 | MOVIE #1,208 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 10.26.23 50 MOVIES IN 32 DAYS! Shoutout to whomever wrote the top paragraph of the Wikipedia entry for this one, which includes the magnificent sentence: While other films of the franchise approach Jason as a human serial killer or undead monster, this movie views him through a science-fiction lens (referring to his inability to die as a "regenerative" power that can be studied and perhaps replicated) |
I swear I’m not going for a kind of Armond White contrarianism here. And I also feel like it’s impossible not to process this film (and to a lesser degree, its predecessor) in relation to the time it was made. The original run of Friday movies are such a product of the 80s that continuing the story into any other era feels like it’s immediately adrift from the aesthetic and tone that is probably the #1 reason most people like these films to begin with. So why not set the next one in the year 2455. That’s right: FOUR HUNDRED+ years in the future.
But its release date is equally important. It’s late 2001 and the world is reeling from the 9/11 attacks. And three little words would start the process of healing our great nation: “Jason in space.” Haha jk. Somehow this had an over $10-million dollar budget — more than 3x the amount it cost to make Jason Goes to Hell, which looks far more expensive — and technically the costliest entry of the franchise up to this point, though don’t get me started on inflation! What I am trying to say is that this looks like complete shit, albeit it in a totally lovable way: with it’s late period Corman-esque sets and early 00s CGI and everything in between.
Jason X was directed by Cronenberg acolyte and Look Who's Talking Too special FX coordinator James Isaac, and Cronenberg is actually in this as one of a handful of notable actors in small roles (the others being his long-time collaborator Robert Silverman, as well as “that guy” Boyd Banks). It’s always fun to see recognizable faces in shlock like this, I guess.
All continuity and connections to “the canon” have been thrown out the window as we open in the Crystal Lake Research Facility (lol) where Jason is being held captive despite having been sent down to hell in the last movie. He kills a bunch of guys before getting cryogenically frozen like Walt Disney’s head. After all these years they finally found the one thing Jason was not impervious to: freezing cold temperatures.
Flash-forward 455 years later: Earth has become too polluted to support life and humans have moved to a new planet, called… Earth II! As I write this, I must remark that I have no idea how this got made. How this got from the bad idea stage to production is something I will never understand, but which I fully appreciate. It’s like an SNL skit that wouldn’t make it to air.
Students on a field trip to the abandoned Earth (I) (lol) collect Jason’s body and bring it back into space. Upon seeing his hockey mask, one of them remarks that “hockey was outlawed in 2024 (!!)” …
(Note to self: I am going to try and post this clip early next year and go viral on Hockey Twitter.)
The kids aboard the spaceship are just like all the other horny faceless bodies that we’ve seen in the woods of New Jersey except they talk in a future, vaguely sci-fi jargon and like playing immersive VR video games. I did not expect to see something like this in a Jason movie…
The CGI is bad in a way that I find completely endearing and it’s actually utilized in some of the kill scenes when Jason inevitably wakes up onboard the ship…
But my favorite part of the movie are the continuous comic goofs. Never before has a Friday flick taken itself less seriously and it was a breath of fresh air after watching the complete saga in chronological order. Sure, not all the bits really work but even the ones that don’t are still sort of WTF funny. The “Microsoft Conflict” lol…
And this delirious sequence — when the ship cyborg/fembot is given an upgrade and briefly gets the best of Jason — is such campy fun…
They leave Jason for dead but of course he magically regenerates into “Uber Jason”...
…and chops off the fembot’s head…
(Gotta give props to the actress Lisa Ryder for her deadpan performance in this incredibly silly role.)
But the satirical high-point comes in the finale when they construct a VR Camp Crystal Lake complete with topless girls chanting, “we love premarital sex!” It’s completely over-the-top but I can’t think of a better closer for the franchise honestly. They even recreate the dumbest kill in the history of the series, the sleeping bag tree slam…
One of its only flaws is that it's probably 15-20 minutes too long. If there was ever a film begging to be 75 minutes long, it's this one. The movie ends with the obligatory open door for a sequel when, on Earth II, a pair of teenagers see what they believe is a falling star fall into a lake (it’s Jason, duh).
I’ll resist being too paradoxical to suggest that this is the best movie in the franchise but it’s definitely one of my personal favorites. They’d briefly traversed this meta, self-referential territory before but never with such abandon and such glee. And I think that can easily get lost in the nonsensical plot and shitty aesthetics but, hell, I appreciate that stuff too. So I present to you now the definitive ranking of the entire Friday the 13th franchise, from worst to first:
10. Friday the 13th Part III
09. Friday the 13th: A New Beginning
08. Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday
07. Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood
06. Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan
05. Friday the 13th Part 2
04. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives
03. Jason X [you are here]
02. Friday the 13th
01. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter
Tomorrow we close the book on both the Friday and the Nightmare franchises with a review of the smash 2003 crossover event, Freddy vs. Jason.
CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ MOVIE #1,207 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,209 ⫸
⫷ MOVIE #1,207 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,209 ⫸
Jason X is a 2001 American science fiction slasher film directed by Jim Isaac, written by Todd Farmer and starring Lexa Doig, Lisa Ryder, Chuck Campbell, and Kane Hodder in his fourth and final appearance as Jason Voorhees. It is the tenth installment in the Friday the 13th franchise following Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993). In the film, Jason is cryogenically frozen for 445 years and awakens in 2455, after being found by a group of students, whom he subsequently stalks and kills one by one. It was released on November 9, 2001.
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