Friday The 13th: Ranking Every Movie From Worst To Best

10. Friday The 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan

So...they sent Jason on holiday. There he was, minding his own business at the bottom of Crystal Lake when the anchor of a passing boat drags a live electrical cable over his corpse and revives him. The guy just can't catch a break, can he?! To be fair, the idea of placing Jason in a city environment is an interesting one but, with Vancouver substituting for most of the Manhattan scenes (apart from the obligatory Times Square shot) the problem is we don't get to see him in the Big Apple until the last twenty minutes.

Jason, after his revival, makes his way on board a boat holding a Senior Year graduating class on a trip to New York. Jason makes light work of the students and the villainous Biology teacher (aren't they all?!) Charles McCulloch has brought his niece, Rennie, along for the ride even though she's scared of water since he pushed her in the lake as a child. When some of them escape the ship in a lifeboat, they end up in the New York harbour and are stalked through the streets until Rennie eventually dispatches of Jason in the sewers with toxic waste, turning him into a, er, child again.

The ideas are all there to freshen up the series but they're poorly implemented. Essentially, the boat section should have lasted twenty minutes and the New York section should have lasted fifty, but it's the other way round due to the budget. We get nice moments, Jason interacting with local street thugs, a boxing match which proves Jason could take the current Heavyweight division by storm and some nice performances by the cast, but it's all much of a muchness. The budget constraints, and the MPAA cuts, destroyed the film and Jason is then flushed away as a child (obviously back to Crystal Lake where he grows up again before the start of Jason Goes To Hell).