Lakeview High’s popular prom queen Tamara Mason has it all: beauty, brains, a body that won’t quit, and the respect of her peers. Okay, maybe Tamara’s fellow senior classmates don’t exactly respect her, but they sure fear her. She’s a selfish, snobby, and manipulative mean girl who snorts cocaine and flaunts her privilege. During the class boat trip on the S.S. Lazarus from Crystal Lake to New York City, she uses the lure of sex to blackmail her principal. Tamara even shoves classmate Rennie overboard, then claims it was an accident.
As awful as Tamara can be, there’s something liberating about watching her be bad. Tamara isn’t just a bad girl we love, she’s in the Bad Girl Hall of Fame. She brings a certain joie de vivre to being bad; she really seems to enjoy it. So when the S.S. Lazarus’s stab-happy stowaway—that supernatural slasher Jason Voorhees—comes for Tamara, it’s painful to watch her demise.
Before Jason stabs her to death with shards of a broken mirror—in a tense and well executed scene—Tamara had just finished trying to seduce the principal for better grades. Part of her plan involved stripping down to her black lace undergarments to reveal biology notes written all over her body. Why? Because she’s sexy like that. Being bad shouldn’t be boring, after all.
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) gets a bad rap, in my estimation. It certainly has plenty of faults, including the worst final girl in the series and a wildly misleading subtitle for a film largely shot in Vancouver—Jason barely gets to Manhattan, let alone takes it—but I can’t help but love it. Besides Tamara, there’s the greatest final girl that never was, J.J. Jarrett, played by Saffron Henderson (may J.J.’s rock ‘n’ soul rest in peace), plus the always great Kelly Hu with a memorable death scene on the ship’s party deck. I jokingly call it Jason Takes the Love Boat because that’s more true to its actual vibe. It’s goofy and never anything less than entertaining.
According to the Friday the 13th Wiki, Tamara is Jason’s 73rd victim in the series, but she ranks much higher in my personal list of favorite Friday the 13th characters. In a franchise that’s spanned twelve films, no other bad girl character has quite matched Tamara’s charismatic flare for being bad. Sharlene Martin deserves a good deal of credit for making Tamara so fondly remembered. Tamara may have succumbed to Jason’s rampage, but she lives on in the hearts of Friday the 13th fans everywhere.
The Starfire Lounge 