If, with a title like
Jason Takes Manhattan - and an opening sequence of gritty, violent New York streets - you were expecting a
Death Wish/
Punisher-style satire of '80s NYC street crime, you're going to be sorely disappointed.
To be honest, whatever you were expecting from this strange entry in the franchise, you're going to be disappointed.
To mark the senior class graduation of pupils from Crystal Lake's Lakeview High School, a party cruise down the coast to New York has been organised.
Unfortunately, before it even gets going, a freak accident resurrects Jason's corpse back to un-life, from its lake bottom resting place after the explosive finale of
The New Blood.
Anyway, the MV Lazarus (
see what they did there?) sets sail with an almost full complement of horny teens, a couple of teachers, minimal crew, and one superhuman zombie stowaway.
In charge of the school trip is Charles McCulloch (Peter Mark Richman), the teacher you see if you look up the phrase "sanctimonious dick", who also happens to be the uncle of aquaphobic orphan and obvious 'final girl' candidate, Rennie Wickham (Jensen Daggett).
Rennie's plagued with nightmarish visions, like something from a J-horror, connected with her phobia and her inability to swim, having nearly drowned in Crystal Lake as a youngster.
Eventually, this is ham-fistedly tied in to Jason's early years - but I wouldn't even start trying to figure out the timeline of the
Friday The 13th franchise;
that way lies madness!
First order of business on the Lazarus, once it's out in the Atlantic, is for Jason to off the captain and pilot.
Luckily for the Lakeview students one of them is the captain's son, Sean Robertson (Scott Reeves), Rennie's boyfriend, who has absorbed a modicum of ship piloting by osmosis.
There promptly follows an all-too-short (
because it's exciting, even though it has nothing to do with "taking Manhattan") game of cat-and-mouse as Jason stalks victims around the decks, corridors, and cabins of the ship (
my pitch for a future Friday The 13th film in this vein: Jas-On A Plane).
Then, rather bizarrely, the bulk of the class is wiped out off-screen, mentioned in a casual aside with zero emotional resonance for either the survivors or the audience.
Unfortunately, it very quickly becomes clear that
Jason Takes Manhattan suffers from similar narrative flaws to
A New Beginning, even though it really
is Jason doing the killing here.
The killer no longer appears to be following his own unspoken "rules": the victims may, originally, be from Crystal Lake, but they're not on the lake shore anymore (
the turf he 'protects') nor do they have any connection to the summer camp where his journey began.
And, yes, they do finally get to New York, about an hour in to this 100-minute movie, but having arrived on dry land, the small group of survivors are promptly mugged.
Then Rennie is kidnapped, drugged, and almost raped... until an unexpected saviour comes along.
After running around the docks for more than 20 minutes, Rennie and Sean make it to the subway, with Jason in pursuit.
Interestingly, and back on brand, Jason concentrates on the Crystal Lake duo, and only kills New Yorkers who get in his way.
The zombie then promptly gets zapped by the third rail, giving his prey time to actually make it onto the streets of the city... before they dive down into the sewers to escape him.
The climax of the film becomes a race against time, as our heroes have to find a way back out of the sewers before a midnight toxic sludge purge (
was this a real thing?)
Without wanting to spoil anything (
in a 30-year-old movie), the toxic waters somehow melt all Jason's twisted, zombie, persona off of him and transform him back into a (
dead) young child.
No, no idea!
.JPG)
