Review #397: Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)

October 2026 Horror Reviews #25 - Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)

Watch it here on PlutoTV!

The misleadingly-titled Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan follows a group of high school seniors taking a "cruise" from the Crystal Lake area (presumably in New Jersey) to Manhattan, as part of an end-of-year trip before graduation. But wouldn't you know it, Jason Voorhees has been reawakened once again, and for some reason he decides to hitch a ride on the "cruise ship" (that looks more like a naval vessel than an actual cruise ship) so he can wreak havoc on these unsuspecting teens. Eventually, once two-thirds of the movie have passed, Jason (and the surviving protagonists) arrive in Manhattan, at which point Jason proceeds to "take" it (if you can call it that, he kills like four people) before getting swept up in a wave of toxic sewer sludge that (perhaps metaphorically) turns him back into a living child. Or something. I honestly don't know what the ending was going for.

While I think this is a perfectly passable movie with some clever kills and interesting (if completely nonsensical) plot revelations, I don't think this is a very good Friday the 13th movie. Or at least, it gets really weird with the series' internal logic (or lack thereof). We already had a movie where Jason becomes explicitly supernatural by coming back from the dead via a bolt of magic lightning, and then we had a movie where the main protagonist has superpowers. In this movie, the writers just seemed to be throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks- several times in the film Jason pretty clearly teleports, and the main character of Rennie is never implied to be supernatural in any way, yet the ghost of Jason's childhood form (?) keeps appearing to her, sometimes asking for help but often to try and grab her. And then, like I said, the ending goes somewhere completely different and I'm still confused about it. I know the next movie (which I've already reviewed, long ago) has Jason turn out to be a body-hopping slug; that one always gets ridiculed by anyone who talks about it (as it should) but honestly after watching all of these in quick succession it's not even that outlandish by comparison.

I like Jason's visual design in this one, a lot more than the last one. They did away with the physical additions to Kane Hodder's big frame (like the exposed spine and chain around the neck) which makes him look a lot slimmer, though it is weird that Jason's clothes apparently regenerated after the previous movie. There's also a GREAT moment in here when he walks past some street toughs listening to a boombox, and one of them threatens Jason with a knife and says "You're dead meat!" Jason then just lifts his mask, (away from the camera), presumably showing them that yes, he IS dead meat, and they all apologize and run off.

I liked how most (though not all) of the kills in here seem to be sort of appropriate for each character. The rock star girl gets killed with her guitar, the manipulative pretty girl gets killed by a piece of a shattered mirror, the guy who works with A/V equipment gets electrocuted on a control panel, the boxer gets his head punched off, and the guy who almost drowned his niece gets drowned himself. It's a neat style we haven't really seen in this series (Jason typically just uses whatever is on hand without any regard for who or what he's killing), and it actually kind of makes me want more! It honestly feels like we're starting to get some Freddy Krueger bleed-over- which makes perfect sense, as New Line Cinema (the creators of A Nightmare on Elm Street) would take over the series in the immediate next film. I'm 100% down with a bit more "fun" injected into the kills, and it's a shock that it took this long!

I'm a little disappointed that Jason is only in Manhattan for a small portion of the movie, and for nearly all of that portion he's walking down alleyways and stalking one or two people. For a title like "Jason Takes Manhattan" I would have really liked to see, you know, Jason "taking" Manhattan. (And of course, since I've already reviewed Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, I can point out that in that film, Jason spends zero percent of its runtime in hell, as he only gets taken there during the last shot of the movie.)

But whatever, this is a fine movie I guess, it's just not really what I (or anyone) expected.

Overall Rating: 6/10 Biology Assignments Due The Day Before Graduation

Timeline Woes: As I said in the previous review, the timeline for the series has become completely screwed up. Someone in the IMDB Goofs section made this write-up, that explains it pretty well: 

"If you follow the time-line of the previous installments, Friday the 13th Parts 2, 3, and 4 take place over a single weekend in 1984. Part 5 jumps ahead to the late 1980s, presumably 1988. Part 6 to the early 1990s, and Part 7 can be no earlier than 1999 in regards to Tina being apparently seven or eight years old when her father dies (Jason being at the bottom of the lake and chained to the rock that Tommy sunk him with in Part 6), to being apparently seventeen for most of the film. Despite all of that, this film firmly sets itself in 1988, supposedly the same year as Part 5, two or three years before the events in Part 6. Jason ought to have been buried at this time, not in the lake."

Next Up: Freddy vs. Jason (2003)!