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Jason X

Jason X

Prior to his big showdown with Freddy Krueger, The Jason Series just had to hit its nadir first. Having teased the big showdown with Krueger in the also awful Jason Goes To Hell, it would take another 10 years before a workable script was finally prepared to be filmed, but in the meantime, Producer Sean Cunningham was able to forge ahead in 2001 with another Jason movie (presumably set after the fight with Krueger) and in order to not interfere with the events of that film, having it be set VERY far in the future so as not to spoil or refer to the events of that entry. It also marked the last appearance under the hockey mask for Kane Hodder, practically given star billing here but only serving as a precursor for his foolish attempt at a power play for the VS movie with him assuming that he had the trademark down cold as the only one who could reasonably play a hulking masked killer (as Gunnar Hansen and the many Michael Myers actors would learn to their dismay). It also employed the unusual conceit of filming entirely in Canada in order to keep production costs down and production values up. It certainly shows in the impressive opening credits sequence, a nearly 3D display of what appears to be some kind of a pseudo autopsy on Jason. Unfortunately, in order to keep costs even further down, the film employed for its supporting cast an almost all Canadian troupe of performers (possibly non union), most of whom are either unlikable or even insufferable to the point that the viewer has almost no rooted interest in anybody. Worse, with its “Jason In Space” premise (which worked well for Hellraiser but not so much for Leprechaun), the filmmakers decided to blatantly rip off whole characters (including names) and plot elements from both Ridley Scott’s Alien and James Cameron’s Aliens with the idea being that incorporating them into a Jason story could be “fun”, but instead comes off as almost being borderline excruciating, using everything from the idea that NOT killing Jason is the best thing because of the monetary value that he would bring to having the weakest bunch of “elite” soldiers ever seen on film, an obvious nod to the Colonial Marines but still such an embarrassingly bumbling bunch of asses that it’s readily apparent that no technical consultants were employed to even TRY and make them look authentic. The story starts proper in the near future, with Jason having been captured alive and kept in some kind of an underground research facility at Camp Crystal Lake, complete with a head female scientist who is the “leading expert in the world on Jason Voorhees” (Lexa Doig, who is actually very appealing even as her character is really more of a passive observer throughout the film) and has pretty much determined that keeping Jason alive for research purposes is a moot point since there is way too much of a risk to public safety should he get out and start slaughtering people again. She finds herself overruled by another government scientist (a cameoing David Cronenberg, a legendary horror director showing immense respect for the franchise just by appearing here) who has decided that it IS worth the risk and prepares a transfer, all leading to Jason wiping everyone out except Doig, who traps both herself and Jason in a cryogenic freeze only to be forgotten about for over 400 years until an expedition team unearths both of them, bringing them back to their ship and reviving Doig using their high technology whereas Jason thaws out more naturally. He claims his first victim (a blonde scientist who is the hottest female in the movie) by freezing her pretty face and then smashing it to bits before he is off and running. A cursory look at these future people and their ways can best be described as ordered yet enlightened, with money still being an important thing to them and their home base now being “Earth 2”, since apparently OUR Earth has now become a dead planet. The characters as played by the Canadian actors are certainly an obnoxious bunch, complete with the cocky space pilot who wears a cowboy hat even if THAT clichĂ© is already half dead to the blubbery technie who rarely pulls himself away from his pet projects to the various females who are probably even more whiny and insecure in the future than they are now (doesn’t sound like they cured PMS). The worse one of all though is the snappy and upbeat female android (an obvious take on Aliens’ Bishop) who is constantly followed around by her inventor / caretaker who seems to have a weird, perverse romantic attachment to her. The android soon becomes the go to character for clever one liners which soon start rubbing off on the rest of the cast which makes for some painfully unfunny bits and has us wanting to stick an electrical power line up Jason’s ass so that he can hurry up and kill them all a little bit quicker. Jason butchers his way through this motley crew (as we wistfully remember some of the quality writing, acting, and character development that would grace the earlier 80s films in the series) and even encounters one black commando who just refuses to go down even as the actor’s attempts at playing tough come off as being laughable instead. There’s also another female who is such a panicked, whiny little mess that she’s the first one to get onto the escape shuttle and tries to fly off prematurely by herself only to crash and burn upon takeoff (an idea borrowed from the Ernest Borgnine character in The Black Hole). There’s also a disgustingly annoying wanna be hippie guy, a shaved head guy who comes off as a super wussy incarnation of Stone Cold Steve Austin, and a couple of pretty boys who go down to Jason even faster than most of the females do. Part of the problem is that all of these actors seem to be trying to upstage each other and maybe even steal the movie outright by trying to give “colorful” performances, but the Canadian acting style and discipline (or lack thereof) just results in a stagnant product that virtually no one can enjoy, save for the actor playing the head professor on board (and who dreams of making money off of Jason) who seems to be attracted to Doig’s character and at least underplays enough of his role to be acceptable before dying an hilariously stupid death at Jason’s hands. Eventually we are fed the idea of the female android being given an “upgrade” of some sorts, which results in her coming out in a skimpy outfit, brandishing weapons that any of the other characters could have used at any point in the movie prior, and coming out with even more irritating one liners before she (literally) blasts Jason to shreds with the weapons that anyone else could have used, leading to Jason falling into a regeneration machine (and being left there) so that his damaged tissue can be regenerated into “Uber Jason”, a literal cyborg reinvention of the character that looks somewhat impressive but what was really unnecessary considering that Jason doesn’t really need this kind of a gimmick to be fiercely imposing. On and on things go, with another girl dying through utter stupidity (complete with bad one liner), the android getting her head knocked off but still finding a way to be obnoxious, and the wanna be badass black commando attempting to “take on” Jason but really just holding him off until the others can get away. One misses the simpler days when a campsite and either camp counselors or kids having a party were enough to suffice and the principals could carry the film until Jason came calling because this attempt at a most unoriginal sci fi premise in the Voorhees universe really shows that while Jason can never truly be stopped, there actually were other elements in the series that made the earlier films work and it certainly wasn’t an overreliance on cutesy one liners by unappealing actors or a CGI filled outer space environment as if that alone was enough to make this different enough in the series in order to be “good”. Jason still had his date with Robert Englund’s Freddy coming up, so this will stand as just a meaningless attempt to fill the void until then and give Kane Hodder one last payday


3/10

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