...yeah, it's a lie.
I know people have been making this joke literally since 1989, but it is. Literally the only parts of this movie's title that are accurate are which Friday the 13th movie this is and the word "Jason".
There is no taking of Manhattan.
There's barely any Manhattan.
I mean it.
...let's just get on with it. I'm already not happy with having to review this to begin with.
Alright, so last time, we saw Tina Shephard - a psychic with very vaguely defined powers that included telekinesis and raising the dead - defeat Jason by bringing her father back from the dead long enough to have him chain the Crystal Lake killer to the bottom of Crystal Lake once again.
...just to let you know that you can literally skip the previous film and miss nothing.
...you can also skip this film and miss nothing.
Mind you, you'll have to contrive a reason why Jason got out of the lake after the events of Jason Lives and ended up hunted down by the FBI at the beginning of Jason Goes To Hell, but... honestly, yeah, just go with that. The massacre in Jason Lives coupled with the massive weekend-long massacre Jason committed in 1984 was enough to get the attention of the FBI and they came looking. Let's go with that.
Getting into the plot, such as it is, a young couple is on a boating excursion and the boyfriend is explaining the origin of Crystal Lake's most prolific serial killer. Then he pulls a prank on her involving a hockey mask and a prop knife before his boat's anchor cuts into an electrical cord and resurrects Jason, who proceeds to get aboard the board, steal the boyfriend's hockey mask, and kills them both.
Apparently, Tina's ghost father was on break at the time.
Also, Tina was on break at the time because Lar Park Lincoln asked Paramount for more money.
Also, why does the hockey mask the boyfriend uses for his prank have the exact same axe mark from Part 3?!
No, really, it's the same mark! I'd ask the same of how Tommy got a hold of the mask in Jason Lives, but the mask did at least exist at the end of The Final Chapter. Improbable as it might be, I could see how he would at least be physically capable of acquiring it. Tina destroyed the mask with telekinesis during the final fight in The New Blood.
So someone would have had to replicate it exactly.
How?!
This becomes the least of this movie's problems when Jason somehow ends up washing out of Crystal Lake and onto a fishing boat that the movie's crew really wants us to think is a cruise ship. This is where the biggest lie of the film is revealed. 'Jason takes Manhattan'? No, more like 'Jason killing teenagers on a fishing boat', as a good two-thirds of the film... takes place on this boat. We'll get into the why of that later on, but needless to say the excuse does not make the end result any better.
So, you have your main cast, but the only three people who actually matter are Rennie (Jensen Daggett), Sean (Scott Reeves), and Charles (Peter Mark Richardson). Mostly because 2/3 of them actually end up surviving the film. Charles is Rennie's uncle, having taken over her parenting after her parents came down with a terrible case of "We don't want to be in this plot"-itis. He also tried to cure Rennie of her aquaphobia by tossing her into Crystal Lake.
Because he's a dick.
Also, Rennie wants to become a writer or something and she keeps having visions of Jason, because it's too little too late to skimp out on the psychic mumbo jumbo eight movies into the franchise. Why exactly is she having visions of Jason? Because the Kool-Aid man is red. Also, it's implied that she saw baby Jason when she was being drowned by Charles, but it doesn't look like Jason from any other movie and by that point in the timeline, Jason should have been chained down to the bottom of the lake, not a child and-
...oh, and Sean. He's there. And he's a sort of, sort of not love interest for Rennie. I think. Maybe. It's not clear.
I will say three things to this film's credit. Number one: We see the return of Kane Hodder in one of the best Jason designs in the franchise (although I'm partial to his look in the previous film, myself), and Kane Hodder is so synonymous with the role even by this point that he's showing up in the main credits. Number two: Some of the deaths are creative this time around, though generally get cut down too much to really be enjoyed. Number three: It gave us a frankly badass theme song.
I'm not even kidding, I know it's about New York and I use it while writing Seattle By Night, just to give you an idea of what we're working with.
And now, we can get back to the raging.
So, the ship sinks and the five survivors dawdle around on a life raft until the heat death of the universe until they reach the second unit footage of New York. Because, the secret of Jason Takes Manhattan is this: there is no Manhattan. So little of this film is set in New York that Paramount frankly should have been sued for false advertising. By most estimates, less than a minute of footage that was shot in New York actually made it into the movie. The rest was done in Vancouver and - even more shockingly - Los Angeles.
Two places that are... y'know... not New York.
There's no rampage of Jason through the streets of New York, like the reveal trailer all but outright promised word for word to audiences in 1989. There honestly are all but maybe one scene that's set in Time Square any scenes that are actually in New York.
This, however, does not come close to the hilarious confusion that is the ending of the film. Paramount ordered writer-director Rob Hedden to not kill off Jason Voorhees as they thought it would write future sequels into a corner... so, he came up with what is frankly one of the biggest WTF?! moments in the history of the franchise.
...so, toxic waste floods the sewers of New York every night, and getting washed in this reverts Jason into being a child again.
...
...
...exactly, Carrie. Exactly.
Yeah, for some reason, they decided to wash Jason in toxic waste and he gets reverted to being a child at the end of the movie. And then Rennie and Sean just leave him there because... reasons? I honestly have no idea and it's something that gets completely ignored by the next film.
Hedden had originally approached Paramount with two separate ideas - a sequel set on a boat and a sequel set in New York. Paramount liked both ideas and so the writer-director performed the fusion dance and put the two ideas together, and so we get that weird dichotomy where nothing is actually happening for large swathes of the film and yet it still feels horrifically bloated and padded.
Now, to not put everything on Rob Hedden, the lack of New York in the movie was largely due to Paramount slashing the budget multiple times during production, so many of the things that were in the original script such as a big scene on the Brooklyn Bridge or Jason rampaging through a packed Madison Square Garden had to be cut. The film had a budget of somewhere around 5 to 5 and 1/2 million by the end of it, and ended up making a box office gross of around $14 million, making it the lowest grossing film in the franchise to date. I can see why.
I might blow the dust off of the old MadCap Fixes Movies moniker sometime later and fix it, but it honestly comes down to one thing - Hedden should have picked one concept or the other, not both. Both certainly have so much potential. Throwing Jason into a major metropolitan area and letting him hack his way through the mean streets would be an interesting concept to explore. On the other side of that, him being stuck on a boat - an isolated area with very little chance of escape or rescue - with a bunch of teenagers to hack up, could also make for a very interesting, even tense and atmospheric slasher film.
This film used to piss me off, but now it just makes me sad. There was so much that could have been done to make this better. So many choices that could have at least made a passable film if not a good one in the franchise. As it stands, it was so bad that Paramount decided to sell the rights to New Line Cinema. Four years later, they would produce Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday, a film we will discuss next year. Spoiler warning: It was a very controversial entry into the Friday the 13th series!
Be there when we take it on!
As for next week, we're going to start on a new franchise. One that I've referenced here before, many, many times. Which one, you ask? Well, I don't want to spoil the surprise. Needless to say, you definitely want to be here come October 16th. After all...
We have such sights to show you...
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan is brought to us by Paramount Pictures.
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