A Dees With A Tease

The first thing you hear in "Friday The Thirteenth Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan", it occurs to me, is a radio host waxing philosophical about the big, bad city of New York. I have to say I like it. It's a fun moment. It grants identity to the city that feels a little more real than the punks, thugs and jaded citizens we see, but it doesn't ground us in too much reality the way a straightforward news report or something would. It's kind of fantastical, which is appropriate considering Jason is coming.

The radio host is a real tease though, since it's about an hour until we see New York again after he fades away. He's so good that it heightens the disappointment. The best thing would have been to make the movie where it's in the city most of the film or all of it, but since they couldn't afford to do that, they probably should have found a way to do something that invests in what they do have, which is a cruise ship. Cruise ships don't have on board radio stations (so far as I know).

What you might do instead of setting the scene with a radio broadcast is to hand that to something like a cruise director (who doesn't appear in the film). Such a person would be chipper and competent- a kind of pleasure taskmaster. Why not help us know the ship with a tour in which she gives running commentary? This sets a tone we know will be subverted at the same time that we actually are given the parameters of the world we're about to spend an hour in.

Of course they don't do that, which is kind of too bad since it leaves us with a radio DJ who teases something that is never really delivered to us. It's par for the course with this movie, which has enough stuff that works to make the movie worth watching, but lets you down in enough ways that it can't possibly rise to its potential as one of the series' top four entries. I'd put it about fifth, maybe. If I give it a lot of thought, I could nail it down, but I think this DJ, good as he is, is really a nail in this film's coffin.