnival Cruise ship and bodies dropping like Titanic. Considering that the movie saved money by not shooting in New York, I can understand why fans hate this movie. They spared a lot of expense.
Anyway, it’s pointless to go through most of the characters because they only matter in death. The main character is Rennie, who is apparently such a writing prodigy that her teacher gives her one of Stephen King’s pens. Oh whoopie. Maybe she could write a better script for Maximum Overdrive with that thing without the benefit of cocaine. There’s also an Asshole Teacher, who will unfortunately survive late into the movie.
The deaths on the tugboat are hit-and-miss, depending on what you want out of a kill. There’s a pretty good one when Jason puts a steaming rock through a guy’s chest in a sauna. But most of them leave much to be desired. The kills, mostly off-screen or implied, are nowhere near the gore in the previous movies, which begs the question – what, after all, are we supposed to care about?
Well, Jason is something of a gossip queen in this movie. The structure of the plot on the boat involves personal relationships to the extent that Jason is the deux ex machina, as it where, od their resolution. We have a metal head, who for some 80s reason sees the tugboat as the perfect set design for her solo music video, which she has the AV nerd film in various awful locations. Jason intervenes and decapitates her with her own guitar, mercifully sparing her many viral videos in later life what would have made her decapitate herself with same guitar anyway.
The AV nerd gets caught up in a convoluted plot that is so overbearing it doesn’t belong in a Friday the 13th movie and shows how far along the writers had run out of ideas. Two girls decide to snort cocaine on the boat – GOSH! – and although Rennie declines, are still caught by Asshole Teacher. This causes one of the girls to use the AV nerd with sexual innuendo to set a trap for Asshole Teacher for blackmail. She pretends to seduce the teacher while the AV nerd films it, then blackmail him. Her plan works, but the AV nerd is still spurned, which isn’t a good idea, ultimately, to promise things and then renege those promises from the only person who can permanently fuck both you and Asshole Teacher over for life.
ANYWAY, she’s killed and he’s killed and enough of that.
The funny thing is that Jason keeps popping up, in between beats and transitions of all this nonsense, as if he’s following the detailed events and purposefully interrupting them just to fuck with people. This is why the boat drama is infinitely entertaining. It’s like Pride and Prejudice if Jason hopped up and killed Mr. Collins after his failed marriage proposal.
A thing often mentioned, though, is that in this movie Jason can teleport, and often he does. Here and there and everywhere, just like a Gummy Bear.
A few kids survive the assault, and get on a lifeboat to float away to New York. This is where the movie gets absurdly dumb. They spend a very short time in New York before running afoul of a gang. This scene, I must say, was one in which I had my best impromptu riff ever, way back in my bad days in 2005.
Hoodlums approach the group, and one focuses on Rennie. Right as he pops open his switchblade, with that signature leer you would expect, I joked:
“Hey baby. Ever heard of Stockholm Syndrome?”
Guess you had to be there.
The rest of the movie is Jason teleporting and kicking over boomboxes with no fucks given and all winding up in the sewer. The sewer is flooded daily with nuclear waste, and it is this very waste that kills Jason, or rather – reverts him back to a baby boy. I don’t know. I don’t care.
Part 8 isn’t as bad as it’s critics would have you believe. It isn’t the worst, but it has serious flaws. It has one of the best kills, where Jason decapitates a boxer with one blow, but has a lot of lame cheesy shit too. It’s one of those movies that divide the fanbase along lines of taste. Either you think the franchise is actually suspenseful and thrilling, and thus hate it, or you find it funny and something to make fun of, in which you love it. Neither is right or wrong.
I give it four stars.