Since I’ve already reviewed Part 7 of the series in HOLY SHIT 2014? Goddamn, how long have I been doing these reviews? Anyway, Jason fights the generic off brand version of Carrie in the previous movie and then ends up right back at the bottom of Crystal Lake where we left him in Part 6. You could honestly skip the previous move and jump right to this one and it would seem like it picks up immediately where you left off. I wouldn’t advise skipping right to this one, though, because as stupid as Jason vs. The Telekinetic Teen was, it cannot even begin to hold a candle to how shitty this one is.

Jason gets electrocuted back to life when a teen with a yacht snags an underwater power cable with his anchor. I cannot feel too bad for him when Jason murders him as he is a teen with a yacht. Crystal Lake somehow now has a connection to the ocean as that same yacht makes it to a coastal pier where the graduating class of Get Murdered (while) High are getting on a cruise to New York. However, since the movie didn’t have the budget to actually film in New York, almost the entire movie takes place on this cruise ship. Also it’s implied our Final Girl has some kind of connection to Jason but it doesn’t actually matter and everything in this movie is boring and stupid.

One of the only things this movie does is establish another part of the Jason lore. We got the mask is Part 3, the reanimated corpse in Part 6, and Kane Hodder joined the franchise to play Jason in 7 and would establish the Jason that never runs. Part 8 is the one that really establishes the whole teleportation thing. Early entries in the series showed Jason as a regular dude that had to run after his prey. Since Hodder, who would be the only person to play the character for multiple movies going from 6-10, established the whole no running thing in 7; Part 8 straight up just has him teleport ahead of people and even be waiting on the second story of a building while a guy is running away from him.

The movie here suffers from a severe case of freshman director syndrome. The pacing is incredibly slow and there are no characters that are remotely interesting to make the glacial pace worth hanging out with them. We are back to one or no-note characters with the worst probably being Charles, a teacher and Uncle of Rennie, the Final Girl. He is just a needless asshole and doesn’t seem to have any motivation beyond being a dick to students. We also get some especially bloodless kills here where apparently they already knew the MPAA had it out for them so they didn’t even film gorier scenes just to have them told to tone it down. Combine all this with the fact that the movie is called Jason Takes Manhattan but we spend an hour on a cruise ship, 20 minutes on the famously vacant and never busy New York docks, and then about 2 minutes in New York before retreating into the sewers.

The idea of taking Jason out of Crystal Lake and putting him in a new and interesting setting was a decent one. I make no excuses for the fact that I am a fan of Jason X IN SPAAAAAACE! But not being able to actually deliver on a new setting or being interesting makes this very close to the worst entry.

Score: 1.5 out of 5