Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with another installment of Out To Sea, a short series where I turn to films that take place on Cruise ships in order to get pointers for my pending jaunt on the Fan2Sea floating Comic-Con experience. I'm a newbie to cruises so I figured instead of Google searching for info on what to expect I'd instead turn to cinema.
So far I've looked to the '90s Stephen Sommers cheesefest Deep Rising for some cruise tips and I figured I'd follow up with Friday the 13th Part VIII – Jason Takes Manhattan, a movie which, as you may have guessed by the title, was shot in Vancouver and takes place mostly on a boat.
I'll start off my revisit of one of the weaker Friday the 13th films with the top 5 things I took away from the film in regards to my upcoming cruise:
1 – If the grizzled crazy old deckhand says this voyage is doomed when I step on board... maybe listen to him and catch the next cruise...
2 – “The Power Room” on board is the best place to shoot my music video as it has “supreme concert hall echo.”
3 – If the 29 year old high school prom queen tries to seduce me in her cabin it's only for blackmail purposes, not because she's actually into me.
4 – Should I end up overboard my only real danger of drowning will be due to child Jason tugging at my feet, so if I kick that little fucker off I'll be fine.
5 – If I find myself on a lifeboat don't worry, I'll be in New York City within a couple hours, no matter where I abandoned ship.
The Friday the 13th films were the dangerous movies of my childhood. Not that they supremely frightened me or anything, but these were the ones you secretly recorded off of cable and brought over to a friend's house during sleepovers. Me and my buddies would get a bit of gore, a bit of nudity and the thrill of watching something naughty one room away from unaware parents.
Because of that all the Friday the 13th films will always hold a place in my heart. I'm not very fond of V, VII, VIII and Jason Goes to Hell, but even those films have moments that trigger pleasant nostalgia centers in my brain. Memories of 1am viewings with friends where we psyched each other up by convincing each other that Jason was out in the darkness beyond the bedroom window begin to surface when I catch Jason showing down between psychic girl in VII. Adult viewings remind me that the rest of that movie is boring as hell, but I'll still have an attachment to moments.
It had been a while since I'd given Jason Takes Manhattan a spin and it's such an odd movie. The franchise was clearly losing steam at this point and now we're at the height of the MPAA targeting and declawing slasher films, so what you get with 8 is a Friday the 13th movie with weak sauce kills, little nudity and an idea grander than its production budget.
And by “grand idea” I mean sail Jason out of Crystal Lake (which I guess connects to the fucking ocean somehow despite being called a lake for 7 movies) and to the Big Apple.
Watching this movie in preparation for a cruise is a silly idea on the surface, but it's even sillier when you see the boat the graduating Crystal Lake students take to sail to New York. I'd hardly consider this a cruise boat. On the commentary track, director Rob Hedden talks a bit about losing his primary sailing vessel just before shooting and having to settle for the old, rusted out boat he could get on short notice.
Instead of rewriting the last-minute change into the story they decided to say screw it and dressed an old non-cruise boat up as much like a cruise ship as they could, which includes a tiny, sad disco, a deck with a couple of lounge chairs and cabins that look more like what the crew going to Skull Island stayed in than a luxury cruise.
The very best Friday movies develop likeable or love-to-hate-them characters and then make you dread them being taken out of the movie. This one they decide to get rid of most of the fun characters first, starting with the '80s hair band chick JJ. The film spends so much time on the dull final girl, a shy bookworm type that doesn't like to swim, but other than that is pretty much just a plain white wall of a character that the more interesting side characters barely get time to be painted as one-note. People like VC Dupree's Julius (aka the boxer dude) and Kelly Hu's Eva Watanabe or Martin Cummins' Wayne Webber, the wannabe filmmaker which at this point in pre-found footage horror was a new and interesting archetype.
One of my favorite Fridays is Part 4 because of the colorful cast of characters. We got to spend a little time with crazy Crispin Glover and monster kid Tommy Jarvis. It's not just rinse-wash-repeat of Jason knocking off random characters.
Still, as generic and gutted as the first two thirds of this film is it can't help but have a little fun when they actually get to New York.
Jason has two stand out moments: His Michael Myers-ish confused puppy head tilt when he sees the big Hockey Mask billboard and the moment where he's challenged by the street punks and scares them off by tilting up his mask.
That's what this movie needed to be. If the majority of this film was taking Jason out of his small, secluded camp element and putting him in the mean streets of New York and seeing how the city reacted to him and how he reacted to the city it could have been the best film in the franchise. I mean, they'd have to shoot more than just a couple days in New York to make it work, but if you cut out all the boat shit and have a real reason to set Jason loose in late '80s New York City then you'd have a hell of a movie on your hands.
As it stands now the city is filled with a whole lotta Canadian-sounding NYC cops, clean Vancouver subways and mysteriously toxic waste-ridden sewers with only a few real moments of the identity of the city of the era popping up.
This movie has a lot of flaws, but it's also one of the standout Kane Hodder Jason performances. Squishy wet zombie Jason is a pretty solid design and Hodder is at his most confident here, putting a ton of personality into his silent, masked performance.
I was hoping to also unravel the mystery of the young boy Jason visions throughout the movie, but I have a feeling trying to make sense out of that will surely drive one insane. I've concluded the idea of the main girl seeing visions of Jason was two or three conflicting ideas crushed into the final product. He's either Rennie's subconscious remembering the encounter when he almost drowned her or some kind of projection of the real Jason just wanting help dying or something. It's not really clear at all and the vision argument doesn't work because the dog sees one of the visions, too, and why does he go from normal little boy to disfigured Jason progressively and then at the end Jason talks like a little boy and when the toxic waste rolls back it leaves just the little boy and... my nose is bleeding. Something popped in my brain. I'm filling a little dizzy... I gotta go sit down for a second...
I'm not sure how many more of these I can crank out before travel begins this Thursday, but I'm for sure going to watch The Poseidon Adventure, Speed 2 and Juggernaut before I leave. Hopefully I can scrap together a few more write-ups as well before I set sail.
Check out my previous entry into the Out To Sea series, in which I revisit DEEP RISING, here!
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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