X gon' give it to ya
Whenever a franchise hits its tenth entry, you run out of sane entry points for thinking about the film as a total package. But Friday the 13th movies practically beg you to start with their titles, so goofy and outrageous they are. (The fourth of to-date twelve is noted as “Final,” which still takes the cake.) New Line Cinema was so caught in knotty copyright negotiations with Paramount they couldn’t even put the franchise title in parts 9 through 11. But yes, here we are with Jason X.
The X in the title has three meanings. First, this is the tenth Friday the 13th movie. So, X, as in the Roman numeral. I still think you pronounce it as “ecks” rather than “ten,” though. Second, Jason becomes a cyborg science-fiction monster in the film’s climax, the kind of research project that’s so dangerous and exotic it earns a nickname of “X” — same energy as Chemical X from Powerpuff Girls, or Planet X from Edgar Ulmer’s film, or X from the Roger Corman movie (though that one is also X-ray). Lastly, as a film that came out in 2001, this is a decidedly “X-treme” take on Friday material — set in outer space with the most badass Jason ever.
(Note: I realized after completing a draft of this review that Kinemalogue’s review of Jason X also opened with a discussion of the “X” in the film’s title, so shoutout to Hunter A.)
I would be lying if I said Jason X is a good movie, and I would also be lying if I said that I care too much. It’s about as fun as a bad movie can be while still being bad; this is not “secretly good,” but it’s also a chuggable flavor of dopey. You see, what if Friday the 13th… but in space! Bingo! (This kind of “Friday, but *insert gimmick*” is what I had in mind when I started watching the series and saw it ran twelve long. Only about half have pitches that fit that structure, with “in 3D,” “vs. Carrie, “on a boat,” and “at prom” examples of blank fill-ins — the latter two from the same movie.)
In the near future, which is actually the past, 2010, both Jason Voorhees (Kane Hodder) and a government scientist named Rowan LaFontaine (Lexa Doig), who’s been studying his supernatural evil powers, get locked in cryogenic stasis. (I have neither the time nor the inclination to make sense of whether this falls into a coherent chronology and mythology for the Friday the 13th series.) Some four centuries later, both of them get unfrozen on a spaceship. Jason promptly starts killing crew members, while Rowan intervenes by making helpful suggestions like “we need to stop Jason!” Meanwhile, a greedy academic, Professor Brandon Lowe (Jonathan Potts), smells a big pile of space bucks in hauling Jason’s body to market rather than dumping it into space, and a security detail led by Sergeant Elijah Brodski (Peter Mensah) discovers that bullets are more of a suggestion than a deterrent to this version of Jason .
In some ways, this is a return to Friday form after the dismally dull and uncharacteristic Jason Goes to Hell, though it’s missing a few key components. The crew is depicted mostly as a ragtag group aged late-20s to mid-30s. It’s exactly the kind of cast you imagine on a basic cable sci-fi series, and notably not a group of scantily clad teens (though they are pretty horny). Whether this crew is specifically a knockoff of Alien, Star Trek, or just a general industrial space-travel vibe, I’m not versed enough in my sci-fi to say. Otherwise, though, this has the approximate cadence and tone of one of the sillier Friday entries. In some ways, its kin is Halloween: Resurrection: both are thrill-ride slashers allowed to make self-deprecating meta jokes and keep a tint of quippy comedy thanks to the success of Scream. (And in both cases I think I’m higher on the film than the average slasher fan.)
Among the crew members to be (mostly) mutilated include: the android Kay-Em 14 (Lisa Ryder), built and doted on by tech whiz Tsunaron (Chuck Campbell); and the aforementioned Professor Brandon Lowe. Security on the ship is led by Brodski (Mensah, though it took me half the movie to realize it’s not Tony Todd). The ship’s two pilots are Kinsa Cooper (Melody Johnson) and “Fat Lou” (Boyd Banks), who is easily identifiable due to his fatness. More generic crew members and engineers include Janessa (Melyssa Ade), Waylander (Derwin Jordan); Crutch (Philip Williams); Adrienne (Kristi Angus); Dallas (Todd Farmer); and probably a few others. My eyes started glazing over. One fun cameo comes in the form of Dr. Aloysius Wimmer in the 2010 timeline played by body horror maestro David Cronenberg.
The highlight for me, personally, is Doig — the woman whose name I can never spell correctly without looking it up. (It’s like the word “sheriff.” You could tell me there are any numbers of “r”s or “f”s in that word and I’d believe you.) I can’t say this is because she gives a world-class performance — it is a massively adequate turn as a space-age final girl — but because she (and Kristin Kreuk) were basically exactly who 12-year-old me imagined having as a girlfriend some day, and I still feel a twinge of covetous affection when she’s onscreen despite my 13 happy years of marriage (yes, to a brunette…).
But more rationally, the movie’s standout is Ryder as Kay-Em 14. She simply has the most to do — sarcastic sex-bot, Xena-inspired super-soldier, robot turning sentient through the power of love, and, finally, dismembered android head. It’s one of the few times the movie really leans into one of its kooky conceptions and turns it into a truly fun version of itself, as opposed to settling for a glancing blow. Other highlights include Campbell, who comes along for the ride as a frazzled but likable dweeb, and Mensah, who gives Brodski some gravitas deserving a film more serious than one that features a character saying “hi, hand!” to his own severed limb. Lastly, Hodder is huge and terrifying — he makes a terrifically imposing Jason.
As a slasher, Jason X is store-brand replacement level material: better than some of the abysmally non-suspenseful slashers of recent years like It’s a Wonderful Knife, Time Cut, and Hell of a Summer, but with only a handful of moments that will make your blood chill. Speaking of “chilling,” the film’s signature moment among slasher-heads is when Adrienne gets murdered by having her face frozen in a sink full of liquid nitrogen, then smashed into pieces. The result is a de-face-itation rather than decapitation. (Another character gets killed with a one-punch beheading, perhaps a deliberate reference to Jason Takes Manhattan’s classic kill.)
Where the movie really flops and/or charms, depending on your perspective and appetite for spoiled cheese, is in the production, which is just the corniest Syfy (née Sci-Fi) Channel TV-movie-level effort. Bafflingly, the budget on this was on the high side for the franchise, but I suspect most of it went to spaceship CGI rather than inessential stuff like sets and props, which are factory-themed-soundstage 101. At one point, Jason gets recharged with some goopy medical nanobots (or something), and he emerges as “Uber Jason,” looking like a Power Rangers villain, and that’s not an exaggeration. I mean compare him to Lord Zedd:
I don’t too much mind — in fact I appreciate — that Jason X is not the most dread-inducing, mortality-pondering example of the slasher form, nor that it’s got a deep silly streak. What really keeps me from giving the film a thumbs-up is that it so rarely lands a full blow with its fun ideas. For example, part of the climax involves trapping Jason in a holodeck that recreates the premise of the original Friday the 13th in a very heightened, postmodern manner, which sufficiently distracts him for a few minutes. This is a really fun meta-joke with the potential for layering self-parody and twisting over-familiar tropes with real in-universe danger, yet the film goes no further than laying out the idea of a micro-simulated Friday before it’s on to the next beat. Everything about Jason running amok on a spaceship feels closer to half-baked than ready-to-serve.
And yet, I can’t be mad about it. Jim Isaac’s direction keeps things moving, Todd Farmer’s script at least commits to the dumb space-ese bit, and Harry Manfredini shows up and seems to understand the assignment. It ends with a silly stinger suggesting an eternal cycle of Friday murder sprees and campfire scary stories — honestly closer to the post-credits scene of Wish than you might expect — and it doesn’t have much dead weight, so I at least had a painless time. Jason X is the peak of certifiably Not High Art cinema, but space is cool and this movie is harmless.
- Review Series: Friday the 13th
Is It Good?
Nearly Good (4/8)
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