Review of Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) by Bill M — 02 Nov 2015

There was a long time that I honestly thought that this was none of the worst movies ever made (maybe in some ways it kind of is) but sitting down and watching this almost ridiculously terrible film with likeminded people who I love very much the night before Halloween time this year it's insanely cheesy pleasures bubbled finally to the surface of all the toxic waste, much like the rest of the fridays, this is a party movie, a get drunk and watch with all your horror or casual movie fan mates and family up for a laugh type experience.

Dont get me wrong this movie is truly fucking bad, in ways that sometimes skirt well past the line of "so bad it's good" (well, well past) but fuck me if it isnt great fun! first lets go through everything crappy about and wrong with this cheap ass, rip off of a flick.

Firstly there's the title, Jason Takes Manhattan, it should have really been called Jason spends an hour and a bit on a boat killing assholes and wanders around some dark alleyways before spending the last ten or so minutes in actual, identifiable New York City.

The big apple itself proved such an expensive shooting location that the screen time of the city is prattled down to nearly nothing, when the boar full of teens do actually arrive at the city harbor they spend about half an hour running around dark, dank alleys ways that could have been shot in fucking Skagness for all anyone knows, and then after about five mins in Times Square (were Jason very lamely scares off some switchblade wielding, boombox playing 80's punks by pulling up his mask) we then end up in dreary subway tunnels that, once again, could have been and most definitely were filmed somewhere else( I think every inch of NY footage they shot is in this movie, just look at the opening credits bit) The other weird fucking thing is that Camp Crystal Lake is now Camp Ocean Mouth really, as the lake has turned into a huge, almost edge-less horizon surrounded by massive snow peaked mountains in the distance (where ever they shot this is actually quite stunning I must admit) and it connects to the ocean, "hmm, okay then".

...and we have a almost ocean liner sized ship full of graduating teens setting sail from a huge dockland that has also materialized. Jason tags along of course, after hilarious resurrection by electric volts from a falty underwater power cable ( why did no one go in and retrieve his body?) Jason, now a waterlogged, gooey corpse, grabs onto the anchor and joins the party.

He's certainly welcome to the roster of teen meat to butcher, horrible, awful characters all, even by the Friday The 13th series low standard of actual likable human beings. The kills are sort of all over the place in this one too, being one of the series most obvious and severe victims of the MPAA, sometimes you get no pay off to a kill scene build up, like for instance the nasty cokehead bitch, I needed to see her get hers, thats the whole point of her fucking existence in this movie, it's like sex without the climax.

But on the other hand when u do actually see the kills they are often so outlandish and ridiculous (the boxing death is especially cartoonish) that you just have to cheer and laugh, plus there are SO many!! (this has the highest single body count of the franchise, Jason really dose kill a fuckload of unlikable folks in this film!) another thing worth pointing out is the outright dive into Nightmare On Elm Street type supernatural sequences and imagery, with the final girls weird, oddly executed connection to Jason and her bizzare visitations of a the undead killing machine in his drowned child form as a ghostly spectre, there.

S some groovy effects (the mirror bit) but it's all very half baked and vague, even baffling, like Jason reverting to child form after being hit by an apparently rejuvenating tidal wave of toxic waste, the actual fuck? but like I said, watch it with the right people, in the right atmosphere and knowing what you can and should be looking get out of it (an amazingly trashy, bad, cheesy, poorly acted, cheap, tacky pisstake of a film, with much 80's amp value) and you must be drunk, like really drunk.