JASON X
By Raymond Knowby
Best moment for this Friday? Easily when he freezes the girl’s face in liquid nitrogen and then smashes it into bloody icicles on the table. It’s just so over the top and zestfully executed that you can’t help but grin like you’ve just seen your first live and preferred set of genitalia.
That’s where the fanboy hyperbole ends, unfortunately. Everything else wriggling around onscreen is appalling. The movie is digitally enhanced so it looks amazingly clean, with nice production value and hi tech set design, but who the hell wants this in a FRIDAY THE 13TH movie? It could be further questioned “who the hell wants a FRIDAY THE 13TH movie?” period, sure (this is the fucking tenth chapter, after all), but Jason in SPACE? Worst idea since LEPRECHAUN IN THE HOOD.
Story-wise, after being captured and studied for his “amazing regeneration abilities” by the military, an outbreak and then a desperate act by a lab assistent freezes the killer in cryosleep for a hundred years. Awaking when a scientific team from another colonized planet find the last two earth inhabitants and bring them aboard their mother ship, Jason goes about the usual business and slaughters most of the futuristic twenty-something models. The kill count goes through the roof, I think even beating out part 5. There’s also a Matrix-like fight between an android female and an “upgraded” cyborg Voorhees, and a virtual reality scene that tries to be funny but isn’t.
A moment comes where suspension of disbelief can be stretched no further, you see. The plot contains sequences and dialogue riddled with self congratulatory references, which only serve to bog it down further as it attempts to present itself as clever. Playing tip that you are bad on purpose is really just a half-assed way of still being bad, and JASON X achieves this with alarming precision.
Bottom line for me: too stupid (even by series standards), too slick, and far too removed from even the familiar tropes of the late end of the franchise to truly be a Jason movie.
Glazed and confused: alternative dispatch methods are explored in JASON X.