Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) and Briefly How the Friday the 13th Series Tried to Find Itself

When people think of slasher movies, there are three main franchises that come to mind.  The Halloween movies feature Michael Myers tormenting the teens of Haddonfield on the anniversary of his sister’s murder at his hands.  A Nightmare on Elm Street and its many sequels show Freddy Kruger attacking teenagers within their dreams, causing them deadly harm in their reality.  Then there were the Friday the 13^th movies, where Jason Voorhees (usually him, at least) attacked the campers at Camp Crystal Lake as revenge for their neglect when he was a child.  Until he wasn’t in Crystal Lake, that is.

Since this past Friday was the 13^th of July, it was the perfect time to toss another Friday the 13^th movie into the mix.  This time, it was the first sequel to move away from the standard camp and cabin setting that the Voorhees killings typically took place in.  Instead, he went on a trip with a bunch of high school seniors.  That was the basic idea behind Friday the 13^th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan.

Jason Takes Manhattan was about a group of high school seniors heading out on a boat cruise.  Rennie Wickham (Jensen Daggett) was a girl who wasn’t originally going to come on the trip until she was convinced by her teacher, Colleen Van Deusen (Barbara Bingham), to face her fear of water and take the trip with the graduating class.  Her uncle, Charles McCulloch (Peter Mark Richman) disapproved of the decision, saying she wasn’t ready.  Her fears would truly be put to the test as Jason Voorhees (Kane Hodder) snuck on board and began killing the teens.  Some of them escaped the ship and took a life boat to Manhattan, where Jason followed and stalked them through the streets of the Big Apple.

The Friday the 13^th franchise is an interesting slasher franchise to look at.  Much like the Halloween franchise, it mutated as it went on.  The difference was that the Halloween franchise went crazy with retcons and mythology, where the Friday the 13^th franchise was more about what kind of situations Jason could be a part of.  Jason Takes Manhattan was one of the many attempts at trying something new with the franchise, though it wasn’t nearly the first.

The first Friday the 13^th movie that was included in the Sunday “Bad” Movies was the fifth installment: A New Beginning.  Prior to that point, the franchise had been a simple slasher series.  Every movie would take a bunch of teens, put them in a precarious situation near or in Camp Crystal Lake, and have them killed by a member of the Voorhees family.  Of course, it started with Pamela trying to get revenge for the death of her son.  The sequels would have Jason returning and killing for his death as well as his mother’s.  He would be killed my Tommy Jarvis in the fourth movie.

Friday the 13^th: A New Beginning then centered itself on Tommy Jarvis.  Jason Voorhees was dead, but Tommy was still seeing him in hallucinations.  He had post-traumatic stress disorder because of the horrific events that he had experienced with Jason.  He was at a halfway house with other troubled teens when a copycat killer started murdering people.  This would seem like any other Friday the 13^th movie up to that point if it weren’t for the focus on Tommy Jarvis and his PTSD.  The audience watched as he sank deeper and deeper into his own mind while things fell apart around him.  It culminated in a final moment that could have spun the franchise in a new direction.

The franchise didn’t go in that new direction.  The people behind Friday the 13^th’s sixth installment backtracked on the revelations of A New Beginning and brought Jason back to life in Jason Lives.  This was a fairly standard Friday the 13^th installment that didn’t spend too much time trying anything new, outside of the kills.  It’s a slasher franchise, so there have to be some semi-innovative, iconic murders.

Skipping forward to the seventh Friday the 13^th outing, The New Blood, the franchise was now going to some strange places for what originally started as a realistic, sex and violence slasher series.  Instead of going up against simple sex crazed, partying teens, Jason Voorhees was in a head-to-head battle against a psychokinetic teenage girl.  For whatever reason (probably to try and keep it fresh), the people behind the movies thought that adding supernatural powers to the protagonist would be a way to continue the franchise.  It was a choice that wouldn’t come back in later movies.

Jason Takes Manhattan went back to the standard slasher roots, taking away the supernatural element that had been present in its predecessor.  It did take some notes from A New Beginning by giving a traumatic background to the main character.  There was an event during her childhood, involving water, which had influence over her present day fear of water.  It was comparable to Tommy Jarvis’s traumatic experience with Jason, and tied into the present day predicament, much like it did in A New Beginning.  It didn’t end the same way, but it was nice to have that little bit of depth to the character.

What really made the movie stand out among the other Friday the 13^th movies was the setting.  The movies, up to this point, stuck mostly to the camp setting that originated with the first film.  People went to their cabins and were attacked.  It was all around Crystal Lake.  For the first time, Jason was going to depart from the place that had been his home, and go abroad.  He was on the open waters of the lake and the Atlantic Ocean.  He was on the streets of Manhattan.  It was as far from his normal killing grounds as he had ever been.

The weird part was that, although Jason Takes Manhattan had taken Jason far away from Camp Crystal Lake, most of the bloodshed felt like it could have come straight from any of the other Friday the 13^th entries.  There weren’t many that felt like they needed the boat or city setting to actually happen.  They were fairly standard.  A hot rock to the stomach.  A murder in a room set up for a dance.  A harpoon through the gut.  They could have happened at the camp.  The only difference was the location.

The ninth entry in the Friday the 13^th saga, Jason Goes to Hell, changed up the formula of the series in a big way.  Jason was killed early in the movie, but that didn’t stop the mayhem.  His spirit lived on.  Somehow, the evil presence of Jason’s body made a coroner eat his heart, and Jason became a part of the coroner.  His murderous spirit would hop from body to body until he could resurrect himself through some family-related magic.  It made Jason into the supernatural being he had become, after coming back to life time and time again.  Jason Goes to Hell also added Creighton Duke to the series, which was a character that could have breathed new life into things had this not been intended to be the final film.

It wouldn’t be the end, however, as Jason X came out.  The tenth installment took Jason to space where he could do his slasher stuff to a space station.  It was as far as he could possibly be from Camp Crystal Lake.  He wasn’t even on Earth.  Some science fiction elements were tossed into the story as well.  Nanobots turned Jason into Uber Jason.   Jason was cryogenically frozen.  An android was on the space station.  Jason Goes to Hell was a weird shift away from the slasher genre, while Jason X went back to it but shifted hard into a science fiction slasher.  The franchise didn’t know what it was.

The final step in the evolution of the Friday the 13^th franchise from its slasher roots into all out mayhem was the crossover with A Nightmare on Elm Street.  Freddy vs. Jason saw the two slasher villains going head-to-head.  It wasn’t as off the rails as the previous two Friday the 13^th films, but it was a crossover between two franchises that saw Jason once again not in Camp Crystal Lake.  He was resurrected by Freddy Krueger to bring fear to the teenagers of Springwood, Ohio.  Instead of just bringing fear, he started killing them, which began a feud with the other killer.  It’s not too bonkers in terms of going away from the slasher genre.  It’s a perfectly fine slasher movie.  The only real thing that took it away from where the Friday the 13^th movies were was that it was a crossover.

After four fairly straight forward slasher movies that felt true to one another, the Friday the 13^th franchise started changing things up.  It started slowly with a deeper protagonist and a copycat killer.  Eventually it went to body-swapping, and science fiction in space.  The Friday the 13^th franchise was always trying something new to keep itself different from the other slasher franchises.  It might not have succeeded every time, but at least it tried.

Each of the three big slasher franchises of the 1980s went off the rails by the end of their runs.  Halloween was convoluted with too much mythology surrounding Michael Myers and had to repeatedly reboot itself to fix things.  A Nightmare on Elm Street turned Freddy into a more comedic character as time went on, before getting super meta with New Nightmare.  Then there was the Friday the 13^th franchise which always tried to push the boundaries of where/what they were.  It’s these directions of the franchises that were their downfall, but they were also what made them gain their followings.  They might be bad.  Some of them are very bad.  They can be fun, though, and if you’re willing to go to the places that the movies go, you can have a good time too.

You might have a good time with these notes:

• Friday the 13^th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan was suggested by @rosstmiller, who previously suggested Going Overboard (week 67), Jack and Jill (week 101), Leprechaun in the Hood (week 120), Son of the Mask (week 207), Jaws: The Revenge (week 240), and Battlefield Earth (week 175).
• Two Friday the 13^th movies were covered in the Sunday “Bad” Movies before this week.  They were Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (week 46) and Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (week 85).
• Kane Hodder played Jason in Friday the 13^th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan.  He was also Jason in Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (week 85).
• Ken Kirzinger popped up for a bit in Friday the 13^th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan.  He was in Stan Helsing (week 64).
• Have you seen Jason Takes Manhattan?  Have you seen any Friday the 13^th movies?  What do you think of the direction they took?  Let me know in the comments.
• Are there any movies that you think I should be checking out for the Sunday “Bad” Movies?  Let me know in the comments or on Twitter.  I’m always open to suggestions.
• When I’m watching bad movies, I periodically put up clips of them on Snapchat.  Add me (jurassicgriffin) if you’re interested in that.
• Next week is my birthday, guys!  Sunday.  My birthday.  As such, I decided to schedule a movie that I knew I would enjoy watching and writing about.  That movie is one that I wrote about for another site a couple years ago.  It’s called Dead Sushi.  It’s a horror comedy about sushi that gets zombified and attacks people at an inn.  You’ll read all about it next week.  See you then.