Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan is a 1989 American slasher film written and directed by Rob Hedden. The eighth installment in the Friday the 13th franchise and a sequel to Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, it stars Jensen Daggett, Scott Reeves, Peter Mark Richman, and Kane Hodder reprising his role as Jason Voorhees from the previous film. Set one year after the events of The New Blood, the film follows Jason as he stalks a group of teenagers on a boat to New York City. It was the final film in the series to be distributed by Paramount Pictures in the United States until 2009, with the subsequent Friday the 13th installments being distributed by New Line Cinema.
Filming took place primarily in Vancouver, British Columbia, with additional photography in New York City's Times Square and in Los Angeles. At the time of its production, Jason Takes Manhattan was the most expensive film in the series, with a budget of over $5 million. It received substantial attention for its initial marketing campaign, featuring Jason Voorhees slashing through the "I Love New York" logo with a knife, which was later retracted after the New York City tourism committee filed a complaint against Paramount.
Released on July 28, 1989, Jason Takes Manhattan grossed $14.3 million at the domestic box office, making it the poorest-performing film in the Friday the 13th series to date. The film received mostly negative reviews by critics and fans for its plot and humor, as well as a failure to live up to its premise. The next installment in the series, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, was released in 1993.
Plot
While aboard a houseboat on Crystal Lake, teenager Jim tells his girlfriend Suzi the legend of Jason Voorhees, before playing a prank on her with a hockey mask, similar to Jason's old mask, and a prop knife. The boat's anchor damages some underwater cables that shock Jason's body, who was dragged down there by the spirit of Tina Shepard's father, and revives him. He sneaks on board, takes the mask, and kills Jim with a speargun before impaling Suzi.The next morning, the SS Lazarus is ready to set sail for New York City with a graduating senior class from Lakeview High School, chaperoned by biology teacher Dr. Charles McCulloch and English teacher Colleen Van Deusen. Colleen brings Charles's niece Rennie Wickham along for the trip despite her aquaphobia, much to his chagrin. Jason sneaks on board and kills rock star-wannabe J.J. with her guitar. That night, a young boxer who lost his match to champion Julius is killed by Jason in the ship's sauna. Rennie, searching for her pet Border Collie Toby, discovers prom queen Tamara Mason and her friend Eva doing drugs. Charles nearly catches them moments later, and Tamara pushes Rennie overboard, believing she told on them. She then uses video student Wayne Webber to record Charles in a compromising situation with her but rejects Wayne's advances afterward. Jason kills Tamara with a shard of a broken mirror after she showers.
Rennie sees visions of a young Jason in different forms throughout the ship. Jason kills Admiral Robertson and his first mate Jim. Rennie's boyfriend and Captain Robertson's son, Sean, discover them and tell the others before calling for an emergency. Eva finds Tamara's body and flees. Jason chases Eva into the disco room, where he strangles her to death on the dance floor. The students agree to search for Jason while Charles decides that the deckhand is responsible. However, the deckhand is found with a fire axe in his back. Jason tosses student Miles Wolfe into the radio transmitter tower to his death, and Julius is knocked overboard. In the hold of the ship, Wayne comes upon J.J.'s body and is thrown into an electrical box by Jason. Wayne's corpse catches fire and causes the ship to take on water. With the other students that were left in the disco room seemingly dead, Charles, Colleen, Rennie, and Sean escape aboard a life raft and discover that Toby and Julius are still alive. The five then row away as the Lazarus sinks.
They row to New York City, where Jason stalks them through the streets. Rennie is kidnapped by Homes and Jojo, a pair of drug addicts, and the group splits up to find help. Julius fights Jason on a rooftop but becomes exhausted after Jason does not go down after a series of punches, and then gets decapitated by a single punch from Jason. Rennie escapes from Jason when he kills the punks that kidnapped her. She runs into Sean, and they reunite with the teachers and the NYPD before Jason kills the officer who is helping them. Rennie crashes a police car after a vision of Jason distracts her. Colleen is incinerated in the car when it explodes, and it is revealed that Charles is responsible for Rennie's fear of water, having pushed her into the lake as a child. They leave him behind, and Jason drowns him in a barrel of toxic waste.
Jason chases Rennie and Sean into the subway, where Sean incapacitates Jason by pushing him onto the third rail. When Jason revives, he chases them through Times Square to a diner and then into the sewers, where they encounter a worker. He warns them that the sewers will be flooded with toxic waste at midnight. Jason appears and kills the worker before knocking Sean unconscious. Rennie throws a vat of toxic waste into Jason's face, causing his skin to melt away. She and Sean climb a ladder as Jason staggers after them. The sewers flood, and Jason is reminded of his childhood drowning and vomits water. The wastewater overcomes Jason, washing his body away. When the water recedes, Rennie once again sees her vision of Jason as an unconscious child for the final time, finally conquering her longtime fear. Sean and Rennie return to the street, reuniting with Rennie's dog Toby in Times Square.
Cast
In addition, Amber Pawlick and Timothy Burr Mirkovich appear as young Rennie and young Jason, respectively, and Todd Caldecott and Tiffany Paulsen appear in the film's open as Jim Miller and Suzi Donaldson. Sam Sarkar and Michael Benyaer appears as gang members Homes and Jojo. Fred Henderson appears as Chief Petty Officer Jim Carlson, David Jacox appears as a boxer, Roger Barnes appears as an Irish NYPD offier and David Longworth appears as a sanitation engineer. Ken Kirzinger, who would go on to portray Jason Voorhees in Freddy vs. Jason, appears uncredited in this film as the Times Square diner cook who confronts Jason. Kirzinger served as a stunt coordinator for this film, and doubles as Jason Voorhees in two short stunts.Production
Development
After the disappointing box-office gross of Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, director John Carl Buechler began developing a follow-up which reprised the character of Tina Shepard again facing off against Jason Voorhees after her release from an insane asylum. Meanwhile, Lar Park Lincoln, who had portrayed Tina Shepard, co-wrote an alternative screenplay which had Tina working as a psychologist for troubled girls. Lincoln's co-star in The New Blood, Kevin Spirtas, also wrote a screenplay which recast the events of The New Blood into a long dream, with his character Nick Rogers as the killer. Paramount, however, opted to assign the project of a follow-up to writer-director Rob Hedden, marking his debut feature.A former employee of Universal Studios, Hedden strove to devise a screenplay in which the antagonist, Jason Voorhees, would travel outside of the setting of Camp Crystal Lake, the primary location of the previous seven films. "The biggest thing we could do with Jason is to get him out of that stupid lake where he's been hanging out," Hedden said. One of Hedden's original ideas was to set the film solely aboard a cruise ship with Jason hiding in the lower levels, described by Hedden as "a little bit of Das Boot and a little bit of Aliens, with a claustrophobic feeling storm at sea and that sort of stuff." The alternate concept was to place Voorhees in a large city, such as New York. Hedden commented: "Everything about New York was going to be completely exploited and milked. There was going to be a tremendous scene on the Brooklyn Bridge. A boxing match in Madison Square Garden. Jason would go through department stores. He'd go through Times Square. He'd go into a Broadway play. He'd even crawl onto the top of the Statue of Liberty and dive off."
Ultimately, after receiving approval from Paramount Pictures of both concepts, Hedden decided to combine them, with the first act of the film occurring aboard a ship, and the second on the streets of Manhattan. This decision was mainly due to budgetary restrictions from Paramount, as filming exclusively in New York City cost more than the studio was willing to spend. In addition to the shift in setting, Hedden stated he wanted to examine the character of Jason Voorhees as a child, which appears in the film in the form of hallucinations experienced by Rennie Wickham, the heroine. To conceal the fact that it was a Friday the 13th film, the initial working script circulated under the working title Ashes to Ashes.