In celebration of Friday the 13, Rob and Joe dive into one of the sillier entries in the Jason Voorhees franchise with 1989's "Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan" on this week's Weirdhouse Cinema.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. And uh, Rob, we got one of your your famous calendar tie ins today because today is a Friday, we are finally doing a Friday movie. And uh, of of the original series, what could we pick except Jason Takes Manhattan, the one where Jason goes to New York years after the Muppets did. Now. A lot of times on this show we dig up obscure weirdness that not many people have ever seen. Uh and sometimes the Sometimes we find the diamonds that are hidden, you know, wonderful little gyms of movies that are that are little known. Sometimes we find stuff that is not so great but funny. In this series, we're going in a very different direction because as weird as the Friday the Thirteenth series is, and if you really like examine the contents of the series, it is a bizarre phenomenon. We should not forget that these movies were immensely popular. These hockey mask horror movies made hundreds of millions of dollars in total, which is a lot for a horror franchise, And I believe until uh, maybe just recently, Friday, a movie about a guy in a hockey mask who walks around stabbing people, was the highest grossing horror franchise of all time. And you know, Rob, you and I as horror fans, probably have different types of movies we think of when we consider the genre as an ideal what is horror? Maybe some of your your favorite maybe the classy or horror movies come to mind. But in the general culture for decades from the eighties probably through the two thousands, if you said horror as a genre, I would say the average American would be more likely to think of Friday the Thirteenth and Jason Vorhees than anything else. Yeah, these movies were big money. Uh, they were everywhere. Um. And and I think you know, to your point about about weirdness, um, just as we have to remind ourselves that that very popular things can still be very good, very popular movies can still be quite weird in a number of ways. And with these Friday the Thirteenth films in particular, I think it's very easy to either absorb them through pop culture or cable viewing and just allow it all to be sort of refined down to just the core scares, the kills in each film, sort of physical incarnation of Jason Vorhees. But there's there's a load of additional funky weirdness that absolutely should not be overlooked in in many, if not all, of the films. Yeah, So are the Friday the Thirteenth movies good? Uh? Not? Really? Are they? Are they classy? Certainly? Not that I mean they I think they meet the definition of tracksh by by pretty much anybody's standard. But are they kind of interesting to watch and talk about, especially when you think about their place in the culture. Absolutely? Yeah. I The thing about the Friday the Thirteen films is that I grew up hearing about them from other kids, like an elementary school. Though I didn't see them, but this is one of the things that was talked about. Certain kids had the lore, had the knowledge, and they would share with the others. And and I do remember later catching parts of them on late night TV during I guess late elementary early middle school. My family lived in the country for part of this, very close to a large lake in fact, so so frankly these films um and and they were all Crystal Lake episodes installments that I was catching parts of it this this time. Uh, they terrified me because Jason seemed very much like this creature of the woods and the wilds that could potentially emerge out of the dark at any moment, in the darkness surrounding my house. Oh. Absolutely, he is one of the He is a nature spirit. He you know, he is born or he's like radigas the brown. He's like one of these figures that belongs to the trees and the critters. He's kind of a he's kind of a a murderous tom bomba dill Um. So you know, I think that maybe the my my childhood fear or in in certainly maybe apprehensions concerning this character, Uh, maybe they've led over into my adult life as well, because prior to this week, the only Friday the thirteenth film that had actually set down and watched from beginning to end was two thousand one's Jason X, which of course is awesome obviously a late franchise detour, and when you you picked Jason Takes Manhattan, I was like, Okay, I'm definitely gonna watch this one obviously, but since this one's also kind of a a detour obviously styles itself as a detour. I was like, Okay, I need to watch another one as well. The Blu ray disc that I rented from Video Drome here in Atlanta had Part seven The New Blood on it as well, so I decided to give that one to go. So I watched two Friday the Thirteenth films this week in preparation for this discussion. I'm gonna go ahead and say that I think Part seven is a better movie than the one we're talking about today, pretty much, hands down. But I think Part eight is a more appropriate pick because of how bizarrely it upsets the formula while still being incredibly predictable. Yeah. I really enjoyed both of them. Um. I mean because New Blood you have Tina, the telekinetic gal um, you know, whipon butt. Uh, you know the final portion of the film anyway. Um, I think there's some share DNA between these two films. Uh. But while the first one was definitely a Crystal Lake movie, this one takes us to Manhattan and well that's that's that's the cell anyway, right. It sort of does. So one of the famous things about Jason takes Manhattan is. I was watching it with Rachel and she had a pretty good one. She said, Uh, she sometimes calls it Jason takes a long time to get to Manhattan, which, yeah, you could also call it Jason takes boat. This movie has something in common with Eliminators, which we did I don't know, maybe a month or two ago. A movie that you think is gonna be about a man droid, a scientist, a mercenary, a ninja out there getting in fights and stuff, and they do that a little bit. But really what the movie mostly is is about a boat. It's about a boat going up a river. And that's the same thing here. You think Jason's gonna take Manhattan, he gets there in the last fifteen minutes or so. The rest of the movie is a boat. Yeah, but the but the last fifteen minutes or so is really strong, and when we'll get to that, well, I guess the secondary critique is also when he gets to Manhattan, it's mostly not actually Manhattan but Vancouver. Um. Yeah, yeah, the there's a lot of Canadians to this film, and certainly in the cast, so that'd be fun to tell talk about in a bit. But but hey, we should slow down here, because first of all, I'm not an expert on this genre. I've only seen the three films and then bits and pieces stitched together through my my childhood cable viewing UM and also the audience out here, not everyone out there really knows the full history, the full mythos of Jason Vorhees, Joe, can you give us a a previously on Friday walk through here? Oh? Yes I can. Maybe I'll start with some some general thoughts and then go movie by movie. So the first thing I would say is that the Friday the Thirteenth series begins as a rip off of Halloween, as basically all modern slasher franchises too. So you had you had John Carpenter's Halloween, which is actually a great movie, but it gave rise to all of these copycat series which are about a guy with a mask and a knife chasing people around, usually usually young attractive people who are up to no good at chasing them around and killing them one by one. But most of these follow up series of major differences from Halloween, one of which is that they're just generally not as good as filmmaking products. You know that they don't have that visual flare, but Another thing is that when you watch Halloween, it is a great experience of of heightened suspense. You know, It's it's like you you are deeply worried for the fates of the characters and you want them to escape Michael Myers, you know, he's chasing them around, and you're on the edge of your seat. This is less the case with the series that follow where I would say the tension is notably lower, and I would say most audience members are far going to be far less concerned about the fates of the characters who Jason is chasing around. You're just not that upset when Wayne in this movie gets thrown into a circuit board or whatever. Yeah. I mean, that's one of the hallmarks of of of the franchise, isn't it That you have certain types of victims. Uh. And we see this beyond Friday their Cather as well. But there are characters that were clearly either supposed to morbidly want Jay and to kill Um or that we're less less concerned with. You know, there's some they're definitely there's definitely some fodder in any of these films. There are a number of kills that have to you have to sort of get them out of the way, hopefully creatively, before you move on to your your final girl and some of the the later survivors, right, and so that's another common element of these slasher movies is they will usually have a main character, often referred to in the literature as the final Girl, who is typically a cut above the other characters in terms of virtues, Like, whereas all of the other characters are kind of dumb and mean and just want to want to do bad, the final girl is usually presented as more virtuous in some way. Yeah yeah, because you almost inevitably have the bad girl earlier on who gets Yeah wait, okay, so I should actually recap the movies. So warning they're going to be spoilers for about seven movies. Uh in a moment here, but uh, I don't, I don't. I mean, are you really that concerned about what happens at the end of the Friday thirteenth movies? Okay? So the first movie establishes the premise you have counselors at Camp Crystal Lake. This is a summer camp on a lake. The counselors are pretty much as always like, uh, young good looking people who like drugs, and promiscuity. So throughout the first movie, these counselors are attacked and killed by an unknown assailant, somebody who's whose face is hidden. But then at the very end of the movie, there's kind of a twist because you get a little bit of Jason lore. There are stories of a boy who drowned in the lake years ago, but maybe he's still out there. But at the end of the movie, the killer is actually revealed to be Mrs Vorhees, played by an actress named Betsy Palmer, whose son Jason drowned in the lake years ago because the camp counselors were partying instead of paying attention when the children were swimming, and so she's on a on a psychotic quest of revenge. And at the end of the movie, Mrs Vorhees is b headed by the final girl. And then we also get that that scene right where Jason, the child mutant or zombie like jumps out of the lake and pull somebody out of a boat, right like this is a This is a great sequence and is frequently referenced or celebrated in Isolation online. So I think it's actually been a while since I've seen the first movie, but I think this is presented or at least perhaps interpreted as a dream or a vision. So the final girl has survived the ordeal, she cuts off the killer's head, and then she's like floating in a boat on the lake, and then there's this horrible vision of the kid popping out of the lake at her. But I don't know if that's I don't think it's supposed to be taken as something that literally happens. Okay, but it's still It's good going into our discussion of Jason Takes Manhattan, that that dreams, hallucinations, visions are part of the franchise from the get go, So what what what can you do? In the second movie, the killer was beheaded at the end of the first one. Well, actually second movie says scratch all that Jason is not head. He is now a grown man, and he runs around murdering camp counselors, still in his a live state, wearing a bag over his head, and he worships a shrine containing his mother's severed head. From the first movie. It's got like candles all around it. Oh wow, I don't think I've seen this one, but this all sounds really solid, even if Jason has not really finalized his his headwear situation just yet. Oh yeah, so the hockey mask is not here yet. It's a sack sack head for this one. Um, you know, I'm gonna say in my personal taste, like the second and third movies, I don't know if they're silly enough to to achieve the maximum uh fun of this series. Yet that happens more once it gets supernatural. We're not there yet. So third movie, Jason's back. He runs around murdering people hanging out at Crystal Lake. Except in this movie he trades the bag over his head for a hockey mask, which was I believe brought along to the lake just by one of the characters. There's just like a joker guy who's into practical jokes and pranks and he brings along hockey mask. Jason is like, you wink, I will take that, and he wears it for the entire rest of the series. Well as we do. I think we discussed this in one of our past Halloween episodes of Stuff to Blow your mind that, like the hockey masks is great on so many levels because it kind of looks like a skull. It kind of looks like a death's head. And I don't know if you if you know the answer to this, but I've often wondered, like where why did they switch to the hockey mask? Like I wonder is it a response to The Road Warrior, which features this villain name Lord Humongous who's super beefy and wears a hockey mask. Um. I'm also aware that there are some horror at the end exploitation predecessors involving hockey mask Alone in the Dark, which is very interesting looking film came out the same year as Part three. But then there's also a non slasher exploitation film titled Acts of Vengeance from seventy four that incorporated a hockey mask. So I don't personally know like where this really came from. I don't know either, Um, no idea really all right, Well, any of you Friday to thirteenth buffs out there, who if you have an answer or just a theory, certainly right in and let us know. Oh oh, and I forgot to mention a major feature of the third movie, which is that it is Friday Part three D, so it's in three D and there are glorious scenes of people like holding a coffee mug out toward the camera, or poking a clothes line, uh pole toward the camera, or like popcorn popping out of a pot toward the camera. It's it's riveting stuff anyway. So, uh, third movie, I think at the end of this the final girl hits him in the head with an axe. So Jason, is he dead? Well, nope, he comes back in the fourth movie. Uh mad slasher behavior continues, but this time Jason goes up against a character named Tommy Jarvis, a child played by Corey Feldman who his main character trait is he enjoys making tom Savini monster masks. That's like Bobby and so oh, and the fourth movie also has Crispin Glover in it. But Jason just yeah, Jason just runs around attacking misbehaving teens. And then at the end of the movie, Corey Feldman uh whacks him in the head with a machete. So he's dead, Okay, dead the end, But I mean he's been whacked in the head with an axe before, so I don't know what's different about this time. I guess it's that you kind of see the machete like chop off basically an entire half of his head. Okay, so severe blow to the brain got you. Uh. The fifth movie, Jason seems to be back and doing his thing once again. Uh. This this movie features the adult, the grown up version of Corey Feldman's character from the previous movie. This is a guy named Tommy Jarvis. Uh. So Jason is like chasing Tommy Jarvis and his new friends around, terrorizing them. But in the end spoiler alert, it turns out this is a movie about a copycat killer. There is some complete rando named Roy who dresses up like Jason, puts on a hockey mask, and he is killer in this movie. Okay, I don't think I've seen anything from this one, but that sounds like a huge letdown. I don't know. Part five is I would say very funny. I would say of all of them, it is one of the trashy ist It feels this one feels really grimy. Um. But but but after the fifth one, Okay, what do you do now? So Jason got his head chopped in half. We already did copycat in the previous movie. How are we going to go for a sixth one time? To introduce magic? So in films two through four, Jason was just a human, just a mad slasher guy who was surprisingly resilient to counterattack. Part six, the series goes supernatural. Jason's body rises from the grave, he puts on the hockey mask again, and he attacks adult Tommy Jarvis. And so this movie ends with Tommy Jarvis doing some kind of ritual where he changed Jason to a rock at the bottom of Crystal Lake. Problem solved. There's a scene in this movie where Jason attacks an RV, which is uh interesting set piece. But another thing about this is not only does the sixth movie introduce magic into the series, I would say the sixth movie also is the first to introduce a palpable sense of irony. Like the sixth one is the first one that gets directly silly and has sort of uh jokes about itself for the viewer. Okay, so it's become Yeah, it's become a little bit funny and play intentionally funny in places. And now we have Jason as a revenant. Uh So, so really, when you say the sixth movie is where we we finally arrive at sort of the iconic Jason, yes, I would mostly say that, though I think it needs one more element, which is the actor playing Jason. The canonical Jason actor Kane Hotter, actually doesn't show up till the seventh movie in the series. So here we are at part seven and the premises Whoops, a girl with psychic powers accidentally causes undead Jason to escape his chain trap at the bottom of the lake. He once again attacks the Sinful Youth and the lake shore vicinity, until he is defeated by the psychic powers of the final girl in this movie, Tina, and by the ghost of a Father's Love. And at the end of part seven he is yanked back under the water by by the main characters dead Dad, and he lies waiting there at the bottom of the lake until the beginning of part eight. This movie ruled. I loved it, especially loved Tina. It was just an absolute pleasure to watch her hit Jason with something like a dozen telekinetic home alons. You know, it's like nails flying at him, wrapping him up in something like the making the floor open up. Just I loved everything about uh that whole showdown. She's hitting him with like like power lines. Part seven also has so it's the first one with Caine Hotter. We can talk more about the Jason body actors in a bit, but Part seven also has really solid human villains. A couple worth mentioning are most of these movies have a character who's like the rich, mean girl. In Part seven it's a character I think named Melissa who is just uh, pricelessly cruel. Uh. And then also there is another human villain who is played by Terry Kaiser. He is Tina's evil, scheming psychiatrist. And uh so this is the corpse from Weekend at Bernie's. But he's like constantly like threatening and bullying the main character. Yeah. When you first mentioned this, I thought you were saying metaphorically that this is the the actor that is the guy from Weekend at Bernie's. But yeah it is. It's Terry Kaiser. Literally the body in that movie is the evil psychiatrist here. Yeah, and I feel like this is a great This is always a great formula for a horror movie when you have your true like even supernatural or just super like super humanly um evil character, but then you have your more like real world villain who's operating within a system, such as this guy. Well, yeah, this could. I mean, this is one of those movie tropes of like the evil scientists who you know. I guess he thinks he's finally going to get tenure if he like drives this girl mad and and makes her like use her telekinesis to make the house explode. Yeah, so he's great, And yeah, I just I love Tina. I think part of the reason I love Tina is because you have your final girl standing up to like fully standing up to Jason and not just like you know, weakly hitting him with something and then not having the courage to go over and finish him off. Like she she goes for blood, and she she just unleashes with her brain like she's his brain power to overcome the darkness. And then, yeah, like there's something empowering about that, you know. It's like it takes me back to this idea of being a child and being scared of these things and these ideas, but also knowing that you could scream at them, you know that you could raise your voice and in a sense fight them with your brain. Um. So I've seen parts of this before, and I remember loving the part side scene, but I had no idea that the ending was so bonkers. I had it in my mind that she was probably going to defeat Jason by just uh, you know, telekinetically wrapping him up in a chain and blasting him off the wharf, that sort of thing. But this whole scene where she uses her powers to resurrect the uncorrupted body of her dead father from the bottom of Crystal Lake to drag him back into the deaths wearing a card again, Yes, still wearing a card again. Absolutely bonkers. I love everything about it. Yeah, you know, you mentioned the idea of defeating Jason with your mind, and so, uh, now that we've laid out these movies, I feel like there is a point I was wanting to touch on about what, like, what are these movies for? Why were they so popular? This is something like film critics of the nineteen eighties would write about. You can read articles of you know, Roger Ebert and everybody else just saying like, I don't get it. I go and watch these movies. I review them. They're terrible, And the theaters are just packed with teenagers who are just shrieking with delight about these movies. And they're selling god knows how many tickets. They're making huge amounts of money, and the teens love these movies. What is it? They're seeing about this garbage and and thinking about it. I think that these movies offer something kind of different than like a traditional like a good horror movie in the traditionally understood since does. Like so you watch Halloween or another good horror movie, and you're you're feeling suspense, and you get that endorphin rush and it's like an exciting experience and you come out of it on the other side and you're like, WHOA, okay, uh. But in these movies, you never really reach that peak of like high suspense. Like just the fact that it's a movie about ludicrous, gratuitous violence but it's not really fully scary and you can laugh at it. I think is empowering, especially when you're like eighteen years old. I remember having that feeling watching these movies around that age. Yeah. Yeah, and and I do have to say, I don't want to go on and on about this, but but turning on the television late at night and just finding yourself within one of these films, having no idea, ability to double check to see if it is a Jason movie, just just having to go with it and then seeing if he shows up. There was something kind of weirdly voyeuristic and and um and haunting about that experience. Alright, So that sets us up for up for this film. We brought everyone up to the level of Jason Takes Manhattan. We've put you in a position where you can follow Jason in his attempt to take Manhattan. And that's the elevator pitch. It's Jason takes Manhattan. What more could be possibly want to know? All right? For our for our our trailer here. So this is actually one where I feel like we need to describe the trailer because it doesn't completely translate to audio only. So I'm gonna tell you what what you would be seeing whilst you, you know, listen to this. So we're gonna start with some some gentle you know, New Yorky music, saxophone playing in there we see a figure on the waterfront, back to the camera, gazing dreamily at the island of Manhattan, resplendent in its glittering lights. What dreams does this figure have? Broadway, Wall Street, Love, Fame, a morning at the met and afternoon in Central Park. Who can say? But we zoom in closer and then the figure turns and it's Jason Vorhees hockey mask weapon in hand, instantly cut the various New York City folks screaming and recoiling and terror, and then we zoom in again on the great Hockey Mask of death and judgment. We got the camera goes into the dark eye of the mask, and we get the title card Jason Takes Manhattan, and some great voiceover from the voice of God himself, Don Lafontaine Friday that the party Jason Takes Manhattan, now New York has a new problem. It's great. You see, like I think at one point you see somebody who reads as a hot dog vendor, like throwing hot dogs up in the air and terror, and I remembering that, right, I think, so, yeah, it's a bunch of like like you know, Jason p o V stuff, But it's great. It's essentially just a teaser trailer, but it absolutely tells you everything you need to know. You know. Also, in terms of marketing for the movie, have you ever seen that clip of Jason Vorhees as the guest on the Arsenio Hall Show. Yes, it's it's really good. I think it was promoting this movie right for Jason Takes Manhattan, I believe so, yes, yeah, uh, and so it's not like Kane Hotter as himself as the actor. Jason Vorhees in character is the guest. Uh. And again again, I think this speaks to like the surprisingly like mainstream level popularity of these movies that like Jason would be booked as a like late night talk show guest. But the clip is worth looking up. Arsenio just like asks him questions. I think he asks him like, why are you so angry? And Jason of course says nothing in response. He just sits in the chair holding an axe. Well, that is a question to ask in a bit is Jason angry? Is this even an appropriate question? Arsenio? I think that varies by movie. All right, let's get into the humans behind this thing. First of all, the director and writer Rob Heddon born nineteen fifty four American director making his feature film debut here, following a documentary about Terry Gilliams Brazil and various episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents mcgiver and weirdly enough, Friday thirteenth the series. Uh. Some listeners have recommended this series to us. By the way, now, Friday the thirteenth of the TV series was not about Jason vores about what it was about, like an antique shop that's old cursed items or something. Yeah, and they had to go like reclaim them. It was episodic, but I don't think I've ever actually watched an episode in full. But it's it's its memory serves. It's very Canadian and David Cronenberg directed one episode of it. You know, I keep saying this, but someday on Weird House, We're gonna have to come around to the TV show Freddie's Nightmares, which was an episodic TV series not about Freddy Krueger, but like hosted by Freddy Krueger, like they returned to turn into the crypt Keeper. Yeah, yeah, I mean he's a perfect I don't remember when it came out. Weirdly, I wasn't a big Nightmare fan, and I was a little afraid of those films too, But I was all in on Freddie's Nightmares, you know, because here it was was on TV. It was episodic, Uh you know, I mean it was an it was an anthology series rather and uh, and it also seemed like a great gig for for Freddie, Like he's basically the crypt Keeper already at that point. Uh. I don't understand why I didn't go a million season Anyway, Rob Headen heading here, he's he's mostly done TV and TV movies since Manhattan, including Night Ride two thousand from the year and the movie Alien Fury Countdown to Invasion from the Year two thousand, which has one of the most boring movie posters I've ever seen. So the director here, I think he's been given a fair amount of grief over this film, but some folks love that. It's kind of interesting to see the see how polarized the reaction was, like, for instance, just looking at some some of the major like critics and commentators that I tend to look at. I don't know what Ebert thought of it, but Leonard Malton loved it. I think he thought it was the best one yet. Meanwhile, Michael Weldon Plectronic Film Chronicler, Uh, he's at least back in the day. I don't know if his thoughts changed, but he seemed to think this film was the worst yet it was just a downward trajectory. So like, they couldn't be more opposite in their evaluation of this film. And I went into an expecting a disappointing step down from New Blood because like Fresh on the Heels of new Blood, new Blood was so good, but I was still richly entertained throughout Jason Takes Manhattan. Yeah, it's difficult to like, what is the scale or standard you're supposed to use when judging how good a fridayte movie is. I mean, none of these movies are what you would think of as quote good. I would say maybe the closest to that is like the first one, which you could say, uh, sort of comes close to working as an actual like suspense horror film. But the other ones they clearly you know, they're extremely popular, they have some kind of powerful entertainment value, So I would rank it on like, um, just like how pleasurable is the experience of watching it, regardless of what you might mark as the I don't know a normal esthetic criteria by which you would evaluate an act of storytelling or filmmaking. Yeah, it's also interesting when you're doing with the franchise like this that's that ends up going so long, you know, for so long, and also has a lot of ups and downs and changes film to film. Like really, off the top of my head, there are very few things I can compare it too, because like do Halloween films really differ all that much, except for, of course the brilliant Halloween three, which went off in a different direction. Um wellt's think the first and the third one are very different than all the others. Yeah, and then there's a lot of a lot of sameness. Uh, you know other franchises. It's about telling a cohesive story, like say, you know Harry Potter films, which you know all are within the same visual universe for the most part, and or you know very much I set on the finish line, like the only thing I can really think of to compare it to would be James Bond films, where you know, you're you're changing things up, You're you're moving to to cash in on this trend, trying to go with the times, like, oh, nobody's going to see Bond anymore. We better make it weirder, um or send him to space. 'll send him to space. And then like, oh, it's our Bond films. They got too weird and too funny. Let's make it depressing again. That's sort of thing. That's a very good comparison. I don't think I would have thought of that, but that that absolutely works. Jason and James Bond like iconic main characters, very lucrative franchises of widely varying aesthetics and qualities from film to film. Uh, though it's also very formulaic movies, like you know all the beats that are gonna happen, you know what the stock characters you're going to encounter. Our's just a question of, like what is the sort of slight dash of individual flavor introduced within those stock characters each time? Uh? Yeah, yeah, I think that parallel totally works. And so who is the Ian Fleming of the Jason Vorhees universe. It's Victor Miller Born. Miller had nothing to do with this film, but he wrote the screenplay for the original Friday the thirteenth and nineteen eighty and created the character Jason Vorhees, or at least the sort of proto Jason Vorhees that would evolve into what we have in this film. I think there are I don't know to what extent they're ongoing, but there have been recent major legal disputes over the the i p of Jason, like who runs the character of Jason. Okay, well, we'll look to the legal literature for the for the legal answer on this, but he did write the screenplay for the first film. Well, let's let's go to Jason, though, because I mean as Jason takes Manhattan. His name is in the title. Um. Who plays Jason in this? It's Kine Hotter born nineteen fifty five, stunt man turned stunt coordinator and actor with stunt and acting credits going back into the nineteen seventies or at least like the late nineteen seventies. Survived some severe upper body burns from a fire stunt accident early in his career. Didn't start playing Jason like we mentioned tell new Blood in, but then subsequently appeared as him in three more Jason movies. But before new Blood he had appeared as an actor in such films as House to Alligator, in which he played the alligator. On did Um he seems to have done some stunt work and The Hills Have Eyes Part two, and he also he got to play leather face. We've got to do leatherface stunt work for Texas Chainsaw Massacre three. And he technically it's a kind of a technicality, but he played Freddie Krueger's gloved hand at the end of Jason Goes to Hell. Oh Man for the person who said part eight was the one we're talking about today is the worst of the Friday series that they just had to wait until the next movie, because Jason Goes to Hell is part nine of the series, and I think it is essentially unquestionable that that is the worst film in the series, and not only that, one of the worst movies I've ever seen. I remember the trailer for it where I was like, finally we've had enough of this Jason. A bounty team or you know, I don't know, a swat team is going to take him out. Yeah, it does have that movie does have a good bounty hunter in it, but it is long. Sections of it are just unwatchable. I think I've really only made it through that movie one time. I think I've tried to rewatch it from friends and we like stopped and he doesn't even go to Hell, right, That's the thing that arguable at the end of the movie. I think maybe that's the idea of pulling the mask down into the ground. You know, Freddie's hand comes up and pulls the mask down, so it's like he is being pulled down to Hell because Hell is underground. It's down there now. Kane Hodder's portrayal of Jason is interesting because he's I think he is considered by most Friday thirteen fans to be the definitive Jason, Like, if there is a canonical Jason actor, it's him. And yet he doesn't show up until the seventh movie in the series. And again today's movie is the eight, so this is only the second one he was in. And uh and according to a making of documentary I remember watching, he said at some point that they originally weren't even planning on having him return because they didn't know if he had any interest in doing it. He had to actively like contact the producers and seek out the opportunity to to play the part again. But anyway, so you know, each actor to play Jason brings his own flavor to the role. Jason never speaks, always totally silent, so it's all in the body language. So some play Jason, especially earlier on in like parts like three and four, they play Jason is more kind of erratic, manic and unpredictable. Uh and and later Jason's I think usually tend to be more subdued in their motions. Kane Hodters Jason, in particular, moves in a way that I would characterize as sort of like a d personalized like removing a lot of personality on purpose. There is a wrote smoothness and efficiency to his movement that makes his Jason feel almost like a robot or like a disembodied physical process, like to the extent that this later Jason Vorhees is a person um. Something about the body language makes it feel like, Okay, he is not an evil murderer. This is more kind of strictly business not personal. Uh you know, he's not the mad slasher. He is a professional executioner doing his job. He's at work. Yeah. Yeah. The body language here is great. And in both of these films, which again both of these have Kane as as Jason, and uh yeah, there's so many nice little touches. I like it when Jason is problem solving or and or determining how to kill somebody. I guess that's one of the main problems he solved. That's what he's good at. But sometimes he'll do that head turn like a dog thinking about something, which is quite effective. It gives you a sense of the the the lethal wheels turning inside the head. There I gotta say, the masked killer head turning beat that shows up in a lot of movies, but that actually happens in the original Halloween, And I wonder if it all traces back to that they're all just copying Michael Myers, Like he uh PJ Soul's boyfriend, Remember he like stabs him against a wall and then he kind of turns his head at him. Interesting, um so, but maybe another movies earlier, I don't know. Okay, Well, uh, I try not to get deeply invested in arguments over which actor has best at any of these various horror franchise roles. But yeah, I think Kine's work is great in this. He has that that that's subdued physicality, like you mentioned. But I also think his basic body shape and high are great for the party six four thickly built, and I think we really have to give a lot of credit to the man's skull shape and size as well, Like there you see so many shots of the back of Jason's head and um and granted there's you know, decay makeup going on there as well, because he's fully a revenant at this point. But uh yeah, Kane Kane Holder has that has that just fabulous skull shape, like it's undeniable. You can tell it's his skull under there, And when you see pictures of him out of the makeup, you're still like, that's Jason Vorhees his skull. I can tell. I've never had that thought, but okay, I see what you're saying. It should you know, in the future, I hope that that this goal will be preserved so that we can all continue to to admire it. All right, let's let's get into the rest of the cast here. Um. First of all, we have our final girl. This is Renny played by Jansen Daggett born nineteen nine and like, Renny's no Tina, So she doesn't have telekinetic and psychic powers, but she does have a kind of a spooky spirit connection with Jason and keeps experiencing terrifying hallucinations. So in a way you could see some you can see some connections between Tina and Renny here. The actor dagg It was also in a major league Back to the Miners, the TV movie Project Alf, and she appeared on various TV shows including Home Improvement. Uh, She's so, she's no Tina, She's no large Park Lincoln. But she's good and this was her first acting credit anyway, So like, I mean, it's pretty great if you think of it along those lines. Now, I think this movie was trying to recreate some of the dynamic of having like an older male human villain, like like Terry Kaiser in the previous movie, but in this one, it's the school principal who is just a strict mean man. Yes. Uh, Charles McCullough played by Peter Mark Richmond, who really had like he just feels in this movie like a walking talking uh CBS movie of the Week or something. Um, he's pretty great. He was born died in Um. Yeah, it definitely plays our our human sub villain and uh and it's it's actually kind of nicely put together his character because at first he seems like just sort of the you know, the stick in the mud authority figure. But then we learn more and more about him and we're like, okay, yeah, he's he's he's even worse. Um, but uh. Peter Mark Richmond was a veteran actor of TV and screen. Some of his bigger credits included nineteen sixties six is agent for harm TV's Dynasty in the eighties and pretty much anything you name from this time period, from the decades in which he was active. He even pops up on the original Twilight Zone in an episode titled The Fear from nineteen sixty four, and he was also on Alfred Hitchcock Presents. All right, then we have some of the other Basically we're into the victims for most of the other characters we're gonna mention here. We have Sean Robertson. I guess he's he's sort of the boyfriend, the good the good guy. He is the final girl's boyfriend, the character who in part seven, this was the guy who was the quote teenager who was like thirty five years old. Yeah, that's another thing I love about these films, like like old teens. It's maybe not as pronounced as some of the like nineteen fifties movies, which really pushed the boundaries of what you could buy as a teenager on the screen. But yeah, there are plenty of folks in this movie and and in New Blood where you're like, these are teenagers. These these people were at least in their late twenties, if not. These these movies are full of people who are supposed to be eighteen, but they're actually thirty two. In a weird way. That also kind of sanitized the whole process of watching them all killed, because it's like, these aren't really teenagers. These these are grown people. Not to say that teenagers are not growing, you know what I mean, though these are actors. Yeah, I agree it it makes the movies better, It makes them easier to enjoy. Uh, it adds to the layer of absurdity, but it also uh yeah, yeah, you don't have to feel as bad. So the actor here, Reeves had a long run on such TV shows as General Hospital, The Young and the Restless in Nashville, Born in n and I believe still active. Um, we'll get back to more victims here in just a second. But we have a wonderful crazy deck Hand and um and and doom speaker in this Uh he's credited as deck Hand. Oh okay, he doesn't have a name. No, unless his name is deck Hand, I don't know that his credit is dead cand So he just keeps showing up and sometimes it really like annoying places where he's just like, by the way, you're all gonna die, Jason Bred He's just returning from the grave, and you were you were filling me in. This is a throwback to another character, right right, there's a character in the first couple of movies known I think his name is Crazy Ralph, and all he does is he runs up to people and he goes, you're all doomed, that camp has a death curse. It's Camp blood. And then somebody will be like, yeah, Ralph, get out of here, and so it happens over and over. I think he gets killed by Jason in the second movie. Yeah, so this is exactly the same character. He even kind of looks like him. Yeah, it's like there's almost Simpsons parody um energy to him. In fact, I feel like there are a number of parallels between I guess later parodies on The Simpsons and this movie, including in the Treehouse of Horror episode. Uh well, it's the whole episode where groundskeeper Willie keeps coming to warn people about the evil and then falls over with an axe in his back. That is how this character dies in this film. So anyway, he's a lot of fun. Played by the character actor Um alex Da kun Born. Um worked quite a bit and even very recently, such shows as The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina The X Files. I don't know if you remember this guy from popping up in different roles on The X Files. Oh no, I don't know who because uh supernatural and he was. He was in a fun episode of the nineties Outer Limits series that I've seen titled Alien Shop which kind of terrible title, but it's a really heavy handed mortality story in which an alien shopkeeper messes with people's lives through magical item sales. And he's he's the shopkeeper. Uh. Um, So a lot of Canadian actors um, as well as just anybody doing TV during the nine he showed up on the Outer Limits. Uh so it's no surprise that this guy did a lot of Canadian TV as well, not only out of Limits, but he also popped up on a show called Danger Bay that I remember watching as a kid. And imagine if there there any Canadian listeners out there who around my age, you no doubt remember Danger Bay as well. I do not know Danger Bay not Canadian enough, why would you? Alright, So some other victims here. We have the character Susie played by Tiffany Paulson. Um. She wanted to become a writer, producer and director. But I think this is one of her main film roles. She's in the boat at the beginning, not the first, not the second boat, the first boat. All right. Then we have Gordon. Yeah, as a movie of many boats, there's Gordon Curry who plays Miles Wolf. Which character was this? Uh? He's well, so he's the blonde guy with the mop cut and the surfer vibe. He is to be friends with Sean the boyfriend. I'm gonna come back to him when we explained some of the characters in a bit. Okay, Well, he was born in nineteen sixty five. Other credits include puppet Master four and five, Laser Hawk um uh, that has Mark Hamill in it. Uh. And also he was in three Left Behind movies in which he plays this character what is it? Nicola Carpathia, Nicolai Carpathia. He plays the anti Christ in these Christian apocalypse movies. Nice. Um. On TV, he pops up in such shows as Highlander, The Raven, This was the Highlander, the TV series spinoff. He's on Forever Night and the nineties Outer Limits series. So a lot of your sort of nineties syndicated cable Canadian filmed TV shows. All right. Then we have Saffron Henderson playing j j uh Born five. This is our fun rocker character. Rachel always comments that she's really impressed by this girl's hair. Um, but yeah, she's a rocker. She she plays a Flying V electric guitar, the Hot Pink Flying V, and she's just jamming out constantly until Jason wax her in the head with her own guitar. I love how she goes into like the the grimy industrial inner workings of the ship to jam out, because this is the kind of place that you would jam out in a music video. Even though nobody's filming her, the sound in there must be awful. But Henderson's interesting because almost exclusively a voice actor, often for the English dubs of different anime titles, many of which were huge names and anime. But she also, weirdly enough, pops up in The Fly too. This is the sequel to the David Cronenberg Fly movie. She plays Veronica Quaif, the character that was played by Gina Davis ian Cronenberg's The Fly, though in this film it's a very small part because basically like the Killer, but they need her in the series in the movie just a little bit, and so Henderson steps in to play the part. Huh. I guess she looks a tad bit like Gina Davis. I can see that. Yeah, the fly to um, that's a that's a tough one to recommend. There's a lot of monster action in it, all right. Martin Cummins plays Wayne, which one was Wayne? I think he is the nerd of the movie. He's the a V club guy. Okay, alright, yeah, you gotta have your nerd and new blood. It was a very annoying would be sci fi writer and this one it's a less annoying would be videographer. Okay. So this actor, Cummins born sixty nine, plays the mayor of Riverdale, if that means anything to any of you. But he did a fair amount of TV over the years, including two episodes of the nineties Outer Limits, neither of which have I seen. And he also pops up on Highlander the series and Danger Bay. So strong Canadian presence here from Cummins. Oh and then we have, uh, we have an actor by the name of Vincent Craig Duprey or VC Duprey dupri rather uh, and he plays the character Julius um So. This actor is known for South Central He pops up here and there. He did one episode of Fredday's Nightmares, which we just mentioned, so it kind of makes him a two franchise actor here. Yeah, he's the jock character in this movie. And whereas usually I think the jock character is more of a human villain or bully. Uh, he's like a more likable jock character. Yeah, yeah, I agree. Oh and here's here's what you know. This is kind of the Crispin Glover factor where occasionally you'll have an actor show up in one of these films that goes on to do much bigger things. Because we have Kelly Who in this who plays Eva wanton Abbi. Uh so she was born night American actor of Chinese, English and Hawaiian ancestry, and uh yeah, Kelly Who is wonderful. This is uh this is her first film role if I remember correctly, following some TV work. But one of her biggest roles and the one I think of instantly is her turn as Lady death Strike in two thousand threes X two X Men United. She has those long, uh you know, adamantium fingernails and she has an extended fight scene with Wolverine. She's sort of like the the evil counterpart to Wolverine. I think she I'm trying. Doesn't she only get killed by getting like adamantium like liquid metal injected into her blood stream or something? I think? So? Yeah. Uh, this is always one of my favorite X Men characters. I remember liking this character a lot when it popped up on the cartoon back in the day. But Kelly who also pops up another film. She plays the Sorceress and the two thousand two films The Scorpion King. This was The Sword and Sandals, the Mummy spin off, starring a far less experience of the rock I saw that in theaters. That was That was ninety minutes. Now here's a on little factoid. Uh. Kelly who also has voiced the Mortal Kombat character Devora in both Mortal Kombat games that have featured that character. This is a weird kind of cronin berg ee insect woman character. So she gets to do a cool female monster voice, which you know, there's a fine art two and she does a great job. But the crazy thing is that, Uh. In two thousand fifteen Mortal Kombat X, Jason Vorhees was a downloadable character, so you could actually have Divora fight Jason in that video game. Oh so it's with this, I guess be a sort of digital reunion of Kelly hu and Kane Hotter. Yeah, all right, And finally, a note on the music. Fred Mullen did the music. Mullin's work is fine here, but obviously he's no Harry met Fredini, who composed the original Friday the Thirteenth score, as well as the just absolutely excellent Friday the Thirteenth Part three theme song, which became a legitimate disco hit in two. If you have not heard it, go listen to it. It's a great track. I'll throw it on the blog post for this episode at smood to music dot com. Do you remember this track, Joe? I feel like you've sent it the Part three songs, You've sent it to you before, but I don't remember. Oh. It's just it's it's got a little funkiness to it, a little simthiness to it. It's it's great. You can you can definitely imagine uh guys dancing to it uh at the disco in two. Okay, but anyway, Fred Mullen he worked throughout the eighties and nineties, especially composing scores for New Blood Uh. Though I understand new Blood also reused music from previous Friday films, but he also worked on Friday thirteenth the series, two episodes of the Outer Limit series, and something like eighteen episodes of Tech War. Oh, the Shatner authored series. Yes, quote unquote author. Yeah, the children will have to learn about tech War one day. Yes, all right, let's get into the plot of Jason Takes Manhattan as it is. I mean, these movies tend to be very light on plots, so we're not going to try to do a scene by scene recap. I think this is one of the ones where we might zoom in on some particular parts, and we must zoom in almost to the molecular level on the very opening of this movie, which is genuinely hilarious U. I think, especially if you've seen the other movies, because the opening of this one is so unlike the opening of any other Jason movie. It starts with you just fade in on footage of the New York City skyline after dusk, so you're over the Brooklyn Bridge or one of the bridges into Manhattan. I don't know which one. Got car headlights creeping creeping along and there's this eighties perm rock just chugging in the background, like, uh, you know that sound where there is way too much chorus and reverb on everything, including the drums. And then you get a random voice coming onto narrate. I think we find out that this is the voice of a radio DJ, but it's just speaking over the song with no explanation at the beginning. And I had to make a transcript of exactly what it says because this is just too good. He says exactly, It's like this. We live in claustrophobia, a land of steel and concrete, trapped by dark waters. There's no escape, nor do we want it. We've come to thrive on it and each other. You can't get the adrenaline pumping without the terror. Good people. I love this town. The number of like just like the feeling of non sequitur, the pronoun antecedent confusion. There's no escape, nor do we want it. We've come to thrive on it. Escape I don't even know. I love too how this is like the voice of the dark barred of New York City, the guy who who is totally fine living in the city, as depicted in this movie. And you know, sort of adjacent hell city New York City films. And yet it's totally redundant because this is not a film that is it all concerned or interested in what it's like to live in New York City. Not really, people are. They don't factor into the plot really at all. Well, I would say that the movie follows the ethos that was very common at the time. In fact, I would say this is almost ubiquitous of films of the late nineteen eighties that would depict New York City as an almost fantasy level hellish environment. Um, they're like, uh in this movie, as soon as the characters arrive in New York City, they are immediately attacked by a heavy metal band and then uh. And then there's a part where they like flee and Jason is chasing them around and they like flee into a diner and they're like a maniac is trying to kill us, and the waitress just goes welcomed to New York. Yeah. Yeah, just this feeling that any people who actually live here are just lost, unknowable souls who are just so desynthitized to violence, just so dead to emotion. That and most they're going to say something rude to you, and they might help you if it's their job, right, And so in the further ence of this, the credit sequence here goes on to introduce you to the concept of New York. So after the monologue finishes, you get the song keeps like the They turn up the volume on that song that's been chugging the perm rock and it opens with the most nineteen eighties perm rock lyric ever. The line is fallen Angel into the Street. The song is called the Darkest Side of Night. But so the yeah after this, the the opening credit is a montage that is supposed to introduce you to the concept of New York, a mystical land somewhere east of a shy characterized almost entirely by crime car headlights and uh, poisonous chemical Yes, And so I want a catalog in detail everything we see in these opening credits. So the first thing is we see Times Square with the light up billboards bearing the Batman logo. I think this would have been for the first Tim Burton movie. We get Coca Cola, Sony, camel cigarettes, all kinds of stuff like that, and then we see punks loitering in Times Square, one of which has a mohawk and they're smoking cigarettes ominously. Yeah, you gotta have a mohawk. And you know, I also love these shots of Times Square because if you've been to Times Square over the last you know, ten years, at least you know that it is. It is hell on Earth. It is like a neon, uh, like garbage zone, you know what. It's just so overwhelming. Uh, you wonder why you have come here. Um, it's just a lot. And so these shots you see of Times Square in this film, they're not quite like I guess we're at this period in time where it's not quite the old days of Times Square, but it's a very subdued Time Square. Like I found myself thinking I would go to this Times Square looks like it would not just completely destroy me on a on a sensory crowd level. No, No, it's almost deserted. In fact, there are very few people there except for a few punks. Yeah, there's no Elmos anything, There's no Yeah. So, oh my god, imagine if if Elmos had been there and we could have had that showdown, like at least a stair down between generic Elmo cost him dude. Yeah, there should be a movie where Jason goes to Times Square now and so he like, there's like a guy in a Superman suit there and they square off. Yeah, maybe he clavers that naked cowboy guy. Jason runs into some minions. Oh man chases somebody through the min m store. Yeah, it would be great, it would be great. But anyway, after this, so any more sites to show us? So? Uh, they show us a bunch of garbage filled alleyways emitting just clouds of steam, with a wall that has been spray painted with the word gang. I think the full phrase is I don't remember the name of the gang, but it's like ex gang rules, very plausible graffiti. And then we see a filthy manhole with its cover popped open, also just billowing steam. Uh. It makes me think about that chapter in Moby Dick that's just all about chowder. Yeah. The New York City underground is absolutely key to this sort of mythology of the city because for starters, the real life New York City underground is beyond fascinating and I love reading about it, I love traveling through it. But the New York City underground of pulp fiction and horror cinema is a place where you encounter Chud's and ancient Chinese demons, toxic waste, Vietnam that cannibals, and just so much more rivers of slime. Toxic waste is quite troll to this movie's vision of New York. The lifeblood of the city is toxic waste, and it's veins frequently just flood with toxic waste. Yeah, we've later learned there's like a tide of toxic waste, Like there's an ecosystem of toxic waste underneath this toxic city. Let's see. We see in the opening credits a man in a business suit walking down like a mile long, dark, steamy alleyway and he's just suddenly like beaten and robbed by more heavy metal criminals. Uh, and they're wearing like jean jackets, they've got long hair instead of mohawks. And so the guys from from Metallica like remove the money from the guy's wallet and they throw the wallet into what appears to be an open barrel of toxic waste with a wet rat crawling around on top. Oh, man, I love this whole thing because, first of all, man taking a shortcut that no rational man of his station would take instantly set up on by youths. And then yea, this this barrel with the rat. I love that the wallet goes into the barrel, the rat comes up, and then we just linger on this rat for what seems like forever and a long time. Yeah, bear at shot. The wear the barrel here will become very important later on. Yes, uh. And then suddenly we're inside. We see a dinner with a jukebox assigned advertising chocolate milk for thirty cents and uh. A lady at the counter gets a coffee refill, but she seems dissatisfied, like she keeps pointing at her cup as if to indicate no more, fill it till it overflows. But the server just walks away. And I think this is the same server who will later say welcome to New York about the murderer. Uh. We see subway stations with escalators covered in graffiti that looks like it was all applied on the same day. People sitting on a subway car, but they are being filmed from the floor looking up. Interesting cinematography choice. Yeah, just more lost souls, more like punks and heavy metal rockers doing uh, doing drugs in the alley ways. They're like holding needles up to the light so that they form a syringe silhouette, and then just like squirting some jet of yellow green liquid into the air that sparkles in a lamp beam. It's possible this is mountain dew, yeah, or or it's the ouze from the teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Oh the ouze yeah. Oh. And then finally the statue of Liberty. Baby show us the statue, the promise, the promise of New York City. You know, we haven't gotten there yet. But there's a hilarious moment early in this film where Sean, the boyfriend, gives Renny, the final girl, a gift and they're on the boat. They haven't gotten to New York. They just got on the boat. She opens the gift up and it's like a jewelry case and inside is a necklace with the statue of Liberty on it. But they haven't gotten to New York yet. It's like a it's like a trinket you would buy on the street in New York. But they're on the way. So New York has been established heavily. And in fact, this whole sequence kind of reeks of producers or somebody saying, hey, we were put in Manhattan in the title. Is there any way you could put some Manhattan at the top of the picture so the people, because people aren't going to see it again for over an hour. Yeah? Uh yeah. And in fact, I think probably the only thing in that opening sequence that is actually Manhattan is the shot of Times Square and the shot of the Statue of Liberty. I think the rest is probably a Vancouver once again. Oh but then so anyway, we get a nice non diagetic to diagetic music transition where that song The Darkest Side of Night is suddenly playing on in a totally different place. So like you're at New York and the camera dips under the water, and then it re emerges from the water and you're at Camp Crystal Lake. Uh, and the music transitions to music coming out of a radio on a boat. It's like a cabin cruiser that's floating in Crystal Lake. Did you notice what the radio DJ was saying when it did that transition. The only thing I remember is that like this one goes out to something to do with Crystal Lake, Like he references Crystal Lake in it, which and immediately made me wonder, well, where is Crystal Lake. I've never, I never. It's kind of like Springfield in the sentence like does it is it anywhere? Is it just generically somewhere in the US. This is so weird. I made a transcript of it too. So the DJ says, you've been listening to W G A Z the Electricity of Manhattan. This request is going out all the way to Crystal Lake. The senior class of lake View High they'll be graduating on the thirteen of this month, and we wish them the best of luck and success when they come to visit our seductive city. Our lure is a great one, dear friends, but beware the city of lights casts many shadows. Indeed. So this is a New York based radio DJ interrupting the darkest side of night to give an on air shout out to a random class of a graduating high school graduating high school seniors from somewhere else who are going to be visiting New York in a few days. Okay, perfectly sensible. Yeah, but as to the location of Crystal like, yeah, this is something that I think is not consistent throughout the films in this movie. Again, it's obvious they're like when they're in the port leaving in a bit there in the Pacific Northwest. It's obviously the Northwest, but other movies that have established the location of Crystal Lake, I think it's supposed to be somewhere in New Jersey. That would make sense wherever they're leaving from, whether it's Vancouver or New Jersey. In either case, does it make sense that they would take a boat to New York a voyage by sea for a class trip to New York. I guess it's the only way to get him there, Like, you can't have a bus trip. How's Jason going to get it? Stow away on the bus? It's like, oh, well, the bathroom has been out of order for the entire drive. Sorry, guys. And it turns out it's got Jason four he's in it, or Jason's clinging to the top of the van, like this is just ultimately the way that he would try. Well, I guess. But so in these movies where Jason has become undead, you gotta have like a sort of waken him up scene. You gotta defrost him somehow. So in this movie, the way it happens is this yacht on the lake is occupied by a couple from that graduating class. Like they they respond to the radio DJ they're like, hey, that's us and uh so it's a boy and a girl who are generally up to no good. And the guy pretty early on dives into a big lore dump. He's like, gee, it's kind of spooky that we are floating right next to that camp where all those people were murdered. Uh and he he just explains all the lord he's like, Jason was of what you know, he doesn't the stuff we talked about at the beginning of this episode. And then he ends up by saying that guy is dead now somewhere at the bottom of this lake. And meanwhile, their boat anchor, we're seeing it just it's dragging across a power cable and bringing it into contact with Jason's chain bound body, and then it starts rubbing against the rock, sparks fly and whoops, electricity brings Jason back to life, just like a Frankenstein. I love it. They also happened to have a hockey mask on board the boat, so he got d masked at the end of the previous movie, but he gets a new mask just because they have one. It's very lucky. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I guess this is up north there, They're gonna have more hockey around in general, so maybe it's a little easier to come by. So yeah, he gets uh electrified into life. He comes up on the boat, of course he he He kills the two people on the boat with like a harpoon gun. I don't know why they even have that, but it's there and he does it. And when we first see Jason in this movie, I gotta say this, of the entire series, I think it's got to be by far the wettest to Jason. This is a generally slimy, almost mucus drench to Jason. Yoh yeah, Like he's just dripping in necro slime. And if if he's been somewhere sometimes their characters like like, why is there a hole punched in this door? And the hole is dripping this slime? Um. It's a what's a wonderful touch? And you know it it matches up with the way his skin looks, which it looks like that, you know, his hand could just de glove at any moment. Yeah, but okay, so Jason's woken back up. He's killed people on a boat, he's just on this boat. How's he gonna get to Manhattan. Well, here's where the premise comes in. And this is the premise. We follow the aforementioned graduating class of high school seniors as they go on their graduation trip, which is apparently getting on what looks like I'm no expert in ships, but this does not look to me like a cruise ship. This looks like a cargo ship of some kind getting on, like a dirty cargo ship, departing from somewhere that looks like the Pacific Northwest and traveling by boat to New York. It reminds me of the boat in Shock Waves a bit, and that it does not look attractive to venture upon. It does not look like a boat anyone would want to travel on recreationally. But then also, yeah, we have all these shots of the interior of the ship where it's like the Titanic in there, like the bowel with the Titanic. Yeah, it's called the Lazarus. Nice. So here I guess we meet a couple of the main characters. So we meet Renny, the final girl of the movie. She's played very just straight down the middle. She is she is a nice person. She is smart, she has a cute dog, and don't worry that the dog is not harmed in this film. The dog just disappears for most of the movie. And then at the end, after Jason has defeated, the dog comes running up to them and they're just like, oh, hey, buddy, that the ending I absolutely love because yeah, at that point, I mean, no real spoilers here, but Jason has killed everybody but these two kids, Um, it's been just a traumatic night of just murder and death and doom and running for your life. But then they encounter the dog and they're like, oh, it's great. And then they just go off into the city like they're they're just on vacation and like everyone or most of the people they knew, did not just all die violently. Yeah, I think do they go get a hot dog or something? You get a hot dog? And they walked through the park that sort of thing. Um, well we're finally in New York, um and uh. But so it's Renny in the car, along with another character named Mrs Van Duson, who is a kind and nurturing teacher who just repeatedly tells Renny that she is so smart and so special. She explodes later in the movie. Yeah, played by Barbara Bingham, by the way. Yeah, so they introduced them in this the scene where they're like sitting in a car, and it's so like the first like seventeen minutes of this movie where there's like all these exposition lines. It's like almost every single line like clangs in some weird way that feels wrong, and you're like, huh. But so they they introduced these two characters. And the first thing Ms. Van Duson does is she like gives Renny a gift. She opens up a box and inside it's like a fountain pen. And the teacher says, Stephen King supposedly used it in high school. I love it. Stephen King's holy pen, a holy relic, supposedly used it. Really, how did she acquire it? I don't know. Why is she giving it to Renny? I don't know is Renny a writer? If so, that is not not ever divulged. Yeah, yeah, but I love that this holy artifact is is implanted into the picture. It's it's interesting too because new Blood, the previous picture, you know, is often summarized as being Carrie versus Jason yea, which I mean loosely so, but anyway, yeah, here Stephen King's pen and it will come up again. And then immediately Ms. Van Deusen is like, You're the best student I've ever had. You're so brave and strong, you are going to survive this film. Vote of confidence. But meanwhile, remember that boat Jason boarded in the previous scene. Uh, here it is. Suddenly it appears to be floating in the harbor next to the big passenger ship, the Lazarus, and we see Jason like pop up out of the water and begin to climb onto the second boat, the boat bound for New York. And here we come to a long running argument between my Friday the thirteenth enjoying friends and I, And the question is this, does Jason drive the boat? Does he drive the first boat to the other boat, or does he merely remain on the boat while it, I guess, drifts downstream to the harbor if the ladder, does he stand the whole time or does he sit while the boat is drifting. I have long been of the opinion that, yeah, Jason drives that boat. He's like work in the throttle, he's steering, he's driving. We never see either way, so it's it's up to interpretation. But a good friend of mine always insists Jason does not drive the boat. He just thinks it doesn't work. That's it reminds me of the whole Does Indiana Jones climb into the U boat or does he cling to the U boat for the entire journey part of Rated Lost start on this one. I'm edge brought. I brought it up because I got to think about it whilst watching the picture. I think, on one hand, this is essentially a Dracula Demeter situation. You know, Dracula kills everyone aboard the Demeter and it continues to deliver him to his destination. Uh. And of course the ship, you know, rolls up everyone's dead on board. Uh. But Dracula does not pilot that vessel. Um. You know, it's just kind of like it delivers him there, and you know, through dark magic and destiny and so forth. Um. So on one hand, I feel like that's got to be what's going on here. But on the other hand, Jason can use tools and machines. He does so sometimes to kill people. And while water is part of his prison, he can also clearly get around on water, and he's not handicapped by it in like a vampire since so I guess he could drive it. But then also this comes back to why does Jason want or need to travel anywhere. He's been very local up till now, and suddenly he's going to go to New York or he's gonna check out this boat. I don't know. Yeah, and mean, so far, Jason has been almost like uh, like a like a century robot that protects a particular location. So it's like you come into his territory and then he will do violence against you. He's not like going out elsewhere until this movie. I guess it's supposed to be like a situation of he's an accidental stowaway or he's he's drawn in by the fact that Renny has this weird connection with him, like with at least with some aspects of him. It gets kind of weird with the various hallucinations she has a young zombie mutant Jason um some very nice hallucination sequences. By the way, there are some very artistic sequences in this film dealing with her flashbacks and visions and hallucinations that I don't think it enough credit. Okay, so we're not gonna explain the whole plot, but we should at least mention who some of the main characters are. So you got Renny, and you've got miss van Duson and they're getting on the boat, then I would say you've got Sean. Sean is the pretty boy again. He fills the role of the final girl's love interest. He is handsome, heroic, and otherwise devoid of personality traits. They tried to fill in some character shading on this one with one of the most ludicrous connections they could have come up with. Sean's father happens to be the captain of the ship that they are all riding to New York, and Sean is a great disappointment to his father, who, by the way, kind of looks like l Ron Hubbard in his sea captain outfit. Because Sean, Sean is a disappointment because he is a failure at being a boat captain. Uh, He's like, I guess his dad wants him to be a boat captain as well, and Sean like forgets to do the international maritime signal when they're going underway and stuff. All right, So that's Sean, and Sean will redeem himself later on in my eyes anyway. Oh okay, I can't wait to hear it. Okay, So we also got like the principal guy, Mr McCulloch, who is a strict and overbearing either teacher or principal. He happens to be chaperoning this senior trip. His interests include scolding, shouting, finger wagging, warning, hectoring, excoriating, and naysaying. He's like a combination of Principal Skinner and Robert Stack from Unsolved Mysteries. Yeah, and like I said, this is a character that initially seems unlikable and is just a stick in the mud and is the authority figure to the teens. But also we get additional wrinkles later on where we learned that he is maybe a little slow to say, hey, teenage student, put your clothing back on. And also he is the type of uncle who will just push you into the lake to help you learn how to swim, even though there there may be like undead monster children down there somewhere. Yeah. So, so Rennie's like character flaw is that she's afraid of the water. Uh. Yeah, And and we learned in a flashback later on, I think when Rennie is staring at us puddle in the street, or maybe it's all of gasoline after a car explode. God, yes, it's after the car explode. This is one of the many wonderfully shot like this is like a beautiful moment in this film. Um that I was captivated by m okay. Uh. Well, she does look into a puddle and she has a memory of when uh this guy, oh, who we also find out is her uncle and guardian. Yeah, she's looking into the flaming puddle and then we see something's moving across the puddle. What is it? Is it a tiny boat? And it is like the yeah, the memory that the that the wide shot of the boat on the lake on Crystal Lake, but like superimposed or whatever within the flaming puddle, and everything's very soft focus because it's a flashback, and it's like her as a kid and her her mean vice principal uncle is like, you're going to learn to swim, and the way that will happen is I will shove you into the water and command you to swim. And she's like, no, I can't swim, and he's like, swim, swim, you can do it. Oh, but the principal here, he Also, he's the guy who once people start concluding that the murders are being committed by Jason Vorhees, just like the in the old stories, this guy is the doubter who must be punished for his skepticism. Most of the Jason movies have some form of this. Somebody's like, Jason Vorhees is dead. You know, you're being ridiculous. He can't be behind this, and then a couple of scenes later, Jason cuts them in half of the saw or something. So let's see who are the other major characters among the mini victims. There's there's Julius. As we said, he's kind of the jock character, but he's not the standard jock bully. He's more of a a sort of likable, brash hero. He's a boxer in training. We see him doing a boxing scene. There's like a boxing ring on this boat. Uh. And there's a scene where once they figure out Jason's murdering everybody. Um, Mr McCulloch is like, everyone do what I say, and Julius says, no schools out and he has a stupendous boxing match with Jason on the roof of a nondescript building. I think In an earlier draft of the script, this was going to take place at Madison Square Garden. Oh, it's a it is a wonderful fight sequence because, yeah, he stands up to Jason. He starts throwing punches. He's connecting with these punches. Jason staggering a bit. He's working Jason towards the edge of the roof, and you know, and you know what's gonna happen. You know, he's not gonna get a knockout on Jason, or if he does, Jason's gonna get up and stab him or something. So you know, this isn't gonna work. But but for a minute, there's hope. But then he's he wears himself out, just wears himself out punching on Jason, and then out of breath, he he's he dares Jason to give him a shot. He's like, give me your best shot. Jason rears back, punches his head completely off, which goes flying off the roof of the building into a dumpster. And then we get rolling headcam. Did you know they like they have like a tumbling camera shot. It's from the point of view of the rolling head. Yeah, I think they took that from Polanski's Macbeth. I think we had a rolling head shot. There is a there's there is a decapitated head p o V in that movie. Maybe there's some connection. Let's see, there's some other characters. There's there's the mean girl in movie like this, you gotta have the mean girl. I think the character's name is Tamara. Uh So a lot of these movies have a character like in part seven, I think the one she's named Melissa. This is basically a blonde girl who is implied to be from a rich family who's at the top of the social pyramid, who bullies everyone of a of a lesser station in that social pyramid. Uh usually including doing some kind of mean prank or diss on the final girl. Tamera also does the drugs though, and she she shoves Renny off the side of the boat for no reason, like really just like oops, whoops, shoves her into the water, though she was on the drugs at the time. Yes, speaking of the drugs, you also have Tamora's friend Eva. This is the one played by Kelly who who is like the nicer, cool girl. She's best friends with the evil rich girl. There's one part where the mean girl is like, um hey, let's do illegal drugs, and Eva is like, I don't know what if I lose my science scholarship. Yeah. Yeah, she seems like a good character. I thought she is. She is doomed by association. You got Wayne, this is the geek of the movie. This is the a V Club guy. He's running around with a video camera. Actually predating the creation of the found footage movie. This is a movie where a character in a life or death scenario is still filming everything. Yeah. Yeah, I thought about that a little bit. Yeah, it's like, oh, this is this is kind of like this would be the whole movie later on annoyingly. Um so maybe that was one of the reasons it. I was increasingly in favor of this character's death. We already mentioned Miles because this is the guy played by Gordon Curry who's in the Left Behind movies, but also I wanted to mention a few things about him, even though he is not a very notable character. In fact, I don't know if he has any lines that remain in the final cut. He's just standing around. Maybe he's a couple. Yeah, he's so unnotable that I had him. I had his his character misattributed in the notes here. I was thinking this actor must be the guy who plays the video game. I don't know, I added backwards, it's easy to blend these characters together. Well, I wanted to mention a couple of things about him. One is that when we first see him, he's in like the pilots I don't know what you call it, the pilot's room, the place where you pilot the ship. He's standing there with Shawn and Shawn's dad, dressed up in the captain's uniform. Uh. And uh he appeared and in the scene he appears to be wearing a sweatshirt with a picture of the Titanic on it. And also there's a deleted scene that you can watch. You got the low ray of this. Uh. This when we very first meet this character. Uh. Captain Daddy here says some hilarious line to It's hard to capture the exact awkwardness of it, but it is something like, hello, Miles, congratulations on winning second place on that intramural diving competition. What do you say Once we're out on the ocean and I cut the engines, throw anchor and let you take a few dives off the back Yeah, that's that's something you do. Yeah. Yeah, and uh I I can't imagine why they cut that moment out. But then yeah, and then I think blond guy is just like whoa bodacious Yeah. Captain the actor playing Captain Daddy in this uh is he has some some other line. There's one where he's talking to I don't know his like first night or something, asking him about his kid and how old his kid is, and he's like eighteen months. And then with like just such this earnest delivery, Captain Daddy says hell of an age or something like that. Uh, and it was, but it was like so earnestly delivered. I was thinking to myself, is it it was? Was eighteen month? Really a hell of an age? I don't know. I don't know if it really was. I'm not sure I would have been didn't didn't. I mean, this is all relative, but I was I was quizzing. I was quizzing myself over that proclamation. Okay, so you got all the people on the boat, Jason gets on the boat, the boat departs. After that, there is not a whole lot of plot. Rather, there are just the standard mechanics of a Friday and movie with some location twists. So Jason murders basically everybody on the boat one by one. This is the majority of the movie. Then the boat starts exploding. Then the remaining survivors at the time, which is Renny, Sean, Mr. McCulloch, Mrs Van Duson, and Julius and the dog. The dog's okay. They take a rowboat the rest of the way to Vancouver or I mean New York. They see the Statue of Liberty and they cheer. Then they like go up to a dock, and the moment they arrive in New York, like literally as they're leaving the dock, they are attacked by a heavy metal band. Uh. And then Jason chases them around New York for like fifteen minutes and kills everybody except Renny and Sean. And then in a final twist, Jason is defeated when he follows them into the sewer. The sewer, we're told by a sewer worker, floods every night at midnight with toxic waste. The clock strokes midnight, Jason is hit by toxic waste. Renny and Shawn avoided by climbing up a ladder, and then the toxic waste turns Jason back into a child version of himself. Well, um, I have some thoughts on this. So we're talking about a little bit about this off Mike, because yes, the flood of toxic waste moves in, destroys Jason, and then when she looks down, she sees him as a child again. Now, my interpretation of this is that Jason is actually just um sludge at this point. He's toxic sludge like floating in the shape of Adjason in the water. But via her weird hallucinogenic connection with ghost kid Jason, which has established several times in the movie with some really at times I think, very creative hallucination sequences. Um, she sees the child, That's what she sees there instead of of the sludge. It's like she sees Jason the child finally at peace, finally uh you know actually, and so he's sleeping, but he's sleeping the eternal sleep of of of true death. But I mean, this is a movie with magic in it, so it could be he was turned into a straight up child. Uh, and the child is floating now in the sewers of New York. It invites interpretational like this film is like taxi driver. Um, okay, oh, let's see, let's see, let's see. What else did I want to so? Um? I love that the new Even you spend so much time on the boat, it feels like you're always going to be on the boat. And then when you do finally get to New York. Despite the fact that this was the selling point of the movie, it weird. It weirdly feels like bonus movie. It's like it was an interesting feeling, even though again this was what we were sold in the teaser trailers that it was gonna be Jason in New York. Right before you logged on here, Rob Seth and I were talking about it, and Seth suggested that the movie could be called Jason Still Cruising. That would be good because it is mostly boat. Yeah, it is. It's kind of like I mentioned Dracula and the Demeter earlier. Again, the section where Dracula is on the boat is just a small portion of the novel, a great portion, that is, you know, given adequate amount of time and space in the novel. Um But then again, the novel is not titled Dracula Goes to England, so or Dracula takes England or whatever. So it's it's like it's different in that regard as well, but there's at least well, I think there's a movie project in the works called like the Last Voyage of the Demeter that is going to be like, okay, that one section of the novel as a full blown motion picture. What happened on the boat that that that transported Dracula to England? How did all those people die? What's all sorts of horrible things occurred? And to a certain extent, you could almost look like, look at this movie like that, like this movie is trying to fill in a gap that nobody wanted filled in just yet. This is interesting comparing Uh Jason Takes Manhattan to Dracula, there are a lot of parallels. I mean, they're both a movie about a sort of monster that is the that is the master of its own rural domain. It is out somewhere far from the city, and it's even tied to the soil of that location. Yes, yes, it's tied to the soil. And then makes a journey by sea to the metropolitan center and uh and arrives where there is you know, great population density and modernity and technology and comes in collision with all these things. Okay, yeah, this is a good Dracula is Jason takes Manhattan. I like it. Um. Now you mentioned major center of population. That's one of the reasons I love when they initially show up in New York because it seems almost completely depopulated at first. This is the largest city in the US, and Manhattan Island is a major center of population, and yet there's virtually nobody there. It's it's only violent criminals. Yeah, you expect to see snake pliskin wandering around back there is something. Yeah, I found it interesting that McCulloch dies in that what I think is the same barrel of sludge that had the rat in it from earlier. Uh, Jason just dumps him over and drowns him, pushes his feet down into it. He kills him with the dip from Roger Rabbit. It's like, you know, he's the judge. Yeah. Yeah, And meanwhile he's down there going in current b Jayson warries. We we get subway tunnel action, which instantly, I mean, you put a monster in a subway and I'm there, I'm committed to the picture. And this is this the action sequence to where Sean totally redeems himself, jumps at at like leaps at Jason and administers a lying bulldog like a flying headlock head driver like he's a Steiner brother coming off the top rope and drives Jason head first into the third rail electrocuting. I want to hear the math promo for that. It was fabulous. I loved it. I had to watch it twice. Um so, yeah, they battle down there, they come out into Times Square and all there's this glorious moment where we had established punks in Times Square earlier, same punks are there again, listening to rap music. They have rap music playing on their um their boom box, and Jason comes by. He's after our main characters, but he has time to to violently kick over their boom box. They do not react well to this, and they're like, they're like hey man, They're like, you know, stepping to Jason. Jason just turns around. He doesn't have time to kill them all. He's suddenly in an area where they're just this is a new situation for Jason, right, there are too many people to kill all of them. He has to leave some behind. But to to get rid of the punks. He just turns around, actually lifts up his mask. We don't see anything. He's facing away from the camera, but they all just run away in fear. Wonderful moment. Loved this moment, but we don't. Yeah, so it's it's great because in this movie, we haven't seen what his face design is going to look like yet, so we're we're enticed. We're like, how scary is it gonna be? And oh boy, the reveal is so underwhelming. Yeah, especially coming off of New Blood, because in New Blood the reveal is horrifying. They do a great job of like, oh, you've ripped off his mask and it's not you know, it's it's the thing is I guess sometimes in these films it's like Jason is supposed to be kind of awkward and disfigured underneath. Like it comes back to the basic hard trope, what does removing the mask do? Are you like, are you revealing like the shame or the weakness of the individual. Are you unleashing the monster even more? And in New Blood it was definitely a release of the monster because this this this grizzled and disfigured and rotting face of a rev It is just just terrifying to it to behold. In this movie, I feel like we take a step backwards and we get more into the Let's reveal the like the awkward dirtiness of the of the Revenant. Let's take away some of his strength by unmasking him. Yeah, his face in this movie is kind of cute. He's almost like a slimy gray muppet. Yeah, he has kind of a muppet qualities, kind of like kind of a sensibility when in the face is revealed. After Um, I believe, she picks up a bucket that's labeled toxic waste right down in the sewers, because they end up going into the sewers down the Chud territory. Yeah, throws it in his face and it starts steaming, and the mask comes off, and there's his there's there's the face of Jason, and Jason takes Manhattan. It looks and while it looks a little dirty at first, I will say that as we proceed and we see him like shambling down the tunnel after them, Um, I didn't look as to me. So, Yeah, in this tunnel, they're they're trying to escape Jason. They've come up out of the subway, he chases them. They're in Times Square. This is the actually shot in Times Square. I think there's like one or two scenes actually shot in New York. This was really Times Square. I guess they had to get the crowds to the side, like behind the barricades to clear it out for Jason. And and there are great stories of when they were filming this, like it did draw crowds. People were really excited to see Jason shooting in Times Square, and you know, they were all waving to him and blowing him kisses and stuff. And but yeah, after this, they run into a diner. Somebody's trying to kill us. Welcome to New York. They run out the back of the diner. They run down into the sewers. They meet a sewer worker who's like, we've got to get out of here. The sewers flood with toxic waste every night at midnight. And then Jason hits that guy with a wrench and then she throws toxic waste in his face, and then the floods come and and that's it. Yeah, it's a it's a it's a magical ending. But the dog is okay. They come up out of the sewer, They're like, Oh, everything's okay now, and then the dog runs up to them and it's happily ever after. M hmm, or is it because here's another read? This is this is this is kind of a radical read on the picture. What if they died in the tunnel with Jason, they were dissolved as well, and when they emerge, they are emerging into the afterlife. That's why they're suddenly okay and New York isn't threatening anymore, and the dog is the psychopomp that's gonna guide them the rest of the way so they can continue to traverse the risk and terrors of the afterlife. Well, what does the monologue say at the beginning? There is no escape, nor do we want it. Uh, those New Yorkers, you know it's weird. I'm just looking at our page of all all of the weird house cinema movies we've done, and I got to say that I really enjoyed this episode and that Jason Takes Manhattan is simultaneously one of the most mainstream movies we've ever done and one of the stupidest. Oh yeah, it's so good. Jason Takes Manhattan. Uh, And and it is it is tooken for sure. Uh So if you want to see Jason Takes Manhattan, I mean, for starters, there's a very good chance you've seen it already. But if you haven't, if you managed to get through most of your life without watching it, beginning to end like like I had, it is widely available obviously. Um. I can't speak to streaming, and I have a friend of mine who recently decided he was gonna watch all the Friday the thirteenth movies, and he was going through other franchises as well, and it was kind of having to play hop scotch from one streaming site to another to watch them all. So I'm not sure exactly where how you need to stream this movie right now, but it's widely available as physical media. Uh. They've put out I think multiple special blue ray can collections. I rented a disc at Video Drome off of I think the the Friday eight movie collection, which I quite liked because again I got to watch to Jason movies for the price of one. A little bit of trivia going back to part seven the New Blood, did you know that this is only one of the possible scripts that could have become Friday the thirteenth, Part eight. Another option was going to have the Tina character, the psychic girl from part seven, return and do battle with Jason again. Well, I mean that sounds like a winning concept as well. Uh, but I wouldn't have wanted a world in which Jason takes Manhattan. Doesn't happen though, But Tina was a great character. I would have loved to have seen her again. Oh, you could have combined them. I mean, it could have been Tina's graduating class, so she's a psychic, she's on the boat and the Jason gets on the boat the gold Manhattan. It could have worked. Yeah, Or then the one after this where they send out the bounty hunters to to bring him down. If that had been conceptualized differently, Um, you know, you could have had a Tina be the go to, like, who are you going to go to to take Jason down? Go to somebody who has not only survived him, but overcome him with inhuman powers, do you want to hear? Or one other alternate idea for Jason A it was going to be that the hunk from part seven. Actually it turns out that part seven was a dream and he was the real Killer. What, Well, that's that's awful. I'm glad they didn't do that. Can you imagine that if you transition from Hunk to Jason, I mean, Jason is is he is a physical specimen to be sure. All right, well, we're gonna go ahead and close it out right there, but we'd love to hear from everyone out there. What are your thoughts on Jason Takes Manhattan or The Friday the Thirteenth franchise in general, any of the specific movies we mentioned in this episode. Let us know, we'd love to hear from you. What do you think about this film's depiction of New York City? New Yorker's uh tourists to the City of New York certainly chime in as well. Oh yeah, I can't believe they didn't end it with Jason buying a bunch of Yankees gear and it's just decked out, head out Yankee stuff. That's the thing. There's so much stuff with that. There's so many ideas that you could have pitched for Jason spending let's saying, an entire films length within the city of Manhattan. There's so many directions to have gone into. You could do a whole film series just about about Jason in Manhattan. But well, in earlier plans for this movie they did want that. I mean, he was gonna go to go to Madison Square Garden, go to the Statue of Liberty, all that. They just didn't have the budget. Yeah, kept getting scaled back more and more boat less and less New York. Well there you go. But in the end I was pretty pleased with it. So hey have yeah. If you want to check out other episodes of Weird House Cinema, we published it every Friday, and the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed were primarily a science podcast, but on Friday's we put most of that aside and we just talked about a weird film. Again. I'll blog this up at some new to music dot com And also we have a letterbox that's l E T T E R b o x D dot com account or user name is weird House and I update that as well, adding the films that we have cover word and sometimes will cover to that list, so you can also get a nice visual representation of what we've done so far. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello. You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com Stuff to Blow Your Mind's production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.