Scheme!

One of the more interesting subplots in "Friday The Thirteenth Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan" - a film which hardly needs any story complications - concerns the beautiful and amoral Tamara, who is interested in sex, drugs and using those things to evade actual effort. Somehow she is on the senior trip despite not having done some kind of biology project which, as I've said before, doesn't really add up. How she's even on the trip is odd, but maybe not more so than the fact that this project makes or breaks her ability to be done with school. It must be some kind of unusual school.

In any case, her scheme requires the video camera skills of Wayne, but first she must lure Principal McCulloch into her cabin. That's easy, since he insists on visiting her cabin in order to see said project, which she's supposed to have brought with her. We are talking about writing too feeble for self-respecting pornographers, here. Porn films and slasher films are a lot alike really, and this film shows that as well as any.

So, Tamara gets the principal in her room and reveals her "project": her own scantily clad body, indifferently painted with a very incomplete anatomy of the human body. McCulloch is comically affected by the sight of no more skin than he would have seen if she'd been wearing a bathing suit on the deck of the ship. After about five damn minutes of him umming and ah'ing like a fourteen year old, she finally starts grappling with him, never managing to enlist his willing involvement.

That doesn't matter to Wayne's camera, which appears in time to capture what I have a hard time believing would be effective blackmail material. Tamara's word would surely never stand against the principal considering how many people know what a terrible, conniving person Tamara is. For that reason, McCulloch's bluster as he leaves is really something more. If any of the people in the room at that moment were still alive a day or so later, Tamara and Wayne would have been toast.