That ‘Friday the 13th’ When Jason Takes the SkyTrain

It’s been called “unwatchable” by Entertainment Weekly, the worst film in the franchise, and is synonymous with every major criticism of “shot-in-Vancouver” films: cheap, cheesy and obviously set someplace else.

Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan remains the most critically despised entry in a series that was never generously reviewed.

Why is this 1989 horror film so hated? Where did things go wrong?

And is it just possible that the world has been a little unfair to Jason Takes Manhattan?

Let’s take a closer look.

‘The worst of Vancouver looked like the best of New York’

Writer-director Rob Hedden pitched the idea of a Friday the 13th film that would drop Jason Voorhees, the hockey-masked killer from Camp Crystal Lake, into a big city. A group of graduating high school students would take a cruise to New York, only to be intercepted by Jason.

“For the first third of the movie we’d be on the boat, then we’d get to New York at the end of Act I,” Hedden said in Peter M. Bracke’s 2006 book Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th.

“There was going to be a tremendous scene on the Brooklyn Bridge. A boxing match in Madison Square Garden. Jason would go through department stores. He’d go through Times Square. He’d go into a Broadway play. He’d even crawl onto the top of the Statue of Liberty and dive off.”

If you’ve seen the film, you know that none of that happens. Most of the action takes place aboard the ship. When the film finally reaches New York, near the end, the city is a cartoonish nightmare full of hissing steam pipes and barrels of toxic waste. It also looks suspiciously like West Hastings Street.

Budget limitations ruled out almost all of Hedden’s ideas, forcing him to rewrite the script. In the film, Jason boards the SS Lazarus right away, killing off the classmates in the ship’s sauna, boiler room and discotheque (yes, the boat has a disco).

The ship’s interior scenes were filmed aboard the ocean liner Prince George while docked at a North Vancouver shipyard; the exterior of the boat was a Seattle vessel, the Western Pioneer, according to a Victoria Times Colonist article from Aug. 5, 1989.

A few scenes were actually filmed in New York, though most were shot in the alleys and rooftops of West Hastings.

“We had to heap trash on the sidewalks,” producer Randolph Cheveldave told the Times Colonist in August 1989. “People who worked on the film said that the worst of Vancouver looked like the best of New York.”

‘They went into it expecting one thing and not getting it’

Granville Station was graffitied up to pose as a subway station, with the SkyTrain serving as a subway car. The sewers of New York were recreated using abandoned tunnels built to carry mail from the railway to the city’s post office.

Anticipating battles with the Motion Picture Association over the amount of violence in the film, Hedden shot alternate versions of several scenes.

As a result, the violence in Jason Takes Manhattan is “tame compared to any R-rated movie today,” Hedden said.

At the time, though, politicians and parents worried about the impact of horror movies on young people. Siskel and Ebert refused to review most slasher films. Even the producer was concerned.

“What kind of society are we living in where this kind of adulation is being foisted on a supernatural serial killer?” Cheveldave asked in the Times Colonist.

Critics didn’t have much adulation for the film. “More like Jason Takes the Love Boat,” Jack E. Wilkinson griped in his syndicated review published in the Province newspaper on Feb. 19, 1990.

Entertainment Weekly named Part VIII the eighth-worst sequel of all time: “We don’t get to Manhattan until the second hour. And when we do, it looks an awful lot like Vancouver.”

Fans, too, were disappointed. For the film to spend so much time on the boat and so little time in New York felt like false advertising.

“A lot of people in their mind pictured the whole movie being in New York,” Kane Hodder, the actor who played Jason, admitted in an interview about the making of Jason Takes Manhattan packaged as a featurette with the DVD.

“So they went into it expecting one thing and not getting it.”

But the film has its defenders. “Here’s the secret about Jason Takes Manhattan,” Scott Meslow wrote in a 2018 essay for GQ. “Despite the false advertising of the title, it’s actually a pretty good Friday the 13th movie. A cruise ship might not be as exciting a setting as Manhattan — but it’s still a lot more interesting than yet another string of gruesome murders at a summer camp.”

Meslow singled out Hedden’s direction as “some of the most stylish in the entire Friday the 13th series.”

Every charge levelled against Jason Takes Manhattan has some basis in fact, especially its double bait and switch of setting (a boat for New York) and location (Vancouver for Manhattan).

Budget cuts, compromises over ratings and a few questionable ideas are evident. Yet it’s a better-than-average entry in the Friday the 13th series. Local actors Martin Cummins, Sharlene Martin and Alex Diakun have memorable roles.

And for Vancouverites, there’s the added pleasure of watching the terror of Camp Crystal Lake rampage through the Expo Line — sorry, the New York City subway.