Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan

For what it's worth (very little), probably the best in the series.

Director Rob Hedden may have been onto something: From Crystal Lake to Manhattan, the series itself was always drowning in ****.

Among the passengers is a bright girl who's having visions of a drowning boy, her smarmy guardian, her concerned teacher, a boyfriend whose soon-to-be-late father is the ship's captain, and assorted high school stereotypes.

For a start, the characters don't even make it to Manhattan until more than an hour into the film and Jason doesn't exactly "take" it when he arrives -- things get pretty tiresome pretty fast in the city that never sleeps.

This awful movie barely has anything to do with Manhattan. [Full review in Spanish]

It's pretty boring for a slasher movie. Case in point: You will feel nothing when Jason sinks a scalding sauna stone into someone's solar plexus. But as a movie about terrifying rites of passage about what happens to you after high school, it's good.

The worst of the initial eight Paramount films.

...ultimately stands as a very slight improvement over its various predecessors.

The makers of the Friday films wouldn't even consider stopping the series till they hit that magic number: Part XIII.