Before Kangaroo Jack deceived a whole generation into believing that the premise of a movie was different than how it was advertised, there was Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. You could also say the same thing about The Full Monty by the way.
By 1989, horror movies were scrapping the bottom of the barrel of filmmaking. Critics detested them. Audiences were staying away. Part of it was the rise of the home video and premium cable markets which made them not as profitable in theaters.
But another reason was that audiences could see through the corporate greed of the studios releasing them. They were so basic and generic. Very few of them at this time were even being released in a wide market. As corporations began to buy up existing independent theaters so they could shut them down and create multiplexes, people were trying to move away from horror to more upscale thrillers like Fatal Attraction.
While the Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street movies were still considered movies made by independent studios, the Friday the 13th franchise had been released almost every year throughout the 1980s by Paramount Pictures. The first movie was an independent production acquired by the studio, the sequels had been produced and released through Paramount and the returns were less and less each time.
A failed attempt to have Jason Vorhees battle Freddy Krueger resulted in the seventh movie basically being Jason vs. Carrie. Produced on a meager budget, it still turned a modest profit. But slasher movies had lost their heydays years earlier. Jason had been killed at the end of the fourth movie only to be resurrected after backlash against the fifth movie.
But there’s only so many times you can make a movie about an unstoppable serial killer targeting horny teenagers that it just becomes redundant. A young filmmaker, Rob Hedden, had been spearheaded by the studio to take the franchise somewhere else where Jason isn’t hanging around Crystal Lake. He thought it would be interesting to set the movie on cruise to create more of a claustrophobic feel while studio executives thought Jason should terrorize a major city.
Hedden decided to combine both concepts. But movies aren’t cheap. And when you can film a movie at a campground , you don’t really have to worry about permits and other expensive measures.
But filming in New York City is expensive, which is why a lot of movies fake it by filming in Canada or on sets. And if you’re going to have Jason Vorhees terrorizing people in the Big Apple, you better make it look real. Unfortunately, with a budget of over $5 million, it still wasn’t enough.
Jason appears briefly in Time Square, but you can clearly see in other scenes it’s filmed elsewhere. Most of the NYC scenes take place either in the subways or in back alleys. So, a lot of people who expected to see Jason Vorhees going through Central Park or other landmarks were disappointed when they went into the theaters during the summer of 1989.
At roughly 100 minutes with credits, this is the longest theatrical release of a Friday the 13th movie or the “Jason Trilogy” through New Line. And Jason doesn’t even appear in Manhattan until about an hour and five minutes into the movie. And like I said, most of the action then takes place in back allies, rooftops and subways stations.
There is something humorous about people on the subways in NYC looking at Jason in his hockey mask as just another New Yorker. Or during the few scenes in which he’s in Time Squares, he kicks over a boombox of some young punks and then casually shows him his face as they realize they shouldn’t mess with him.
Kane Hodder reprises his role as Jason again and he’s by far the best in my opinon. Considering that he’s playing the undead version of Jason, he does bring a different style and execution (no pun intended) to the role. It’s just a shame that he wasn’t given a good movie. The marketing for this movie was iconic with a commercial beginning with a man standing at the waterfront looking at Manhattan as “New York New York” plays. As the camera zooms closer, he turns around and reveals it’s Jason.
Hodder even appeared in make-up on The Arsenio Hall Show to advertise the movie. But the whole segment consists of Hall uncomfortably asking him questions to which he doesn’t respond and look around the set. There was even some controversy as they did a variation of the “I Love New York” campaign that had to be pulled.
So, a lot of people were very disappointed to see the same type of characters from previous movies pop up for a few scenes only to be killed. There’s not really much you can say about them as it’s a group of high school graduates on a cruise to NYC. There’s the token black guy, the nerdy guy and the sexually attactive woman who all meet their fate.
The main protagonist is Rennie Wickham (Jensen Daggett) who has a fear of water. She’s also on the cruise against of her overbearing uncle, Charles McCullock (Peter Mark Richman), who is a teacher and one of the chaperones. Richman overacts maniacally like a villain in an older movie. He’s so good at being a creep that his comeuppance is very justified when you think about it.
Yet, it probably became evident to audiences around the half hour mark that it was still a long way to Manhattan. Hedden is obviously blamed for the movie as even the scenes on the cruise ship feel sloppy with Rennie’s love interest, Sean Robertson (Scott Reeves) basically dropping a line that a lower-level has been flooded and thus the other passengers are probably already dead.
And therein lies the problems, no one really took this production as seriously as they should’ve. They just expected audiences to flock to the theaters as they had before. Even though this was the summer of Batman, that movie had been released a month earlier and Lethal Weapon 2 was also already in theaters as well as the third Indiana Jones movie. People needed a bigger reason to go to the theaters.
The audiences that had grown up on these movies were older and had grown tired of the same old story. Horror movies such as The Lost Boys were able to appeal to audiences better as they became the MTV Generation. Hedden gives the movie a nice needed comedic tone at times. It’s also worth noting that Hodder refused to kick a stray dog Jason would encounter on the streets of NYC because there’s one thing you can’t do in a horror movie is to hurt a dog.
Part of me feels Paramount was looking to dump the franchise off as they have notoriously used “Hollywood accounting” to deny payments of residuals to actors and other crew members.
And the movie became regarded as the worst in the franchise, even considered worse than the fifth movie by some. (In that movie, a copycat is pretending to be Jason.) It’s unknown if more audiences would’ve gone to go see it if more scenes were filmed in NYC rather than the Vancouver area, where it’s shamelessly obvious in several scenes. I’m sure negative word of mouth among loyal fans kept them away.
The movie ended up making just over $14 million in the U.S. markets, the lowest ever. However, I think adjusted for inflation, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday and Jason X might equal or even be lower. However, most critics ravaged it. Surprisingly, Leonard Maltin, no big fan of cheap horror, actually said it was the best in the franchise. It would later be called one of the worst sequels of all time by Entertainment Weekly.
To be honest, I think most of the movies in the franchise function as separate entities. The first movie only has Jason appear in a dream sequence as Pamela Vorhees (Betsy Palmer) is the killer. So, that and the fifth movie consists on their own as buffer movies. The second, third and fourth movie act like trilogy focusing on Jason’s rampage of the Crystal Lake area in 1984. Then, in the sixth movie, he’s resurrected by accident as a more powerful zombie only to disintegrate in toxic waste at the end of this movie.
But I think if you look at it another way, it was like a perfect end to the slasher craze of the 1980s. There’s something eerie about Metropolis theme song, “The Darkest Side of the Night” that adds to the feeling that the franchise has come a long way and evolved .
Also at this time, NYC would go into a transitional phase as the 1990s came about and Times Square become more of a family-friendly tourist attraction. Nothing can stay the same forever.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 