Eventually all horror franchises need to go to space. Godzilla went to space, Leprechaun went to space, and Alien started out in space. Ten movies deep, after first taking the big guy to Manhattan and to Hell, finally Friday the 13th traveled the cosmos with Jason X. By the way, this isn't "Friday the 13th Part X: Jason in the 24½th Century". The movie is just called "Jason X". You pronounce "X" like the letter, "exxx".
A roman numeral was just too brainy for a movie like this.
It is surprising that it took Friday the 13th this long to become self-parody. Eight of these movies came out in rapid succession throughout the Eighties. They were never high art or particularly well-regarded. But even as late as the ninth movie, Jason Goes to Hell, the series was still mostly playing it straight. There were jokes in the movies but the movies weren't *a* joke. Jason X is a joke. It is a stupid movie about Jason in the FUUUUTURE, and knows it.
Honestly, this is an improvement. Most Friday the 13th movies are pretty bad, or least, not very memorable. A few are hilariously bad like Jason Takes Manhattan. For the most part they're very same-y movies. You could play me a random kill from any of these films and I'd struggle to tell you which movie it came from. They're movies you can play in the background while browsing Reddit. You do not need to pay much attention. Even if you miss a scene, you basically know the formula by now. So at least, Jason X is doing something different, tonally.
Even so, Jason X is not a good movie either. It isn't a great comedy. There aren't that many good kills. The production value is terrible. Jason X has a cast of total nobodies. Kane Hodder, the guy playing Jason whose face you never see, gets top billing and is actually the most famous person in the movie. (Well, behind David Cronenberg's cameo.) The "future spaceship" sets that feel like a D-grade SciFi series from the Nineties. These sets remind me way too much of dirty-cheap space horror movies Roger Corman was doing decades earlier. This movie could easily have been a SciFi Channel "original" in 2005 just with slightly better than usual CG effects.
Luckily, Jason X is so outrageously and shamelessly stupid it kind of still works.
After being frozen and thawing out in the future, Jason finds himself on a spaceship. Turns out though, the 24½th Century is just as aggressively horny as the Eighties. At times Jason X feels distressingly like the horrible - and even more horny - 2000 SciFi movie, Supernova. Everybody on board is fucking and Jason does not like it. Oh, also, Jason was frozen with a 20th century girl, Rowan (Lexa Doig), who gets to serve as both our first and Final Girl. People get stabbed, you know the drill.
Jason X is not entirely sure what kind of comedy it wants to be. At times it feels like Spaceballs when say, Brodski (Peter Mensah, the only actor you'll recognize) is fighting Jason. Jason stabs him once and Brodski yells "It's gonna take more than a poke in the ribs to put down this old dog!" Then Jason stabs him again and Brodski admits "...Yeah, that'll do it" and collapses. Later Jason wanders through a satire of his own movies where topless bimbos yell "We love premarital sex!" There's a great cut of him smashing their bodies against a tree. There are a lot of other jokes that are not nearly as funny. Anybody who the script calls for to be a comic relief is immediately terrible. This kid Asriel (Dov Tiefenbach) was really annoying. Luckily those character do not last long.
Later we do get a super form of Jason, Uber Jason. He's Mechagodzilla with a future machete. He's got chrome armor because everything is chrome in the future. I think Uber Jason is mostly in the movie to sell toys, but he sure looks cool.
Less cool is the cyborg girl, KM-13 (Lisa Ryder) who has a romance with a human guy, Tsunaron (Chuck Campbell). "Kay-Em" gets an upgrade where she turns into an S&M leather queen with guns. The actress can't pull that off either physically or with her delivery. I don't often feel embarrassed for a movie, but I do for Jason X when Kay-Em is supposed to be "badass". This movie needed more Peter Mensah...
Ultimately, I liked Jason X less than I thought I would. It has been about twenty years since I've seen it. It has held up worse than I hoped. There are a couple good kills. The frozen head smash and the "screwed" guy are good. Otherwise this is a cheap fucking movie that is only sometimes funny. If I had to recommend a Friday the 13th, this would definitely be up there. I recommend Jason Lives first, however.
Next Time: Blair Witch (2016). A movie that does not go to space, but maybe it should have?
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