Rob Hedden had big plans for Jason Voorhees’ first trip to New York City.
“There was going to be a tremendous scene on the Brooklyn Bridge. A boxing match in Madison Square Garden,” the director said of his grand initial visions for 1989’s Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan in the book Crystal Lake Memories. “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.”
Unfortunately, the only people who cut more viciously than the famous hockey mask-wearing star of the Friday the 13th series were the studio executives in charge of the film’s budget.
“The preliminary budget people took a look at it and said, ‘We’re only going to give you $4 million to make this movie,'” Hedden recalled. “‘You’re going to get one week in New York, if you’re lucky, and the rest is going to be shot in the cheapest place we can find.'”
Because of the budget cuts, most of Hedden’s major set pieces were cut from the script. Jason doesn’t set foot in the city until one hour and four minutes into the movie, leaving just over a half-hour of Big Apple carnage. Still, an impressive seven of his 13 kills take place in the city.
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When last seen in 1988’s Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, Jason was “dead” at the bottom of Crystal Lake, near the campground he’d haunted for the entire series. This time out, the anchor for a cruise ship for graduating high school seniors accidentally hits his body and an underwater power cable, re-animating the killer. He boards the ship, which is heading for the Big Apple, and begins yet another murderous rampage.
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“The one thing everybody says is it’s not Jason Takes Manhattan, it’s Jason Takes a Cruise Ship,” Hadden admits. “In my first outline it was flopped the other way. Pretty soon it was half New York, half cruise ship. Then it was the last third in New York. It just kept getting whittled down and whittled down.”
Jason Takes Manhattan attempted to strike a more humorous tone than previous entries. The first thing a confused Jason sees upon his arrival is a huge billboard featuring a hockey goalie wearing a mask similar to his own. Later, while walking through Times Square he destroys a boombox playing rap music, but then lets the young punks who were playing it off with a warning (and a played-for-laughs look at his deformed face) instead of killing them.
In addition to the promised week in Manhattan, much of the movie was filmed on an out-of-commission cruise ship and in Vancouver. An abandoned tunnel in the western Canadian city filled in for the New York City subway. “We built fake subway tracks for hundreds of yards down this tunnel and built a fake subway car,” recalled production designer David Fischer. “Vancouver is a pretty clean city, so here we were, going around to all these alleys and picking up garbage. We even added the graffiti.”
After eight Friday the 13th movies in nine years, and with a movie that didn’t fully deliver on the promise of its title, all but the most die-hard fans stayed away from Jason Takes Manhattan. The movie earned a franchise-low $14 million at the box office. It would be four years until Jason returned to movie screens in 1993’s Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday.
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Gallery Credit: Michael Gallucci
