Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan
Director: Rob Hedden
Year Released: 1989
Rating: 1.5
This joins the dubious ranking as one of my favorite trash movies as a kid, back when I watched the nightly heavily edited movies on New York TV and mostly absorbed lousy horror pictures (and I "liked" it the way I liked so many gruesome, violent movies, as catharsis and the desire to buy into the notion of "bogeymen" inflicting harm on the "immoral"). This one, arguably only slightly "better" (relatively speaking) than the other Jason Voorhees splatter movies that preceded it, has the perpetually reanimated murderer boarding a series of boats and ending up, for the last third of the movie, in Manhattan where he chases after equally afraid-of-water Rennie (Jensen Daggett). I personally like the appearance of Jason ("played" by Kane Hodder) as a hulking deformed brute; when the hockey mask comes off, his head looks like a grey melting pumpkin. The only scary aspect (for anyone that isn't 11 years old) is the soundtrack.
