Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan -- 1989 -- R

Joining the ranks of such award-winning clunkers like Scary Movie 2 comes Jason Takes Manhattan, the eighth installment to the Friday the 13th franchise. While I would normally applaud a series like this trying to go in a different direction, to do this, they had to break all the rules established for Jason and his antics. Let's review, shall we?

Jason is an undead demonic critter who lives at Crystal Lake. He died in a drowning incident, which understandably pissed off his mother sending her on a murderous rampage to ensure the camp never reopened. Jason, enraged at his mother's death, wanders the woods around Crystal Lake making sure no one ever does anything around there again. At no time has Jason ever taken preference of who he kills, nor has he ever left the grounds surrounding Crystal Lake.

Well, this time Jason is awakened and boards a boat to kill its passengers. This boat, which had previously dropped anchor, which is why Jason was awakened, floats onward and ends up at a harbor somewhere. Geography got me on this one. I always thought Crystal Lake referred to the city in IL that's west of Chicago, but in this lake, it would be quite improbable for a boat to get from Crystal Lake, IL to any harbor bound for New York.

Technically, the location of Crystal Lake is never stated, and so I delve into the fan database to find that it's probably in New Jersey, since that's where the car license plates generally reflect, and there are a couple of Crystal Lakes in NJ. So it's in a coastal state (so it's more conceivable than where the real Crystal Lake is), but that also means this lake would have to empty into a river to get into the ocean where it could end up at this harbor. For a guy who "died" drowning, that's some indepth boating. This also means Jason would have to have intentionally pulled up the anchor and set sail for whatever the world had to hold for him instead of getting off the boat and staying at home in the woods around Crystal Lake.

Anyway, there's where we're starting. Not real great, to be honest. So Jason boards this cruise ship for some reason. Why? We'll never know. He also proceeds to wipe out the kids onboard as well as the crew. Why? Um...just because? It honestly makes no sense and there's very little value to redeem in that.

As if that wasn't enough to swallow, here's another tidbit. Jason drowned in Crystal Lake in 1957. Jason apparently aged since then, even as an undead, or he would not be an adult. Our main character has a fear of the water, and it stemmed from a run-in with Jason as a child. Since she is apparently a year out of school (it is stated she did "this" last year)m she's 18 or 19. She looks fairly young in the flashback making her probably 7 or so. This means she would have hadto have visited Crystal Lake and had her experience shortly after Jason died since he was a child in her past. Though the film purportedly occurs in the present day (1988-89), the girl's experience would have to have occurred around 1960, which puts the date of this film not much past 1972.

So it's this group of party-hearty teens against Jason the Illusionist. I call him that because Jason appears to have magial powers that allow him to be wherever he wants to be regardless of the rules of time and space. One moment, he's on deck peeping through a window, the next, he's way down in the depths of the ship killing someone down there. He flits from place to place so impossibly that he can only be hooking elbows with Houdini or something to allow him to do this. This mess ends with a teacher telling everyone to "wait here" (so typical), and it is implied that they all die in that room. No, we don't actually see it. Maybe they live after the next bit of insanity.

A small group survives the massacre on the ship and we get this long sequence of then travelling in a lifeboat until they reach Manhattan. The movie isn't ending, though. My logical thought here is a Dracula-ish sequence where Jason rides the now-derelict boat into a harbor, making a huge mess. What happened? They park the lifeboat (and of course the grumpy-dude complains about this...can't wait till he gets knocked off), and who should climb out of the water behind them but Jason! I laughed. I couldn't help it. This was so ridiculous that I just shook my head and wondered what the hell these people were smoking when they wrote it.

Of course, the survivors do make the idiotic decision to split up. Now, they'd just been attack by local thugs who took all their money and the heroine girl, and they decide to split up? You've got to be kidding me! Who would do this? Who would agree to it? Now, Jason does rescue our heroine from the thugs (what a swell guy!) before chasing the survivors from the boat all over the place. He gets one before the rest get back together.

Bunch more stuff happens before our last two end up running through the POPULATED STREETS OF NEW YORK from Jason. Jason is focused on killing these two only. Why? He is obviously on a random killing streak anyway, why bother? It just doesn't make any sense whatsoever. He willingly kills whoever gets in his way, but no one else. He just walks past them. They even get on a subway and Jason the Illusionist is right there as well. How the heck he got down the stairs, through the crowd, and onto the subway can only be explained by his new found magical teleporting powers he demonstrated on the boat. He actually walks past groups of people to go after his new special friends.

Here's where I throw out that this movie was too long and just boring. If I didn't feel the need to finish watching it, I would have turned it off, but hey, I like to torture myself. They take out Jason several times, and he just keeps coming back. They make horrible decisions on where to go, and he just keep popping up. I get to the point where I just want it to end. We end up in the sewers, and I'm thinking, there's no way he can pop up in front of them....but he does. Those are some impressive magical powers, Mr. Voorhees. Have you considered a career in show business?

So, they tried to go a new direction, but in doing so, achieved a film so abysmally bad that it caused Paramount to sell out their interests in the franchise to New Line Cinema (who owns the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise). There were some bad films that came before, but this one sinks it to the bottom of the toxic waste barrel...you know, the one that the main girl tried to bust a hole in when she should have just pulled the lid off of? Yeah, the lid jumped every time she hit it...