The change of scenery doesn't disguise the fact that this eighth (!) episode of the slasher series rigidly adheres to the same old boring formula. It didn't even work in the first movie, so it's certainly not going to work in the eighth. Actually I'm being slightly unfair; this movie does one thing right that all its predecessors did not, although after eight movies I'm too jaded to care. For once, the characters figure out there's a maniacal killer on the loose before it gets down to the last one or two. That was my primary problem with the first episode -- without the characters feeling the need to do anything to save themselves, all the movie is is a series of disjoint killings of indistinguishable teens. But Part VIII has other problems the first didn't. The first movie was at least creepy and made an attempt to scare people, but all it succeeded in doing was showing people dying. The eighth movie and most of those in between are content to make that their solitary goal, as if that were enough to make an effective horror film. It's horrific, all right.

As with the previous three episodes, there are a few scant moments of bad movie humor, but it's not worth burrowing through this thing to find them. This movie is not long, but it feels long. At the 70 minute mark, it felt like a good two hours had passed, and when the movie ended at 90, it was as if I had been sitting there for hours. It wasn't just me; my wife felt the same way.

There are a couple mildly amusing attempts at deliberate humor. Finally the producers gave up taking the series seriously and started to make fun of Jason's cult popularity. For instance, in Manhattan (it takes them over half the movie to get there, by the way), Jason spots a billboard with a picture of a guy in a hockey mask on it. Jason looks at the billboard, then looks directly at the camera, then keeps walking. Later, Jason kicks some street kids' stereo out of his way, and when they threaten him about it, he lifts his mask (the camera only shows the back of his head), and they suddenly become polite and agreeable. But these touches are too little, far too late.

We open with a really STUPID monologue about New York City (I think) that seems totally out of character for a Friday the 13th movie. Cut to Crystal Lake. Jason's lying at the bottom of the lake again. He gets electrocuted again, and he comes back to life again. Cut to a cruise ship. A guy on it says, "This voyage is doomed." Heh. There hadn't been an eerie prophet of doom in the series for several episodes. This one is one of the most comically eerie of them and was a good funny-bad part of the movie.

Female Lead sees a vision of a drowning kid, conjured, apparently, from a traumatic childhood experience. Her dog sees the vision too and runs away.

Two teens find a secluded place in the ship and start taking drugs. One is doubtful, but the other says, "Do you think I'd risk getting caught?" Just at that second, Female Lead walks in. Then their chaperone walks in.

Jason kills some people. His mask has the same face markings and is still cracked where he got an axe to the head in Part III, even though this mask is a different mask entirely. His old one got cracked at the end of Part VII, and this one was "borrowed" from his first victim, who just happened to have one with him.

"He's come back. And you're all gonna die," the eerie prophet of doom says.

A teen takes a shower. When she steps out, she's not the least bit wet. When Jason comes to kill her, for people who bathe shall surely die, she doesn't do anything to save herself -- she just screams "No!" until Jason kills her. Later, Jason cuts someone's throat -- and if you look at the knife, you'll see that it barely even touches the guy.

"You're all going to die," the eerie prophet of doom says.

A girl runs into an empty dance hall. Someone left the music blasting and the spotlights swinging. Jason kills her. The music stops for no good reason. Someone else dies in a set that looks exactly like Freddy Krueger's old stomping grounds. Someone else tries to escape Jason by climbing up a really long ladder. Jason watches him ascend some fifty feet. Then we cut to a close up of the guy climbing, and suddenly Jason is RIGHT THERE, yanking him off.

Finally the scene shifts to Manhattan. The remaining survivors disembark on the docks of New York. One says, "There must be a phone around here somewhere."

Stuff happens. They end up in a car. Jason pulls one guy out the driver's side window and hauls him several feet off to the side to kill him. About one second later, Jason is standing way the heck in *front* of the car. He pulls a Michael Myers and lets himself get run over. The car crashes, most of the people get out, and the car explodes with a ridiculously insanely overblown explosion that would have been way funnier had it not been for the recent memory of the ten times more overblown explosion at the end of Part VII.

Jason, lying motionless in the street, snaps awake and looks at the camera, as is his tendency. He kills another character by doing more teleporting. Then he gets thrown onto a subway track, gets electrocuted, and "dies." I thought electricity brought him *back* to life? Never fear. He isn't dead yet. He comes back so that he can undergo *another* death, namely that of being deluged with toxic waste. The approaching flood of toxic waste (!) causes Jason to start spewing a couple quarts of water out of his mouth (!). Cut to lightning striking the Statue of Liberty for no good reason. Cut back to Jason. The toxic waste hits him, and he dissolves into a little boy. That ugly exterior was just prosthetics after all!

The dog survives, of course.

Rating: 2 turkeys.