Well then, Day 8. Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan was the movie that pretty much killed the franchise (for Paramount, at least). It was... not good, and between the poor financial showing of this film and the diminishing box office returns in general, the rights got sold on to New Line, who decided to do... something else with the series that we'll see tomorrow.
Okay, so it wasn't entirely the writer/director's fault that the film fell so flat; he had wanted to film more scenes in New York but was told at the last minute that they weren't able to, so he had to fill out the time with more scenes on the ship, which infuriated him as well as the audience. But they could at least have then changed the name to something more suitable, like Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Sets Sail or Jason on the High Seas. But let's be completely honest - only having 25 minutes in New York was hardly the film's biggest problem.
So this time around Jason Voorhees is freed from Crystal Lake by a handy high voltage power cable that they'd apparently just run under his trapped body without bothering to move him; he hops aboard a yacht, kills the teen couple on it and then sails off to meet the rest of their graduating class on board a cruise liner heading for New York. Yes, this time around Jason apparently kills an entire high school graduating class; we admittedly only see a handful of their deaths but as only five people eventually escape from the ship I think that's what we're meant to assume. One of the students on board (and our Final Girl) is Rennie, who has a fear of water from a mysterious event in her childhood and who keeps seeing visions of child-Jason drowning and pleading for her to help him. She also has an "evil" uncle who is also the school principal (see also Part VII for the beginning of this recurring plot point in the series) who turns out to have been responsible for her water phobia by pushing her into Crystal Lake as a child, where she was pulled down and nearly killed by... child-Jason? Except she can't be any older than 19, so that couldn't have happened any earlier than just after Part VI, so... Oh, I give up.
This movie makes no sense. There's the mysterious vanishing students. There's the utter lack of continuity. And there's the climax of the film, where the survivors are chased through the New York sewers by Jason, while also trying to escape before the nightly flooding of the sewers with toxic waste (yeah, I thought this was bullshit, but apparently it's at least partially true, at least back in the 1980s). Well, I guess it explains the C.H.U.D.s, Turtles and Alligators. The film also has an amusingly... "small-town" idea of New York, even in the 80s - the survivors of the Jason cruise haven't been in New York five minutes before they get mugged by two drug addicts, and later on Jason chases two of them through a crowded subway train and the locals barely even look up (and let's not forget that the only cop they manage to find in the whole city is so Irish his name was probably Padraig o'Shaunnasy).
It's not all bad. Part VIII does feature one of the most badass attempts to fight Jason that there has been in the entire series, when a boxer attempts to beat Jason in some bare-knuckle boxing. It doesn't matter if he succeeds or not (spoiler alert: he doesn't); it's a high point in a film that desperately needs more of them, and a moment when you really are impressed at the bravery of one poor future corpse. But overall, Part VIII was the film that put the franchise to bed, at least for a while, and even when it continued it looked like things were never going to get better.
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