- Directed by Rob Hedden
- Written by Rob Hedden, Victor Miller
- Stars Jensen Daggett, Kane Hodder, Todd Caldecott, Tiffany Paulsen
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 40 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y10jRZLzTAE
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
They wanted to mix up the location a bit on this one, so they did, setting most of it on a boat. And some of it in New York as the title promises. It does refresh it a little from the same formula of Jason slowly picking off a group of people, but it’s mostly more of the same.
Spoilery Synopsis
We get a “hard-boiled” voiceover about living in the big city. We see that it’s a very 1980’s big city too, with rats, muggings, drugs, graffiti, and all the fun of life in New York City.
Meanwhile, at Camp Crystal Lake, and we’re told that the graduating class will be taking their senior trip to NYC on the 13th. Jimmy, on his houseboat, throws the anchor overboard and gets back to making out with his girlfriend. He mentions to Suzi that there were a bunch of murders that happened near here a few years ago.
We see Jim’s anchor dragging on the bottom of the lake and it disturbs… an electrical cable that ruptures and electrifies the body of Jason Voorhees, deep under water. Up above, Jim pretends to be Jason, wearing the hockey mask and all, until the real Jason gets them both and takes the mask along with him.
Rennie and her mother drive to the big ship dock, and her teacher gives her a pen that supposedly used to belong to Stephen King. Rennie and the others are all getting ready for their senior trip. Charles and Colleen are the chaperone teachers going along. Charles is a grumpy old grouch, and he’s also Rennie’s legal guardian. Not far away, Jimmy’s boat drifts to shore, apparently abandoned.
Up on the bridge, the admiral wants his son, Sean, to take over the ship, but the son’s not that interested. Sean walks out to the dock, where a man tells him, “This voyage is doomed.” Sean likes Rennie and her dog Toby.
J.J. and Wayne talk about guitars and acoustics and his video camera. Jason follows J.J. down to the engine room, where she’s heard the acoustic are good.
Uncle Charles warns Rennie that there’s supposed to be a storm tonight. She still has nightmares over something, and she want to get over it, but she doesn’t even know what “it” is that caused her trauma.
Jason kills a guy in the sauna with a hot rock. Tamara pushes Rennie overboard as a prank, but Rennie imagines a drowning boy grabbing her leg. Sean rescues her and Colleen comforts her until overprotective Charles butts in.
Tamara shows Charles her “biology project” and Wayne gets it all on camera. At the very least, it’s blackmail material. Tamara’s next visitor, however, is wearing a hockey mask, so that tape isn’t going to help with him.
The admiral leaves the engineer in charge of the bridge, but he’s soon killed by Jason. The admiral returns and soon follows the engineer. Sean and Rennie soon find their bodies. Sean tries to call the Coast Guard, but Jason pulls down the antenna.
The crazy “You’re all gonna die” guy returns and tells Charles and the kids that the killer is Jason Voorhees. While all that’s going on, Jason stalks Eva in the disco. Five of the high school boys grab weapons and go hunting. Wayne loses his glasses and shoots one of them right before Jason gets him.
Jason sets off a fire alarm and kills a few more students in the chaos. Rennie has another vision of the drowning boy as Jason reaches through the porthole and grabs her. She uses Stephen King’s pen to stab him in the eye.
As if things couldn’t get any worse, the ship starts flooding and sinking. Charles, Colleen, Sean, and Rennie get into a lifeboat as Jason watches from the deck. Julius hops in as well, they all thought he went overboard a while back.
They finally make their way to a dock in NYC, and Charles complains about Sean’s choice of landing sites. Jason comes ashore right behind them, seeing a huge billboard about a hockey league.
Our group of survivors almost immediately gets mugged, and they take Rennie with them. They inject her with some drugs, so she’ll lighten up for what they have planned for her. Jason arrives and shows the guy what he does with a syringe. The other hood shoots Jason several times, but you know how that goes.
Rennie runs off, so Jason goes after Julius next. Julius punches Jason about two hundred times, but when Jason hits back, it only takes once.
The drugs kick in, but Rennie eventually runs into Sean, Charles, Colleen, and a cop. Charles still doesn’t believe a word about Jason, and the cop doesn’t really believe it either. The cop doesn’t last long; neither does Colleen.
Rennie does, however, finally remember her long-forgotten trauma– her Uncle Charles told her all about Jason before throwing her overboard from a rowboat. That’s probably not the best way to learn to swim, even without an ugly ghost boy pulling at your feet. Back in the present, Rennie yells at Charles and runs off, leaving Charles with Jason, who wakes up and finishes the old grouch off in a random barrel of green goo.
Rennie and Sean are the only ones left. They board a subway to get away from Jason– except he’s there too. They all get out, and Jason gets a taste of the subway’s 6000-volt third rail. That’s gotta kill him, right?
Rennie and Sean leave the subway at Times Square. “It’s over,” Sean says. It’s not over– Jason’s right behind them. A bunch of punks try to fight with Jason, but Jason takes off his mask and they all nope right out of there.
Somehow, they all end up running through the sewer system. The kids run into a sanitation engineer who says that the sewers fill up with toxic waste every night at midnight, and they only have ten minutes to get out. The engineer doesn’t last long after that. Sean gets knocked out, so Rennie leads Jason away from him.
She throws toxic waste on Jason, who takes his mask off, and it ain’t pretty. Rennie and Sean climb up the ladder out of the sewer just as the wall of toxic waste comes and washes Jason away.
As the flood water recedes, all they see is a little drowned boy remaining. Afterward, Rennie and Sean go to see the Statue of Liberty– worst senior trip ever!
Commentary
I’ve never quite figured out how you get a cruise ship anywhere near Crystal Lake, which is always shown to be way out in the woods somewhere. But you can take a boat from there, out to the ocean and New York.
At the end, there were millions of people in town, and dozens on that subway. Why was Jason so fixated on following Rennie and Sean specifically? I suppose maybe Jason felt he had unfinished business after her childhood encounter at the lake.
For a movie about Jason going to Manhattan, they sure spend an awful amount of time on the cruise ship. Also, that’s a mighty big cruise ship for only carrying a dozen high school kids and two teachers. Still, there’s probably not a lot of clientele for cruises in Crystal Lake.
Peter Mark Richman has always excelled at playing villains and jerks, and this may be his best outing ever as Charles, the perpetually sarcastic and mean-spirited teacher we all recognize. This was Kane Hodder’s second go at playing Jason, and he’s good as always. None of the other performers really stand out. Unmasked Jason wasn’t particularly impressive, but a nice touch at the end.
We’ll never see him again, right?