08/29/10 - Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan

Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989, 100 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097388/

I'm not really thrilled about this choice but I've gotten so close to finishing the original ten Friday the 13th movies that I watch it. The end is in sight and I'm trying to sprint towards the finish.

This film picks up some time after the previous installment. Jason Voorhees (Kane Hodder) ends up mainly attacking a ship as opposed to Manhattan which is somewhat disappointing. Anyway, the main heroes are Rennie Wickham (Jensen Daggett) and Sean Robertson (Scott Reeves).

This is the hardest Jason film I've had to rate yet. It reminds me of Casino Royale from the James Bond series. Basically, this movie isn't great at all as a Friday the 13th series perspective but when you look at it as like a slasher-thriller hybrid it's pretty decent. The same was true with Casino Royale: it was a terrible Bond movie but it was a way above average action movie.

I'll start off by going through the things that this movie does completely different from the other films in the series. Most notably, this film shows Jason a lot. Like way too much even. In the previous installments we very rarely saw Jason but instead used the point of view camera stuff a lot to signify we were acting as Jason. Here we see Jason walking around a lot of times. Also, whenever we used to see as Jason it was always as he approached someone for the kill. This time around it's frequently just to show him walking around the ship doing whatever. Personally, I'm not a huge fan of this as most of the suspense and thrill of the series relies in watching the kill slowly be anticipated and then accomplished. With random shots of Jason we lose that. Next, the music again takes the turn for the worse we saw in the previous film. There, the standard theme was just used almost whenever to build tension and it failed at this because of the previous connotations of the tune being used for Jason's point of view only (or Pamela Voorhees's in the first one). Anyway, the overuse of the theme continues and I'm still not a fan of it. Next, the film contains way too much humor. Only occasional times in the other films was there a joke of any sort. Here, there's way too many moments that are just a little too cheesy and end up being bad. The one that most comes to my mind is when Jason takes off his mask in Manhattan so as to scare a gang of kids that are threatening him. It's stupid and I imagine the intent of this shot was humor which completely clashes with the vibe of the scenes before and after it. Finally, this movie creates way too many main characters. I didn't completely list the group of five people that survives the initial boat attack only to be taken out one by one in Manhattan (until our final two heroes survive). There's a couple problems with this. Mainly, at 100 minutes this film is pretty long and it gives it enough time to actually have these characters built up. While in almost any other movie I'm going to say this is a great thing, it's not the case in Friday the 13th. Here, we're supposed to root for the heroes only if they are cool and follow "the rules" of a slasher but otherwise we're almost supposed to root for Jason. Having a couple characters built up forces too many audience connections which isn't good for this type of movie. Next, by building up a large group of characters it takes away from the main heroine of Rennie. With time spent forging relationships between secondary characters it leaves her as a very bland lead and one I never felt attached to. Near the end they reveal the crux of her back-story but by then it's too late for me to really care.

Somewhat between full complaint and minor complaint I place one new quality of Jason: his discovered ability to teleport. In previous films people would run from them but he would always catch up to them even with his slow shamble. However, for this movie it seems that Jason is able to just magically teleport around which allows him to move a lot faster than previous films. I'm not completely set on if I think this is a good thing or not. Part of me doesn't like it because it takes away some of that tenseness of the chase but it also helps the image of Jason as a zombie that almost all of these kids are helpless against.

However, the film isn't all bad. It's actually a really good movie in one thing that's really important for the Jason character: he's relentless. In this film we start with him getting resurrected and taking out the large quantity of kids on the boat only to be "killed" a few times in the process. Naturally he survives over and over again and this gives the film a very hopeless feeling. I was actually reminded of The Terminator near the end as Jason seemed to be marching relentlessly towards Rennie and Sean. This is how Jason has been developed in the past and this aspect was handled really really well.

Overall, I gave this film a 3/10. Fumbling around on the qualities that make a great Friday the 13th film really hurt this one. However, getting that final point there bumped it up probably a point. With only two films left in the series, I feel I can finish it next week and then move on back to A Nightmare on Elm Street or Halloween.