Roberto Giacomelli
•After being resurrected by an electric shock, Jason immediately sets out to find new victims. He encounters a group of students about to embark on a journey from Crystal Lake to New York: Jason sneaks aboard their ship and begins his killing spree. Among the passengers on the ship is also an aspiring writer terrified of water after being attacked in Crystal Lake by Jason when she was a child. Upon arriving at the port of Manhattan, the masked killer pursues the survivors, spreading panic among the inhabitants of the Big Apple.
"Friday the 13th Part 8" is a notable improvement over the disappointing seventh episode. This time, our "hero" is immersed in a metropolitan environment, completely foreign to him; like a new King Kong, Jason represents the exact opposite of what one might expect from civilization. Jason is the embodiment of the most destructive primal instincts, he is Thanatos, death opposed to the frenetic vitality of the big metropolis. Seeing Jason roaming the streets of New York (for a few sequences, unfortunately) is extremely entertaining (remember the scene with the thugs and the intrusion into the subway car) and distracts from the always thinner and colorless plot of the film.
In this episode, the deaths become creative again, although the level of gore is not particularly high, and the story (almost entirely set on the ship) has a good pace. The final confrontation, with Jason's subsequent death, represents the ideal end of the entire saga, since Jason regains his original appearance as a child, through a metaphorical rebirth from the waters that act as amniotic fluid.
The direction is by the usual unknown, Rob Hedden; among the cast is Kelly Hu, known in Italy for the Philadelphia cheese commercial and later worldwide thanks to blockbusters like "The Scorpion King" and "X-Men 2".
"Nightmare on Manhattan" is therefore slightly superior to the last chapters of the saga, but remains a product appreciated only by the followers of Jason Voorhees' cinematic exploits.
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