I've said for a long time that the best way to ruin your franchise is to send it to space. Today we're going to be looking at the prime example of that in Jason X. The tenth installment in the Friday the 13th franchise, Jason X doesn't even bother to follow the F13 formula and call itself "part 10." I hope you're ready boys and girls, because this is going to be a doozy.
For a long time I've thought that the early 2000's were just a bad time for horror. I mean, you had the likes of Halloween: Resurrection, Cabin Fever, Dog Soldiers, and last but not least, Jason X. After looking through a list of horror movies that came out in 2002, I stand by that statement. Outside of Ju-On and the Americanized release of The Ring, there really weren't any good movies. Honestly, I'm kind of kicking myself for not deciding to review on of those but here we are. Jason X is the garbage fire written by Victor Miller and directed by James Issac. Starring absolutely no one except Kane Hodder who is only known for playing Jason (and also a cameo appearance from David Cronenberg,) Jason X sits at a whopping 19% approval rating from critics and 24% approval from audiences, with scores of 3.5/10 and 5/10 respectively.
So what can we say about this movie? Is it as good as Jason Lives, the other Friday the 13th movie I've reviewed? Not remotely. Is it as good as the original Friday the 13th that the rest of the MRC crew reviewed on the main show? Again, no. Is it as good as the terrible 2009 reboot? Ehhhh they might be on equal footing. So what happened? What caused this movie to be a spectacular failure? Well, if you ask me, sending Jason to space had a lot to do with it, but also because the formula had become tiresome at this point. We were on the 10th film of the franchise, after the last film had been dubbed The Final Friday. Aside from teasing Freddy vs Jason that was supposed to be the end of it. But since horror movies make lots of money while at the same time costing next to nothing to make, I'm sure some executive was like "Hey you know where Jason hasn't killed people yet? Space! That's what we should do. Send him to SPACE!"
And that's the whole plot. Jason in the year 2010 gets put into stasis and awakens in the year 2455 on board a space ship and kills everybody while the survivors hurl super out of place one-liners for no particular reason. There is a point where Jason stabs a guy, and the guy says "It'll take more than a poke in the ribs to stop me." Jason then stabs the guy again and the guy says "Yep, that'll do it." What? Who was that for? There was nobody else there, and Jason doesn't talk and probably doesn't understand the concept of humor. Why are you being witty when you're about to die? You're dumb, character man. Oh, and we can't forget about how since this was the early 2000s EVERYTHING had to be a ripoff of The Matrix. What, you think that's far-fetched? Guess again. There is a scene where a lady dressed in tight black leather with guns strapped to every inch of her body fights Jason by using said guns and also doing flips and kicks and other nonsense. Also she's spitting quips at him the whole time. Like, the whole time. As someone who has never been a big fan of The Matrix (check out our review on the main show if you haven't already) this almost 4 minute-long scene was absolute agony for me.
I've been bashing this movie pretty hard, but let me see if there are any positives to the movie. Let's see...the design for Uber Jason was kind of cool I guess? I mean, it doesn't make any sense but nothing in this movie makes sense. Oh, I know! There's a scene where the last couple of survivors are trying to distract Jason so they can escape and they throw him into a simulation of a campground and he kills some simulated campers in kind of a funny way. Here's a clip for your amusement, edited as to skip past the nudity.
Pretty funny, right? The cut in the actual film is almost exactly like that as well so the humor is still there in the movie. That's about all I've got though. This movie is pretty terrible overall.
So that's about it, I guess. If you're bored and have an hour and a half that you feel like wasting Jason X is available to stream on Netflix at the time of this writing. Now I want to know your thoughts. Have you seen Jason X? What did you think? Leave me a comment and we'll talk about it!
Comments