Did You Know?
The original posters for the film featured Jason ripping through an "I Love NY" poster. In the first poster, Jason is holding a bloody knife which was cleaned in a second poster for fear that the blood was too graphic. However, both posters were dropped following a complaint from the New York Tourism Committee.
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The prologue of the film foreshadows all the places that Jason will chase the teenagers: downtown with the gang members, the diner, the alley with the drug addicts, and the subway.
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In the scene where Jason reaches through the porthole and grabs Rennie, Jensen Daggett was reportedly really terrified. Her face was just inches from a large and very sharp piece of glass that had become stuck in the window frame, and the actor who played Jason was (unknowingly) pulling her towards it.
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In the diner, the man Jason throws into the mirror is Ken Kirzinger, who would go on to play Jason in Freddy vs. Jason. Kirzinger also doubles as Jason in a few brief shots in this film.
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This was the last film in the "Friday the 13th" series to be produced and distributed by Paramount, due to declining box office returns. Subsequent entries were handled by New Line Cinema.
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The deckhand who's warning everybody that they're "doomed" is based on Crazy Ralph from Friday the 13th part I and II
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Writer/Director Rob Hedden originally wrote more of the movie to be set in New York. He had written scenes at Madison Square Garden, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Empire State Building. But Paramount told him that budget would not allow him to spend that much time in New York, so he was forced to rewrite the film and spend more time on the cruise ship. Hedden says he agrees with fans who complain that not enough time is spent in New York, given the title Jason Takes Manhattan.
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Vincent Craig Dupree actually cut his hand in the phone booth when Jason shatters the glass around him.
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The movie was falsely titled "Ashes to Ashes" while filming in New York City to avoid fan interruptions. This fake title was also used in the script to prevent auditioning actors from knowing and revealing what film they were making. In the fake-titled script, Jason was renamed Ethan.
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The subway car chase wasn't inside an official NYC subway. Only the exterior shots were real.
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In the scene in the subway when Jason is chasing Rennie and Sean, Sean pulls the emergency brake to knock Jason back. On the poster to right of Sean, sprawled in graffiti are the words Jason Lives
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On the DVD audio commentary the director said that the original version was over two hours long and he cut the following scenes for time *Several scenes with Miles, who is shown to have been an Olympic diver *A scene at the beginning where Sean hears that Rennie will not be on board and is disappointed *Several additional scenes with Tamara and Eva were cut *Before Rennie gets pushed into the water there was a longer conversation between her and Colleen *A scene of Eva meeting with the group on the bridge and then leaving to find Tamara *A shot of Rennie touching Jason after he is electrocuted on the railroad tracks
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Fred Mollin wrote the original music for this film, as he did for Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood.
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In the original script, when Jason makes it to the dock, a dog starts barking at him and he kicked it. Kane Hodder, who was playing Jason, felt that kicking the dog was going too far and so the scene was dropped.
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Kane Hodder says that one of the most fun parts of his tenure as Jason was the scenes in Times Square. He says that spectators were lined up and down the block watching the filming, and he didn't want to take off the mask to destroy their illusion of Jason. He said that every once in awhile, he'd turn his head and look at them, and watch them all go crazy.
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In one shot, the subway bears graffiti reading "Quayton lives". Quayton was part of the name of a high school band that director Rob Hedden was in.
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According to an interview in Fangoria Magazine (August 1989), Kane Hodder vomited on cue in the final scene after drinking several pitchers of water. This was not a special effect.
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Despite the nature of the film and adverse filming conditions, Kane Hodder provided several moments of levity which were appreciated by the cast. Following several death scenes, for example, once director Rob Hedden called "cut," Hodder would do a brief disco dance in full makeup, making the cast laugh.
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This is the first movie in the series where Jason kills one of his victims by strangling the neck.
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