Worst Movie Ever: Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan

Worst Movie Ever is a new feature here at Horror in Retrospect, where I take a movie that I consider to be horrible, and put it to shame. Some of these movies are widely considered some of the worst horror movies ever and some of them are considered the best. My tastes differ from a lot of people's, so for the first installment of this series I have decided to play it safe and take on a movie that many people: Friday the 13th Part VIII; Jason Takes Mahattan.

Jason Takes Mahattan starts out well enough with the resurrection. In the films beginning with Jason Lives, Jason was resurrected from whatever grave he was put into in the previous movie. In Jason Lives he was reurrected from the grave that he was put into between the fourth and sixth film. Here is resurrected from his watery grave that Tina, in part seven, put him into. Not only is he resurrected, but it is always done accidentally. For instance, in Jason X Jason is resurrected because he was being thawed out for research. No one on the ship could have predicted that, by letting Jason's seemly lifeless, and therefore, dead body, would allow Jason to rise to kill again.

Here Jason is resurrected by a ship that is passing by. To me, this is the first of many mistakes that the filmmakers have made. It shows how lazy they were when it came to finding a way to bring Jason back into the fold. So now that Jason is back to business the rest of the movie is going to be good, right? Not by a long shot.

The movie moves the main action to a cruise ship, where it will spend the majority of the movie. This is the second mistake the filmmakers make. They put Jason into an extremely limited enviorment, where he doesn't have any room to breath. This takes all the suspense away from the movie and just makes it a series of meaningless kills.

I know what you are thing: Jason is a killer and most of his kills are meaningless. My answer to this is: the best Friday movies have characters that you can relate to. In the first four movies in the series, there are characters that are just like you and me. They are regular people trapped in a situation that they have never been in before and they do things, while some of them dumb, that we might do to get out of said situation. Here the characters are cliches, going through the motions. None of these character think for themselves and therefore we cheer when Jason gets them.

That is one of the problems with the latter slasher movies. The filmmakers don't take the time to give us real characters and the movies suffer because of that. If they would just give us characters with a shred of a brain that would build suspense and therefore giving us a reason to cheer for them instead of the killer. In the original Friday, we cheer for the characters and when Mrs. Voorhees is decapitated at the end, we cheer because evil has been vainquished. We want the good good, or girl, to live and the bad guy to die.

As the series progressed it became thew opposite. We went to a Friday movie or a Nightmare movie and rooted for the bad guy. We wanted Jason or Freddy to win and to do it in the most inventive way possible. And that leads me to the most important part of the this movie: the kills.

The Friday movies have always been known for their inventive kills. Whether it be two lovers killed together with a spear or a camper being stuffed into their sleeping bag and continually beat against a tree, the Friday movies had some of the most inventive kills of all the slasher movies. The problem with Jason Takes Manhattan is that the kills are not memorable. Other that Jason punching a guy's head clean off, the kills are pretty standard. We go into this movie expecting to see some really cool kills and we are let down.

The ending of the movie is probably the most boggling aspect of the movie. The final confrontation takes place in the sewers and when all is said and done, Jason is turned back into a kid. I can take the bullshit that is part five, but this is just stupid. Did the filmmakers really think that this idea would fly? Was there another ending that they could have used? I have no idea what they were thinking, but this ending is one of the worst endings I have ever seen.

Jason Takes Manhattan is not the worst movie is the series (that honor goes to part five), but it comes close. It seems that the filmmakers weren't even trying to make a good Friday movie. It goes to show that this movie was not that big of a hit and, Paramount decided to sell the rights to the series after this movie didn't make a lot of money. It has been twenty-one years since Jason Takes Manhattan and we still have yet to see a good Friday movie, not counting Freddy vs Jason. This is a real shame. Here's hoping that we see a good one come soon.

Friday the 13th (2009) 1/2 *

There have been many "Friday the 13th" movies, ten in fact, so the formula is getting a little tired. So when they announced a remake I was hopeful. Could a reboot be just the thing that slasher fans needed? The answer is an astounding no.

This remake is really a remake at all. Well it is for the first minute or so, but after that it back to the usual business. After I watched the movie I asked myself "How can you take an entire movie and boil it down to a minute?" The answer to this is answered very quickly: you can't.

The problem lies in the fact that this movie was written by two people who apparently know nothing about the "Friday the 13th" movies. What they do know is public knowledge. Jason was thought to have drowned when he was a kid, but according to this movie he didn't. He watched his mother be decapitated and ever since has vowed revenge.

This may or may not be the case if you are a fan oF the series. Some believe that he did drown and is now the living dead, while others believe that Jason didn't drown and that he lived off the land until he could take revenge on the one who killed his mother. I like to think that Jason died and came back, but who am I to know?

Anyway, the after the opening we meet a group of twenty somethings who are venturing into the forest to find a hidden garden of weed. We get to know the group as they hang out by the fire., then they split off into groups of two to go have sex and explore. Soon enough Jason makes his appearance and kills off all of the group except for one. What I took away from this scene was that Jason was merely protecting his weed. How else would he get through all the years of being lonely?

The sequence above last for about twenty minutes. The reason I mention this is because after this sequence we get the title of the film. I have always been a fan of pre-credit sequences, but not twenty minutes worth.

Now we are into the meat of the story, but you know what? I didn't care. I don't like the fact that we were given time with the first group of people only to have them killed off so quickly. It didn't work in "Death Proof" and it doesn't work here.

There are nods to some of the previous movies, but they are so badly handled that you even wonder why they even tried. The writers said that they were bringing "Friday the 13th" back to classic form. I guess they did in a way, but they forgot that "Friday the 13th" movies are supposed to fun, not boring.

April Fool's Day (2008) ZERO STARS

It’s so great seeing a remake of I Know What You Did Last Summer...wait, this was a remake of April Fool’s Day? Well you could have fooled me (pun intended). The reason I say this is because this movie is not anywhere close to being a remake of April Fool’s Day. Most remakes are close to being a remake, in fact most remakes actually follow the plot of the original, hence the term “remake”. But in 2008, the film studios decided to can that idea and simply use the title and just make up some random storyline, simply to cash in on the titles. The other film in 2008 that chose this path was the remake of Prom Night. My questioning behind this is why do this? Why not just make a sequel if you’re not going to follow the original plot. I loved the original April Fool’s Day, but this movie was a piece of shit and it is simple as that.

What follows is the weak, made up storyline of the 2008 “remake” of April Fool’s Day. Basically, a party is going on and a group of friends decide to embarrass their friend Milan (Aldridge), by giving her a date rape pill (yeah, that sounds like fun), they videotape her making out with someone, but she loses her balance and somehow falls off a balcony, killing her. We then go into some pointless news show talking about the death and trial that follows. On this show they actually show the real footage of the girl’s death, which I’m pretty sure they would not allow that to be shown on national T.V., I think it would be considered evidence. So a year later, all the people who were involved in this girl’s death are being stalked and killed by “Milan”. Desiree (Cole), is the main person here playing detective trying to figure out what is going on.

I am going to reveal the ending to you, so stop reading if you don't want to know it. Basically, it turns out to be an April fool’s joke again, this time by no surprise. However, the surprise here is that the group that supposedly died, is actually after Desiree, trying to coax a confession out of her. Her confession to killing Milan. She finally confesses. The dumbest ending follows. As they explain what they did and why they did it, Desiree is accidentally killed by Torrance (Taylor-Compton). She is showing her that the gun she used had blanks in it, she puts the gun to Desiree’s head, and kills her.

Overall this movie sucked big time. Not just for the fact that it doesn’t follow the original plot, but because the new plot is lame. As stated above it feels like a very cheap remake of I Know What You Did Last Summer or even a bad remake of Prom Night, this was more of a remake of Prom Night than the actual remake of Prom Night was. The acting is okay, the direction is also okay. The writing is stupid. The characters are flat and at no time do you feel sorry for any of these people in the movie. And when the “shock” ending comes along, you aren’t surprised at all. Throwing in that accidental killing seemed like a cheap way to shock the audience. It didn’t work, as soon as it happened I knew that whoever wrote this was probably all out of their dumbass ideas to even come up with a decent ending. And what the fuck is up with “The Butcher Brothers”? And how is this movie based on an original idea from them? And why is this movie credited as being based on an idea by Danilo Bach? Yes, Bach wrote the original film, but since this movie doesn’t follow one idea from the original, there is no reason to give him credit. All this movie does is tack on the title so people think it’s a remake when in actuality it is a lame, direct to video horror movie that tries too hard. In short, this movie is a piece of garbage!