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It also means I've finally watched all the Friday the 13th movies made in the 1980s. It was, informally, the most movies made in any franchise in any decade in history. (Let's not look too closely at the really old series, like the Charlie Chan movies, where they probably made three movies a year.)
With a series that has announced its return multiple times, with such suggestive subtitles as A New Beginning, Jason Lives and The New Blood, I might have reasonably expected Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan to be the first real reimagining of the core elements of the series.
For one, the location would be wholly different than anything we had experienced before. Nary a tall building had been seen at any point in this series thus far.
Secondly, it figured to be -- it should be -- a comedy, with that title.
Yes on the former, not so much on the latter.
Yes I certainly expected the ludicrousness of Jason Voorhees appearing in New York City to be played for laughs, at least on some level. And I guess you can say, it barely attains that "on some level" designation. But this movie is mostly told with a straight face. None of the absurd jokey bits, the kind you might in Gremlins 2, were present here. Jason doesn't chase anybody up the Statue of Liberty. He doesn't appear at the end of a line of Rockettes, kicking out his legs in the same manner as they do, before cutting the nearest Rockette in half. He doesn't shove a particularly large slice of pizza down someone's throat.
He does chase someone through the subway, and the presence of this subway was the first real evidence that they actually shot in New York. For a while there, I wasn't sure, but the subway and the long escalator into the subway station confirmed it. Later on you get a Times Square shot that also confirms it. Being on location in New York City is more budget than I would have given this film credit for.
Let's pause for a minute to consider this film's perspective on New York, which is funny, and which reminds us this was just before New York got its first big clean-up under Rudy Giuliani. They still considered it to be a bit the 1970s hellhole we saw on screen in films of that era. The opening title sequence, before the action returns to the obligatory opening at Crystal Lake, features a man getting mugged in an alley, and his empty wallet getting discarded by the muggers in a barrel of what appears to be toxic waste. A rat emerges from the liquid, suggesting maybe this waste isn't as toxic as we thought, or at least the rat is impervious to its toxicity. As if to drive home the specific mis-en-scene of this shot, director Rob Hedden holds on this shot that contains the rat, the empty wallet and the barrel of toxic waste for like ten seconds.
We have to get Jason back to life, again, so there's a return to Crystal Lake, where a couple horny teenagers are on a houseboat, ready to get freaky deeky. Some odd combination of a lightning strike, an anchor, and a high voltage line once again resuscitates Jason, who was once again successfully dispatched in the previous movie and has been sunk to the bottom of the lake. But as we know, Jason never stays dead.
How the hell does he get to New York, you ask? Did we even know Crystal Lake was in New York state? Maybe we did.
So he hitches a ride with a boat that's going to New York City by water, though I don't totally understand the logistics of that. It's some sort of school field trip, chaperoned by two bickering teachers, one of whom I recognized from other things. Look I was already sort of falling asleep near the beginning. It's been a busy week.
Speaking of people I thought I recognized from other things, there's an aspiring rock musician on this boat who gets dispatched pretty early on, who I could have sworn was Chrissy Hynde from the Pretenders. It isn't, so never mind.
So then there's a lot of killing on the boat, and finally, about five of them make it to New York, where the stuff we really came for starts happening. And it's pretty disappointing. Not a single Rockette to be seen.
The thing that I did find sort of funny is to see Jason doing his thing with a million random New Yorkers as witnesses. It kind of undercuts the supposed menace of a serial killer, who tends to be alone with his prey in the lead-up to their death. If there are 75 other people looking on, in various states of bemusement/disbelief, in theory, they'd be able to gang up on the killer and neutralize him. Of course, that they don't is consistent with the film's take on New Yorkers and the city itself, as underscored by the toxic waste barrel with the rat. These people might as well just be parts of the scenery for how willing they are to intervene to help somebody other than themselves.
Oh in terms of the rest of the plot, the Final Girl this time is the aquaphobic niece of the male teacher chaperone, who has some kind of kinship to Jason due to her uncle throwing her in Crystal Lake as a child, knowing she couldn't swim but trying to create a "sink or swim" moment in her development. Jason, at that point taking the form of his child self, grabbed her leg but did not drown her, so this girl continues to both "see" and actually see Jason throughout the movie. Hey, it's at least an attempt to give some extra soul to some otherwise pretty soulless proceedings.
Jason gets drowned? melted? dissolved? in a flood of toxic waste at the end, or at least I think that's what happened. If so, it's the first existential threat to his corporeal form in the series. And maybe there will be some sort of weird afterlife depicted in the next film, which took four more years to make, by far the longest drought in the series to that point. It's called Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, and I'll watch it at some point this weekend. That would be -- could be, at least -- a true reimagining of this series.
And of course, it's not actually the final Friday, again. There will be two more movies after that, bringing me up to the end of the month.
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