I have to say, I'm quite surprised to be giving you the minority opinion on Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. Jason fans really really loathe this movie, and consider it to be the worst of the series. To add insult to injury, Leonard Maltin gives it two stars and says that it's one of the best! Somehow, I found this entry to be the most satisfying since Friday the 13th: A New Beginning. It's toned down a bit from the glossy campiness of the last Friday the 13th film, but it stays in your stomach longer.

And at its best it is often really tremendously powerful. Maybe I was just feeling a little overly sensitive last night, maybe it's because I had just finished reading Iris Chang's "The Rape of Nanking,” but there is a scene in the film that is somehow one of the most revolting that I've seen in a long time. Two thugs take the heroine into a back alley. They hold her down and inject her arm with heroin, so she'll be high while they rape her. The one doing the raping tells his friend that they'll need a lot of this stuff as they plan to go all night. Why do they want her to be high exactly? That's not an attack against the film's mastery of logic, but a question of, "What exactly is the nature of these guys' perversion?" They say something about how it will feel better if she's high, but how will it make her feel better? It seems that by injecting junk into her, they hope to make her more frightened. The goal of rape is basically to humiliate your victim. You want to make them feel ashamed of what they are. You want them to remember you, how terrified they were when you used them. In other words, rapists know full well about the ramifications of their acts, and that is the whole point. It's not as much that she asked for it; it's that she deserves it. When the thugs inject that needle into that girl's arm, she doesn't know where it has been or what exactly is in it. That terror is a turn-on for them. Also part of the connection of forced drug injection is this idea that they want to somehow fill her with filth. In effect they are raping her with both their dicks and with a needle, reminding this clean-cut teenage white girl that she is in now in Manhattan and they are giving her a disease that she'll keep for a long time.

Man, rape is one of most profoundly hateful acts that humankind could have cooked up. After all, it wouldn't have been a Rape of Nanking if the Japanese army didn't rape Nanking's women and young girls. On that sort of note, going back to that clean-cut white girl crack, the thugs are Hispanic. The scene makes a statement about ethnicity in New York, namely that non-whites are animalistic and hateful. It's awfully gratuitous and offensive, but I'm nonetheless fascinated in that which is politically incorrect and destructive to the social fabric. The racist slant is thorny; you know that it's wrong but it nonetheless hits a chord. It's not embarrassing like a good deal of racist imagery, but confrontational and angry. When I evoke the Rape of Nanking in a review of Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, I want to stress that I'm not trying to trivialize that any more than I would trivialize some image or event within the Holocaust, although that has been exposed enough to perhaps have grown a bit more of a skin. I'm trying to say that this sequence in this Friday the 13th movie is really in that league of atrocity.

The rape doesn't actually happen. Jason breaks into the scene and kills the thugs. I suppose that if director Rob Hedden really was sincere about the visceral horror of the moment he would have gone through with it. But the scene is powerful enough to be worth mentioning all the same. A couple fans complained that none of the characters really act like what they just went through really bothered them. The hero in the movie has his father killed, and he doesn't seem to be at all bothered by it. Even more curious is the lack of the aftermath of that attempted rape. I can't say that it is an unsound argument. The terror is muted when we realize that the survivors are going to be able to go on with their lives. This was also a problem with the far too happy ending to the sixth entry, Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives. The series had made fairly good use of the Tommy Jarvis character only to say goodbye to all the torments that he faced by actually getting him a girl and the promise of a happy ending?!

Following the first Friday the 13th film, the survivor, played by Adrienne King, is plagued with memories of the insane Mrs. Voorhees. In the second she gets stuck in the melon with an ice pick, in effect making her Jason's very first kill. It was a great joke. The character hadn't died in the first entry, and so she spends all the time before the sequel basically waiting and dreading the day that she finally gets it. The power and absurdity comes in the lack of a conclusion. There is something very nicely insane about the first three films in the series. They actually try and pick up where the last film left off. Adrienne King survives the first and dies in the second, and the survivor of the second is seen on TV by a cranky modern couple in the third. These are of course movies where the plot consists of mostly filler, and so this idea of hooking them all up in one long story helps to underline the meaningless of it all. Like the last two films in the series (6 and 7), the filmmakers seem to want to create a feeling of closure for the audience. It's not a good idea. The lack of closure was a virtue of the series. We don't want to see these characters grow or get on with their lives. We quite simply do not like them that much. It's interesting to me that the two surviving characters get on with their lives in Manhattan. Even in being filled with trash, graffiti and rapists, it’s home for them. I think that the feeling is sincere. The villains in New York are real, but defeatable. You can protect yourself from them. Whereas Jason will hunt you down and it is basically a forgone conclusion that he is going to get you.

The film is adamant about establishing Jason as a mythological figure, a boogeyman. The heroine's uncle forced her to learn how to swim by throwing her in Crystal Lake and telling her that if she doesn't swim, the little boy Jason, who had drowned years ago in that lake, would come and get her. She never swims again. Destroying Jason is, of course, destroying her fear of autonomy. With Jason gone again, she can now swim, grow up, and basically live again peacefully. There is certainly something postmodern about the idea of Jason taking Manhattan, which is why it's a pretty good gimmick. He emerges from the sea onto Manhattan, an immortal mythological being journeying into a temporal myth-less environment. New York is unable to really wrap itself around Jason. When the heroes run into a restaurant and exclaim to a waitress that a maniac is trying to kill them, she wisecracks, "Welcome to New Yawk.” The citizens of New York are unable to recognize that Jason is not just any maniac; I mean he's Jason for Christ's sake! That's part of the humor; New Yorkers (well, in this movie at the very least) are an irreligious arrogant bunch. They know that they have seen it all, and can deal with it all, and so when they encounter Jason they can't as much muster surprise or terror as much as frustration that they can't take him down the same way that they can take down your typical maniac who’s trying to kill you.

One of the most common complaints that I have heard about Jason Takes Manhattan is that Jason doesn't arrive on-shore until the last fifteen or twenty minutes of the film. The rest of the time, he's on a ship going to Manhattan. They apparently didn't have enough money to shoot much footage in Manhattan, or the faux-Manhattan, up north. I wouldn't say that the title isn't misleading, but then again, I'm not sure that there was that much more that could have been said about Jason being in Manhattan. It would have been sort of a good gag to see him take over famous New York landmarks or something, but that is perhaps a different movie for a different time. In this case, it seems to me that less is better. In order for the scenes in the city to have very much significance, I think that it is necessary to establish a Camp Crystal Lake-like setting on the ship.

Series creator Sean Cunningham's DeepStar Six (released the same year as Jason Takes Manhattan) has the tagline "Not all aliens come from space,” implying that some aliens come from deep underwater. A deep body of water is an obvious symbol for the subconscious, as the planet is covered with it but we only skim the surface of it. So basically there could be all sorts of things going on down there that we know nothing about. Aliens that are underwater are just as alien as those that come from outer space. The irony is that they are here with us all along. The film takes great pains at establishing then that Jason is one of those "monsters of the id" as they said in Forbidden Planet. Jason is even introduced with the phrase, "according to legend.” The heroine keeps seeing Jason as a little boy, as that is how she has always seen him since her uncle told her about his drowning. She has a certain kinship with Jason. They were both left to drown in Crystal Lake, and their failure to swim in the water is an all-purpose symbol of their inability to operate on the level of everyone else.

The gore in the film has been said to have been toned down as the MPAA was cracking down. The first kill was nonetheless slightly shocking for me; Jason sticks a guy with a spear gun and pulls out some guts. When he pulls out he is surprised by a splash of fluid. The most sadistic kill is of Kelly Hu, being choked in mid-air, only to be thrown violently to the ground when Jason is finished. This stuff is harsher than its reputation suggests. I do have to say that I don't feel that it has the same sort of impact as previous entries. Yet again, the murders are not penetrations, or "rapes by steel.” (Well, actually the first two, happening soon after or maybe it was just the preliminaries of coitus, were murders by a penetrating weapon.) The killings lose that creepy feeling of sensuality. The connection between the heroine and Jason is stronger, the former being a creation from her subconscious, but Jason doesn't act out of sexual jealousy or frustration as was the case in some previous entries. Thinking somewhat heavily on this issue, I've come to realize that Jason's existence is similar to that in Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood. Jason;s (and his controller's) goal is again simply autonomy and emotional peace and not sexual intimacy. Thus when Jason is defeated, the heroine is saying that she has been able to conquer her demons, and we can develop closure. Closure is much more difficult to establish in the earlier reading of Jason as a sexual being. If there is a motif to Jason's killings, for a while it seems that it may be a sort of "turning the sin against the sinner.” The fornicating couple is killed through a penetrating weapon. A rock-and-roller is beaten to death with her guitar. A film geek is electrocuted. One of the druggie thugs is stabbed with a needle. And so on. In everybody's favorite kill, Jason knocks a cocky boxer's head clean off. I don't think that Jason kills, in this case, as a product of any conservative dogma or anything. If anything he kills the people who the audience wants him to kill. I suppose that you could argue that the target audience for these sorts of movies is sexually inexperienced, or mostly inexperienced in anything. After all, they're getting high off watching a Friday the 13th movie.

I think that a better explanation may be that these characters are just plain annoying. In previous entries, I think it was the case that the audience wanted to distance the characters into the roles of victims in a Friday the 13th film. If they related to them, that would be a confession that their lives really are that shallow and meaningless. In this film, I don't think that there is any threat of the audience relating to the characters. They exist as stereotypes, and at times it may be the stereotype that is being executed. It can be read almost like a Spike Lee routine, or Eric Harris' tirade on niggers, spics and racist white people. Tough-guy blacks, gang-banging Latinos and Asians with scholarships all get executed by Jason. Maybe it's strictly racism, or maybe it's an attack on the way we confine minorities into those roles. In other words Jason isn't attacking Latinos; he's attacking the idea of the gang-banging Latino. Somewhat more comfortable, I suppose, is the way that some of Jason's other targets include a tight-assed principal, who complains about how one of his students was paddling the boat through the night while he himself took a nap; and the traditionally skanky blonde, who snorts cocaine and gets slaughtered by Jason in the shower with a shard of a broken mirror.

The abundance of broad stereotypes gives the film a healthy campy feel. They are far far from actual human beings, and so we can laugh at their deaths in good conscience. The knocked-off head is still my favorite gag. When it lands in a dumpster the lid slams shut. The film doesn't have the superior attitude that Jason Lives did. It's funny, but funny with a relatively straight face. Yes, even when Jason scares off some punks by lifting up his mask and showing how ugly he is, or the part where he sees a billboard for hockey masks, the film does not go into the depths of jokery as Jason Lives.

Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan was the very last film of the series to be released by Paramount. They apparently found them to be very embarrassing, but wanted to keep making them as they were extremely profitable. This film seemed to have turned a profit, the total gross was about 15 million on a 5 million budget (maybe double the budget to make up for the cost of marketing) but it was still the least successful of the Friday the 13th franchise. Grosses had dropped significantly after Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, maybe because it was the best of the series, maybe because people realized that the subtitle, The Final Chapter, was a horribly cynical bald-faced lie.

In 1993, New Line Cinema, for better or for worse, started producing them. The inclusion of the DVD extras on New Line Cinema's releases provides a stark contrast to the ones that Paramount included on theirs. While it is not really true to say that New Line releases in general are more extra heavy than Paramount, it sure seems like it most of the time. If they smell out any sort of niche market for a film, they'll go for it. New Line seems to like Jason fans and seems to honestly want to try and satisfy them. Paramount doesn't. They don't think that these films are really worthy of any time, attention or respect. In a way, I think I can understand how the New Line Jason films may fail for being over-ambitious. That may explain some of the complaints that I have heard of Jason Goes to Hell and Jason X as being purely fanboy exercises. We'll have to wait and see how they hold up. All the same, however, the idea of actually giving the Friday the 13th films some respect has an undeniable charm to it. I reviewed the first eight films on video. You may very well see me review the last two on DVD.