This is usually considered one of the worst F13 movies, but
I actually like it. It’s got a goofy sort of charm to it, the change of locations
is interesting and I find it funny overall. It’s just so eighties it’s
ridiculous. It changes things up in silly ways, with Jason stalking on a boat
and stalking the Manhattan streets being a definite change of pace for the
film, the move away from Crystal Lake being a breath of fresh air. The
strangest thing is that the filmmakers must have really hated New York because
they present it as an ugly, dirty, dangerous slum city full of punk muggers,
trash, rats and sewage.
This is the most 80s F13 movie there is. It starts with a
narrator talking about Manhattan, then a try-hard late 80s rock song plays over
footage of Manhattan, here shown as a trash ridden hell hole. Most of the
footage is mundane stuff, like people sitting in a diner, people on escalators
and then you get stuff like street punks doing crack and heroin. Everything
about it, from the setting, the fashions and attitude, even the fact that the
teens do cocaine are all late 80s/almost early 90s; it’s just completely
ridiculous overall.
Jason, trapped at the bottom of Crystal Lake, is revived
when a passing houseboat accidentally clips some underwater power cables that
electrocute him, bringing him back to life. Jason then gets seaborne somehow
when the houseboat (its owners now dead) floats away from Crystal Lake to the
harbour somehow (since when was it connected to the ocean? I thought it was a
lake?). Boarding a ship at the harbour is a graduating high school class going
on a school trip to Manhattan. Amongst the classmates is Rennie, a bright
student (and our nice, wholesome, forgettable protagonist) who is afraid of
water, going on the trip despite the objections of her uncle/foster parent, the
English teacher/trip organiser McCulloch. Unknown to the teens, Jason sneaks
onto the ship as it’s leaving, and begins stalking and slashing the ships’ crew
and the teens until the boat sinks and they reach Manhattan, where he chases
the fleeing survivors through the city streets.
Jason has a slimy look this time, like the waterlogged
corpse he is (after all he’s been under the water for a while now). It’s
actually pretty cool. Jason looks awful without the hockey mask though, with a
face resembling a cheap rubber mask that’s melted a little. It’s a massive step
down from his ghoulish appearance in the preceding film. New to this movie is
Jason being seemingly able to teleport (or at least move very quickly when off
screen). A few times somebody will see him, turn and run away only to run into
him again. He’s also apparently one hell of a swimmer. When his nautical
killing spree hits its peak the small band of survivors get into a dinghy and
row away for a long time (presumably a few hours if the fade away is any
indication) before they reach New York. Shortly after Jason emerges from the
water, so he must swim like an Olympic champ.
Rennie is another nice, wholesome, forgettable girl, this
time with a traumatic childhood incident. In a very much forced little twist,
it turns out that Rennie is afraid of water because, as a child, she was almost
drowned by a young Jason Voorhees while vacationing at Crystal Lake. It’s dumb
and needless, and just like what happened with Chris in Part III. It’s also
revealed that she was pushed into the water by McCulloch who was trying to
teach her how to swim in the most asshole way imaginable. Rennie also keeps
seeing ghostly visions of child Jason attacking her. He appears almost
everywhere – in the water, in windows, in mirrors, even just in the middle of
the room. She even sees blood spewing out from some taps for some reason. The
strangest thing is that her dog seems to see the visions as well, which makes
no sense if they’re meant to be in her head? It’s never explained anyway,
unless it’s meant to somehow tie in with the weird ending.
In a weird bit of silliness, Rennie is attacked by rapacious
thugs who shoot her up with heroine in New York (because it’s a scum bucket
apparently), and Jason actually saves her…so that he can continue to try and
kill her. Rennie also must be an addict because she barely seems to react to
the drug – she’s still able to drive a car (though she crashes it into Jason)
and never acts high. If anything this would have been the perfect point to
start having her see the visions of Jason, as drug-induced hallucinations. In
another weird bit of silliness, Jason actually ignores a whole bunch of people
while stalking Rennie at the end. She runs down a busy street with dozens of
people standing around, and Jason just walks by all of them. He doesn’t even
attempt to murder any of them, though he does take off his mask to scare a few
punks away. Why is he so intent on killing Rennie specifically? I thought his
whole deal was that he killed anyone and everyone.
The kills are all over the place. Some are fairly straightforward
– rocker chick gets hit in the head with her guitar, the bitch is stabbed with
bits of a broken mirror, Asian girl is strangled to death etc. Some are
awesomely silly. A guy in the sauna has hot sauna rocks jammed into his stomach
(the effects don’t quite do justice for how horrific that would be). Mean
English professor McCulloch is drowned in one of the garbage bins full of
sludge that are just lying around Manhattan. Probably the funniest and best-known
is the boxing kid who attempts to fight Jason in unarmed combat (not a good
idea). Jason delivers a single punch that knocks the guy’s head off and sends
it flying into a garbage bin. There are a lot of them actually, but the gore
has been noticeably tuned down compared to some of the earlier F13 movies.
The ship setting is strange because I can’t tell what sort
of boat it’s meant to be. They have skeet shooting, shuffle boarding, a sauna
and a dance floor on the boat (the ‘S.S. Lazarus’), but the ship itself, with
its cavernous engine room, salty crew and dirty little cabins looks more like a
simple trade boat or something. If it is meant to be a cruise ship it’s a
pretty atrocious one. Of interesting note is the camerawork – on the boat it
gently sways from side to side, as though the boat is rocking. Coupled with the
lightning and rain effects it does give the impression that it’s an actual boat
at sea. It’s the loosest school trip ever, and everybody seems to have free
reign to do whatever they want. Some are even wandering around in the engine
room uncontested. There’s never a good idea of where anybody is, with several
characters disappearing for lengthy stretches before appearing again. The
boat is a much more claustrophobic setting for Jason’s stalking (there’s not
much room to get away from him when you’re stuck in tiny cabins). It’s not
quite used to its full potential (there really aren’t any prolonged stalking
scenes). The cramped quarters also make it confusing in how long it takes
before anybody realises that Jason is on board and that people are getting
killed. When they do, interestingly enough, they form a posse and actually try
and hunt Jason down. It doesn’t work and the survivors end up abandoning the
boat to head to safety.
Once we hit the streets of Manhattan for the finale, things
get an odd feel. It’s comparatively more open, with intricate alleys full of
street punks and dilapidated apartment blocks. Jason oddly seems right at home
there, maybe because of his waterlogged, grimy look. The strangest thing
pace-wise is that the switch from the boat to Manhattan sort of changes things
up – instead of being trapped in a relatively isolated place, they’re now on
the run in a big city. While moving through the alleys and streets, running
from Jason, they encounter muggers, they get into a police car and try driving
away, they take the subway (Jason does too somehow, and even gets electrocuted
on the tracks – he gets better), they hit the ‘main drag’, a fully lit streets
with passing cars and dozens of people (none of which phase Jason), until they
finally head to the sewers for our ridiculous ending.
The finale is really stupid. By the film’s ‘New York is a
horrible scum bucket’ logic, apparently the sewers underneath Manhattan fill
with deadly toxic waste every night at midnight (!?). The surviving two teens
(Rennie and her requisite love interest Shaun) lure him down there, throw toxic
waste at him, then the clock strikes midnight, acid floods the sewer and he’s
melted down to nothing, with Rennie seeing a vision of a little crying boy
Jason. It’s confusing, and probably a misguided attempt at being symbolic or
something, or at least continuing Rennie’s unexplained visions of Jason. It’s
funny to note that, Rennie’s little boy vision aside, Jason is fully,
completely dead at this point. His entire freaking body dissolves in toxic
waste. Future movies will ignore this completely.
It’s a really stupid movie, but it absolutely owns it. It’s
so oblivious to how silly it all is. I have to admit I’m a bit fond of it. It’s
just so completely absurd. I have a million questions. Why is Manhattan some
borderline-dystopic thug wasteland? Why does the ship have a sauna? Why does
Rennie see visions of Jason? Why is McCulloch such a dick? Why the hell do the
sewers under Manhattan fill with toxic waste every night? Where does the toxic
waste come from and where does it go?
It’s usually considered the worst, but I really don’t mind
it. It’s stupid and silly, but I found its faults endearing. I’m just so
baffled by it all, the 80s fashion, the attitude, the way Manhattan is
portrayed like the post-apocalypse. The opening, with its rock song, has a
montage of muggers, street punks with syringes and crack, dirty cans of
garbage, rats and dirty streets is so strange that it feels like it’s for a
completely different movie. If the entire film was set in Manhattan then it
would probably have been better. The movie didn’t do too well, which means that
drastic changes were made for the sequel, which is where things get really
freaking strange.
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