Kane Hodder and Vincent Craig "VC" Dupree Interview
Kane Hodder and Vincent Craig "VC" Dupree Interview
The Actors Talk Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan.
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I think Jason Takes Manhattan is one of the worst Friday the 13th movies ever. But what do I know? Kane Hodder, Jason Voorhees himself, says he prefers it to Jason X (which is one of my faves… such a guilty pleasure. I mean, c'mon... The hockey-mask and machete are in space!). "I have gotten a lot of feedback from fans [on JTM] and the only reason they didn't really care for the movie — if they didn't — most people liked it, but if they didn't, it was because it was too much on the boat and not enough in New York."
The movie came out in 1989, but it's been resuscitated for the home entertainment market, with all new featurettes (which are actually very much worthwhile for fans. Read our review here). The story basically picks up where Tina left Jason: at the bottom of the lake after she "killed" him. Reanimated by a live wire, he gets a charge and goes charging after a group of random (and quite obnoxious) teens who are on a ferry headed for Manhattan. About as exciting as taking a slow boat to China, this tedious tale plays out practically bloodlessly until — way too late — Jason finds his way to Times Square and goes on a tear.
That part is pretty good. "The scenes we did in Times Square were the single most amazing thing I've ever experienced in film," [click the image to enlarge it] Hodder said. "Just being in Times Square in the full costume, and I'm not exaggerating, hundreds of people held back by barriers and police watching. We had to shoot certain angles so we wouldn't see the crowd, and they were just amazingly excited that we were there. I never took the mask off because I just wanted to stay in character, and I'd stare at them and they would start cheering."
Fans also cheer when Jason finally does away with Julius Gaw, played rather sassily by Vincent Craig "VC" Dupree. "People just have a lot of love for that particular kill," said Dupree. "The fact that I'm one of the only black guys who's like made it towards the end of the movie [is significant], so the response from it is really cool. More recently I started doing these conventions, and I didn't realize how much love people had out there for that kill." The DVD has a great featurette behind the scenes of this, which tells more about the "de-capi-cam".
Hodder agrees that it's one of the more inventive death scenes. "It's one of the kills that I'd done that fans talked about the most. In fact, I was just in Atlanta at DragonCon and a guy came up and was talking about that kill. He says, 'Do you know how many times he punched you before you knocked his head off?' I said, 'No,' and he goes, '66!' The guy knew that. It was hard to count because he was throwing body punches really fast. I'm not kidding – he was hitting me!"
Dupree laughed, "I was asking Kane, 'So are we going for this?' And he's just like, 'What are you going to do?' And just like he was saying in New York how there were all of the people behind the barricades and stuff like that, I don't know how many people it was, but out of the apartment buildings that were adjacent to the rooftop, [it was like] those Where's Waldo? books; you would literally see curtains and heads, and the director was like, 'Get down!' It was just the energy of all those people, and then just realizing what we were actually doing."
The only thing Hodder is still less-than-happy about in regard to Friday the 13th Pt. 8 is the fact that he was doubled in a scene which was used in the trailer. "This is the first time I've ever said it: That's not me. We were shooting in Vancouver, that was done on the Jersey side of Manhattan, and I don't know who it is. You can tell it's not me, because I would never turn around and stand like that! I hate how he turned around, and he looks kind of small to me, too. I don't know why they didn't wait until we got to New York, but they had to do it while we were still in Vancouver. I wasn't too happy about it. That whole thing is not me."
Both actors, 20 years on, are still working in the genre. Dupree has a steady gig on the upcoming TV series Eastwick (based on the John Updike novel, The Witches of Eastwick), while Hodder is working opposite his big-screen boogeyman brethren Robert "Freddy Krueger" Englund. Hodder revealed, "I did a few episodes of a web series for Fearnet called Fear Clinic with Robert and also Danielle Harris [from the Halloween movies]. It starts airing October 26th, and I'm very excited about it because Robert and I have done a lot of movies together, but never a scene, and we get a face-off scene where there's this almost like a Freddy vs.Jason thing. And, we're looking to do the sequel to Hatchet, and then I coordinated the stunts in a movie called Frozen with Adam Green up in Utah. That's going to be a very good movie, I think. It's a thriller."
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Be on the lookout for Part 2 of our Friday the 13th Deluxe interview series, featuring DVD producer Dan Farrands and the director of Part 7, John Carl Buechler.