Jason X

 

After the colossal misfire of Jason Goes To Hell, a movie seemingly patched together from random half-formed ideas and thrown on the screen with little care, the Friday the 13^th series was put on ice for a while. It was fair enough – they didn’t seem to know what they were doing with the series for a while, pumping out sequels with no real conviction or even understanding of what the fans wanted. A decade later Jason X was released, a continuation of the series that, instead of being a remake (ten years really is a long time between sequels), Jason X was a sort of sequel vaguely in spirit, and the first F13 movie made post-2000. You know what sort of movie was really popular in early 2000? Space movies. And thus we have Jason X, where Jason Voorhees goes to space. He’s not the first or only horror series to suddenly end up in an intergalactic adventure – both Leprechaun and Hellraiser ended up in space first – but there’s something inherently silly in seeing how taking Jason into space doesn’t change the formula up.

This is a seriously stupid movie, with completely ridiculous, impossible to take serious parts, but I like it in a weird way. It has a sense of humour about itself – it seems to know that it’s ‘Jason in Space!’ premise is ridiculous and it just goes ridiculous with it. It’s very much a F13 movie, but set in space, with Jason stalking and slashing his way through a spaceship. Since it’s a pretty cramped quarters, they mix things up a little and have everybody know Jason is on the prowl pretty much instantly. They even make attempts to stop him, not that they work. It’s a dumb movie but it seems to know it, and never attempts to take itself seriously. There are a lot of kills and a lot of Jason, and while it’s full of stupid stuff it is pretty fun overall. It seems to completely ignore most of the F13 movies, and just keeping to the general knowledge of what they’re about (an unkillable Jason slaughtering his way through teenagers). It’s again produced by Sean S Cunningham, the director of the original, who also threw money at Jason Goes To Hell for some reason.

 

It begins with footage of a hellish landscape full of flesh, chains and fire – this is actually the inside of Jason’s head. Bit weird, but we’ll roll with it. Military scientists are experimenting on a captured Jason (at the ‘Crystal Lake Research Facility’), trying to find the source of his immortality. After many failed attempts at killing him he’s scheduled to be cryogenically frozen by kickass lady scientist Rowan (our heroine) so he can’t cause any more mayhem. Another scientist (a cameo by director David Cronenberg) wants to postpone this for more experiments, and comes with a military escort to retrieve him, but Jason escapes and kills them all except Rowan who manages to cryogenically freeze Jason, at the cost of being frozen herself. Four hundred plus years later and an intergalactic field trip of college students from a spaceship arrive to an uninhabitable Earth and find the facility, retrieving the frozen bodies of Rowan and Jason. Back on board the ship (which also houses a bunch of soldiers) they revive Rowan (using a special nanomachine bench thing), who warns them to get rid of Jason’s body. But it’s too late, as Jason Voorhees has already thawed out and he’s on a murderous rampage on the ship. The survivors fight to escape Jason, and prevent him from leaving the ship.

Rowan is a more kickass heroine than the usual sort. In the opening she unloads a shotgun into Jason and manages to lock him in the cryogenic freezing tank. He stabs her through it, which causes a leak freezing both of them. When thawed she doesn’t seem to care too much about being frozen for 400 years, she’s still more concerned about Jason. Girl’s got her priorities. It is weird that she’s so immediately accepting and unconcerned about being in the future – the girl just rolls with it.

You won’t remember most of the cast, but they’re a sillier lot than usual and they all have weird names. There are a lot of them, mixed between the students (of what exactly?), the soldiers (why are there even soldiers there?) and the crew. While the military folks are completely forgettable (barring the commander, who played the same role in ‘Resident Evil’), the teens are so freaking weird. Their costumes look like something form a cheap early 2000 sci-fi kids show. Of them there are only a handful of memorable ones. Snarky girl is memorable because she’s snarky – it’s weird but it kinda works for her. The android is memorable because she’s an android, and the nerd guy who seems to be in a relationship with the android is memorable because that entire aspect is really creepy. I guess the idiot professor is memorable because he’s an idiot? It’s very unclear what they’re all students of. Their professor seems to just take them to scavenge Earth for stuff he can sell, which leads to our tiny side plot: he wants to sell Jason’s body to a collector for big money. That means he ignores Rowan’s warnings. In a pretty strange, WTF scene he’s in a woman’s negligee while the snarky girl uses tongs to twist his nipples (to ensure a top grade of course). It comes out of nowhere, has nothing to do with anything and is just so freaking strange.

There’s a fair amount of space stuff thrown in here, with the usual nonsense talk of federations, credits, space travel, space technology and the sort. Apparently everybody knows what nanomachines are but nobody has a clue what a hockey mask is. They have space technology like virtual reality videogames and holodecks (both of which Jason doesn’t seem to understand – he just kills anything even if it isn’t real). There’s even an android girl. She acts in an android-like fashion. In one of the weirder scenes, the android’s creator/lover attempts to give her featureless breasts some nipples because she wants them because she’s jealous of the other girls (don’t ask me, it’s weird). So we get robot boobs. In the finale she ends up being decked out with weapons and takes on Jason, blowing him away. When Jason revives he cuts her head off, but since she’s an android she’s fine. She’s one of the few to escape safely (well, relatively at least). One issue with the spaceship setting is that it’s almost impossible to tell where anything is. The place is made up of tight corridors, tiny rooms and then a cargo hold/engine room/mechanics room with giant drill (?). Jason is one the loose but who the hell knows where he is or how he’s getting around.

Jason is looking pretty good here. He’s got a familiar look, which is fine with me. You see him without his mask early on in the film, and he’s looking pretty dead by now. It’s basically mashed up meat under the mask at this point. He can still stalk and slash like the best of them, but the biggest thing that happens is Jason becomes a super-powered cyborg. Towards the end Jason is ‘killed’ by the android girl, now kitted out with a bunch of guns. He has some limbs blown off and his head is blown in half. He just so happens to land on the magical nanomachine healing table, which brings him back to life as a part-cyborg monster, referred to as ‘Uber Jason’. This only happens in the last fifteen or so minutes of the film – for the most part it’s just regular old Jason hacking his way through everybody. I do find it confusing that the nanomachine table made him metal instead of flesh. It was meant to repair human bodies, and it certainly didn’t turn Rowan into a cyborg. Anyway Uber Jason is a bit of a silly design, with a new mask and bulky robot muscles. The most notable aspect is probably his bloodshot eyes. They have fun with Jason as an icon. A frozen Jason manages to slice one of the student’s arms off when he falls forward, his raised machete slicing it right off. I love the stupidity of Jason being so deadly that even incapacitated he’s capable of slaughter. A scene of two of the teens having sex is intercut with Jason coming back to life, as though he can sense horny teens. On the whole the movie understands the goofier side of the franchise and caters to it.

There are some cool bits. One kill, probably the absolute best, has Jason shoving a girl’s face into liquid nitrogen and then smashing it against a table where it shatters. It’s the best kind of gory nonsense. The most memorable part is easy – at the very end, as the survivors are attempting to flee Uber Jason, the android momentarily traps him in a hologram simulation of Camp Crystal Lake. Two nubile girls come up to him and offer him beer, marijuana and pre-marital sex before undressing and eagerly getting into nearby sleeping bags. A few seconds later it cuts to Jason swinging one sleeping bag girl into the other, in a sort of joke reference to the sleeping bag kill in Part VII. Snarky girl gets killed when a breach in the spaceship causes a vacuum that pulls her out of a vent, but it’s not as gory as you’d expect.  

In the end almost everybody gets killed, a space station habitat thing full of thousands of people (who we never see) gets destroyed and the ship explodes as our survivors, Rowan, the nerd and the android’s head, escape to safety. Uber Jason, floating through space, is grabbed by the military commander (in a space suit) who thrusts both of them into Earth 2’s atmosphere (there’s another Earth apparently). They’re both burnt up on arrival, like meteors, with Jason’s robot mask landing in a lake and floating to the bottom. The end? Well, yeah, for another decade at least. Jason X was essentially the end of the Friday the 13^th series, which had it’s ridiculous ups and downs and strange detours over the three decades of its original run. Jason X stands as a pretty fun one, mostly because of its dumb space setting and understanding that it’s space setting was really, really dumb. Cyborg Jason is such an adorably stupid idea it sort of grows on you, even if he’s only in the last ten or so minutes of the movie. It’s a lot more fun than a lot of the other sequels.

The F13 series reached ten films with Jason X (not counting Freddy vs. Jason, which is another beast entirely). But it didn’t end there, they made, as they do with most things these days, a remake. But was that remake any good? Find out next time.