Saturday, October 19, 2024

Friday Week: Trapped by dark waters, there is no escape—nor do we want it

 
FRIDAY THE 13th PART VIII: JASON TAKES MANHATTAN

1989
Written and directed by Rob Hedden

Spoiler alert: moderate

Note: though based on a fresh watch, this is a re-edited-more-than-I'd-have-liked version of an earlier review written in connection with my annual Halloween-time crossover with Brennan Klein (rarely these days of Popcorn Culture, more commonly of Alternate Ending).  My hopes were to barely change it.  My hopes were dashed, given that significant stretches would have been redundant with things we've already covered in previous entries (particularly my grand unified theories of Friday the 13th criticism), while a lot was simply performative whining that only makes sense in the context of Brennan having control over the programming.  The original will, of course, remain, and it has a lot of neat slasher flick errata insofar as the crossover concept demands I ape the format of Brennan's impiously encyclopedic Census Bloodbath series of 80s slasher film reviews, which I obviously recommend.


Even by 1986, the Friday the 13th series had already reached something of its natural resting place, beyond which the franchise could have continued, but only with desperate effort and by increasingly abandoning the things that made it what it was.  Even so, part of me refuses to believe that Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, after which Paramount would make no more Fridays forever, was entirely unavoidable.  The previous film, 1988's The New Blood, while indeed desperate, had nevertheless inscribed a new franchise formula, which might well have generated any number of moviesat least, had there been a market for them, and had the MPAA not made it virtually impossible to produce slasher films, and had Paramount really still given a shit about the franchise, but of course there are indications that Friday chief Frank Mancuso Jr. had been ambivalent about it for half a decade.

That formula, anyway, is suggested by The New Blood's pitch line, Jason Voorhees vs. Carrie White.  Obviously, the vast majority of specific, IP-based movie monsters were off the table (the whole thing arose as an alternative course of action when New Line Cinema laughed in their faces at their request to use Freddy Krueger, and, I perceive, even mocking Mancuso's overtures by way of an insulting in-joke in 1988's A Nightmare On Elm Street 4).  However, using a knock-off of a specific, IP-based movie monster had worked out surprisingly well, so that the problems of the previous movie really were only "the MPAA sucks" and "sometimes our inexperienced director isn't great at assembling a thriller."  Well, they weren't about to fix those problems, yet it seems like a whole line of such movies could still have been churned out in the dotage years of the franchise: Jason vs. Not the Wolfman, Jason vs. Not the PredatorJason vs. Not the BlobJason vs. Not Jawokay, maybe not that last one, as we'll see.  I don't know what could have possibly given Paramount the impression that they were entitled to Nightmare numbers, but it's not like The New Blood (as opposed to this one) was anything like a true commercial failure: despite one's assumption that it must've been more expensive than your run-of-the-mill Friday movie, it had, in fact, cost almost exactly the same amount of money as Jason Lives (this one cost $2 million more) and done almost exactly the same amount of box office.

But instead of any of that, they did the opposite; instead of bringing new blood to Crystal Lake, they decided what really needed shaking up was the setting.  So, they took Jason out of it.  Then, though this feels like a problem a Goddamn B-movie should never manage to have, when they couldn't decide which of their two new settings to use, they used both.


For no good reason whatsoever, Mancuso had awarded the new Friday to former Universal publicity flack and debutante feature film director, Rob Hedden (he'd written a couple of episodes of the completely-unrelated Friday the 13th anthology TV show; he also wrote this one's screenplay solo), and it scarcely seems like they could have hired anybody, at least anybody who would've consented to being hired for a Friday the 13th film, who had less affection for what the franchise was.  "The biggest thing we could do with Jason is to get him out of that stupid lake," Hedden said in an interview, and while I realize that he was just trying to be funny, I'll tell you, with grave seriousness, it might not be "the lake" that was stupid.  Then again, I'm the one who's voluntarily seen his movie twice.

Hedden came up with two ideas, and each received Mancuso's approval.  I guess they weren't quite mutually incompatible enough for it be impossible to do both simultaneously, though despite loosened purse strings, Paramount probably wouldn't have properly funded either in the best case, and they clearly weren't going to properly fund both.  The movie eventually obtained the title Jason Takes Manhattan, but that was the second idea.  It's the first that actually predominates, and as everyone has observed, the movie is a lot more Jason vs. the S.S. Poseidonnot the crossover I'd have chosenand not much in the way of him Taking Manhattan.  What we get of the latter explains with great clarity why: basically, that Hedden had "an idea" for Jason visiting New York in the same way-and to the same extentsome SNL sketch writers might have had.  "Jason on a boat" at least scans: Jason's something of a water spirit, Crystal Lake has a lake, and while I'd never previously thought of it as an inland port, such things cannot be ruled out.  "Jason in New York," on the other hand, you know that can't amount to much.

Inevitably, the result was the most unrepresentative Friday to date, yet, paradoxically, still the culmination of all the series' most decadent trends.  In the face of the MPAA's clampdown, the Fridays had begun to try compensating for the absence of viscera with a surplus of victims, and it had never worked, and it had also had the side-effect of warping the series's storytelling out of shape in order to bring in each film's increasingly-unwieldy tonnage of meat.  Jason Takes Manhattan's scenario (classmates on a boat) seems like it should've been proof against the scattershot narrative that had plagued A New Beginning and Jason Lives, especially when it boasts its own unique problem, the basic fact that it's the longest of all Fridaysthe difference between "~90 minutes" and "100 minutes" shouldn't be profound, yet when every other Friday operates exclusively in the Perfect Runtime Zone, you feel it.  Presumably, Hedden thought smooshing two movies into one justified that runtime, but as I've said, he never actually had that second movie.  Still, it should have, at a minimum, protected his one-and-a-half movies against the vignettish sensation that it winds up having anyway, and Jason Takes Manhattan is where the late-period Friday "variety show" approach collapses.  Now, the plot just completely disintegrates into a balkanized collection of mini-stories, so while every other Friday gave us some feeling of a semi-coherent community, eventually embodied in the vengeance of a Final Girl, Jason Takes Manhattan is the one where it barely feels like its participants have even met before they start to die.

That's because, lazily, it assumes that "classmate" (or, unbelievably, "teacher," because this is the Friday with omnipresent authority figures!) is an automatically meaningful relationship and nothing else needs be added to make it so.  But, as I should summarize the plot sometime, let me now do so as briefly as possible: Jason (Kane Hodder again, good for him) gets on one boat, which leads him to another boat, and he kills most of the people on that boat, and the ones he misses make it ashore to New York City, where they enjoy the city's famous hospitality, but Jason follows them, and eventually they wrap things up in an astoundingly silly way.

Pictured: blocking being adjusted on the fly so that Hodder can even reach her neck.

Well, to add to that slightly, our cast is mostly comprised of students and teachers from Crystal Lake's Lakeview High, and for Lakeview's students' senior trip, the school's sprung for a holiday cruise to NYC.  The whole class is here, but the one who "matters" is Rennie (Jensen Daggett), a big friendless nerd so lame she has to be dragged out to party by a teacher, Ms. Van Neusen (Barbara Bingham), and it's a pity they wasted the "looks like her mother dresses her" quip on the previous Friday's Final Girl, where it wasn't nearly as apropos.  Rennie's reticence, however, is not solely due to awkwardness, but because she's afraid of the water, a character backstory that irritatingly slowly comes to into focus, though the main thing is that she's being haunted by the ghost of Jason in the form of the child that, going by the franchise's always-dubious timeline, drowned in Crystal Lake most of a century ago, while Jasonthe adult revenantstalks her in the (undead) flesh.

That's
 a big hole in the center of the screenplay but not actually any special reason to dislike it: between this and some other, even weirder crap, Hedden clearly had some desire to bring full-on mysticism into Jason's saga, and if that's not necessarily admirable in principle, it isn't an unfair thing to attempt when the overt supernatural would've been front-and-center for three movies now.  But even by Friday standards, it's reckless; it's only even intriguing by the skin of its very teeth, and Hedden's film certainly has no ability to digest whatever ideas it thinks it's playing with, let alone make them important.  (People frequently cite the "toxic waste" finale as especially nutty, and obviously it is, but what struck me this timemay there never be another!is how quietly insanely the "human drama" attached to Rennie and Baby Jason actually plays out: you see, Rennie is going to get vastly more upset about, and the movie expects us to care more about, how she suddenly unearths some light traumatic memories sustained from her uncle's suboptimal swim coaching, and some kind of childhood encounter with Jason's submarine ghost, than she gets about the current events of her life, namely being repeatedly almost killed by a giant zombie, almost raped by New Yorkers, and accidentally manslaughtering her favorite teacher.)


In any case, Rennie hits it off with Sean (Scott Reeves), the son of the boat's captain, well enough for them to cling to one another once Jason's murder-spree goes from chronic to acute.  However, Rennie's presence aboard the boat is opposed by her uncle, Charles McCulloch (Peter Mark Richman), also the vice-principal or somethinghe's the ranking, or at least the loudest, chaperoneand, for reasons that couldn't have even made sense at a time, Hedden's screenplay pits McCulloch against one of the very few other characters who "matter," Tamara (Sharlene Martin), for the title of the franchise's worst named character.

Tamara wins on vileness, given that her subplot involves sexually assaulting McCulloch while filming it for blackmail purposes, this being the kind of teen noir shit that probably shouldn't be broached outside of its own movie (though somehow Tamara's sex crime caper doesn't hold the record for the series' "most reprehensible act short of murder" even as long as this film).  Yet we're certainly not invited to sympathize with McCulloch's predicament, partly because we know it won't make any difference, but also because he easily beats her on obnoxiousness, somehow making you more eager for him to die than the most aggravating prankster stereotype in any earlier Friday.  Maybe that's because he's a grown-up.  Maybe it's because even as the ship is literally exploding underneath him, he keeps barking about how Jason is baloney invented to frighten childrenin other words, turning one of my favorite things about the Fridays, Jason's perpetual retrenchment into folklore, into something intolerableor maybe it's just because Richman's one-dimensional testiness is so utterly miscalibrated, and he survives so long.  In any event, there's also Julius (V.C. Dupree), a tertiary character who's had almost no interaction with any of these people, but graduates to "lead" because he also lives long enough, and I almost like the arbitrary disaster movie-ness of that.  Julius is a boxer who thinks going head-to-head with Jason is a good idea, making him arguably the franchise's dumbest character (he also sends the kids on an infinitely stupid "split up and get him!" Jason hunt), but he's by far the best character in this one.

Oh right, it's not possible to briefly summarize slasher movies.

Otherwise, it's an army of chaff characters drawn from various teen stereotypes, or not even stereotypesthere's a whole group of anonymous survivors who blow up and/or get drowned entirely off-camera.  (I also suspect the amount of yammering here is the reason why Fred Mollin, whose score work last time was a highlight, manages practically nothing here.  Alternatively, Harry Manfredini was doing even more lifting on The New Blood than I thought.)  Now, I'm not going to judge Hedden for passing off a freighter as a party boat, or pretending that his soundstage scenes (or his Vancouver area featured extras) line up with his abbreviated NYC location shooting; but he doesn't even understand that a vessel the size of the SS Lazarus (oh-ho! ha-ha) would probably have a crew slightly larger than three.  Even "three" is counting the salty deck hand (Alex Diakund), who likewise drives his character function into the ground, turning the Coot Cassandra who often shows up into a permanent fixture, seeming to pop up every third fucking shot to offer up one more unheeded warning.  Which is a mite redundant by the time we've seen Jason kill a dozen people.

Well, "seen," in scare-quotes, as a lot of these people die without good gore effects or, in many cases, any gore effects.  Sometimes, this is actually effective: I somewhat like the victim-POV shot where a girl rocker gets brained with her own guitar and blood spatters the camera.  Sometimes, it's just pathetic, and Jason Takes Manhattan seems to want to get out ahead of it, sheepishly offering the lousiest gore effect in the series, and arguably one of the most disappointing gore effects in the entire genre, as its very first kill; this involves Jason gutting the operator of the first boat offscreen, and, I believe, trying to make you think the spear gun's hose covered in syrup is his intestines.  Nothing's that bad again, but very little is good (notwithstanding a flying cranium, the movie's best "gore effects" involve "extremely-close close-ups of objects going through latex" which is only even interesting when the object is a hot sauna rock).  McCulloch's death is a drowning; we don't see a burning body burn after it gets thrown at an exploding console from Star Trek; hell, they make a big slow-motion show of the captain's neck opening up after a machete slice (using, uh, the blunt edge of it), and it essentially does not bleed.

And that's a pity, because Jason Takes Manhattan does some nice things.  This includes the cinematography, courtesy Bryan England, that does some fun stuff with lurid lighting conditions aboard the boat, plus some muscular camerawork; and Hedden offers the occasional visual drollery, like Hodder looking back at us to share Jason's bemusement at a billboard advertisement for hockey, or (in a less like-it-or-lump-it way) a subway car reflecting his mask's red-and-white color scheme.  Plus, as much as I complain about its bloodlessness, this one does have two good kills, including one of my favorites.  The first of them finds Hedden sidestepping the gorelessness, with a nauseatingly long and brutal strangling (which ends, in conformity with the Friday style guide, with seeing if Hodder can throw a prop body clean across the frame even in a medium-long shot)and this also comes with one of the neater stalking sequences in the franchise, in which Jason's chased a victim into the party boat's empty disco room, still full of disorienting lights and sounds, with very subjective editing communicating his victim's terror and the bleakness of her plight.  I'd like it better if it didn't also communicate how Hedder is going to be dealing with the constraints of his new setting; as probably should've been obvious, those constraints are very stark, and something like half of the thriller sequences wind up with Jason just teleporting wherever he needs to be at any given moment, which is scary if you do it a little (more-or-less all the Fridays do it a little), and increasingly annoying if you do it a lot.  And so it sort of emphasizes just how good either one of Jason Takes Manhattan's new ideas were: the boat is too cramped for a good Jason rampage, while New York is simply too open.

The other one, though, is pretty all-time great, giving us as character-driven a death as the series has ever managed with Julius.  It earns the right to play itself out for almost two straight minutes in mostly long-shots, as our amateur boxer exhausts himself attempting to pummel the unpummelable.  It's a perfect Friday death, capturing both the sincerely-presented heroism of a hopeless struggle, while also being goofy and played for mordant laughs.  In either case, it ends with Jason punching my dude's head off:


These high points are precious, but few.  Besides Julius's last stand, the film decisively shifts into almost-uniformly-terrible once it arrives in "New York," a hellscape patterned on the jokes they make about New York in Alaska.  It almost works, in its stale 80s stand-up comedy sort of wayit's not unfunny that a rotting animate corpse would draw no reaction from jaded Manhattanitesbut it sure isn't persistently adept at this, even for the brief period it spends on it.  I can grudgingly accept that Rennie getting immediately abducted by street rapists who are just waiting around for shipwreck victims to wash up (so that we can have "the irony" of Jason being the one to preserve her virtue) "makes sense," given the tenor of the film's parody of urban life; but there's not any excuse for it to need a full reel for that concept to grind itself out.  The movie's often gross in the wrong ways, then, but slasher films are sleazy, and sometimes that won't be modulated correctly, and that's not the end of the world.  But this slasher film did end its world, at least for a while, and it accomplished this by committing a sin far worse than simply being gross, and far worse than any that its predecessors had: it's boring.

Score: 3/10 (oh yes, it went lower this time)

Reviews in this series:
Friday the 13th (Cunningham, 1980)
Friday the 13th Part 2 (Miner, 1981)
Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday (Marcus and Cunningham, 1993)
Jason X (Isaac, 2002)
Freddy vs. Jason (Yu, 2003)
Friday the 13th (Nispel, 2009)

5 comments:

  1. Looking over your suggested ‘Vs’ episodes, it occurs to me that any horror franchise set in the New Jersey backwoods that does NOT consider an entry subtitled ‘The Jersey Devils’ has clearly missed it’s calling.

    Now going with the ORIGINAL Jersey Devil would have been the logical place to start back on the day, but for my money HELLBOY Vs JASON would be an even better use of the title JERSEY DEVILS (If only because Big Red has the range to do goofy and Awesome in a way that fits FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH).

    A less expensive alternative would be to shake up the formula by making the meat for a new entry in the franchise Serious Academics (or at least A Serious Academic, at least one teaching assistant and their student lackeys) seeking to investigate the scientific underpinnings of the apparently inexplicable Murder Zombie at Crystal Lake.

    The most entertaining possible variation on this basic concept would have either the Academic or one of his student assistants being a budding Frankenstein seeking some inspiration (Bonus points if that ‘Good Doctor’ is played by Mr Jeffrey Coombs in the spirit of Herbert West …).

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    1. I hadn't thought about cryptids, and it's a little too southerly, but now I want to see how the Mothman interacts with the concept. Co-starring Richard Gere.

      Kinda like a mad scientist going for Jason, too, it maybe would've helped The New Blood (probably not, as I still don't want the mad scientist we had around) if they'd made that more explicit there.

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    2. If nothing else, a strong suggestion that the ‘Good Doctor’ had deliberately set up that party to pull in Voorhees and see what happened when Tina was exposed to that sort of stress would make the plot depend less on contrived coincidences.

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  2. I remember seeing this as the only reviewed Friday in your archive when I started my binge last year and feared you didn't like the series at all. How wrong I was -- you like it a lot more than me! So according to Letterboxd, as an out-of-10 score, I gave this the same score as your revised rating, though I also gave it a 3 out of 8 on my own site. And yet I feel more affectionately towards this one in retrospect. I guess "in a weird setting" registers in my memory neurons more than "vs. Carrie" or whatever you'd call Part 5. The decapitation punch helps too. (Jason X is basically a TV movie but tickled me similarly. I'll write about that one at some point.)

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    1. Jason X is, I'd say, a lot better than this.

      Both have decapitation punches though! Or maybe it was a wrenching in Jason X, it's not super important.

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