Jason X

(2001) *

The Friday the 13th series was already starting to feel like a bad hangover at this point, then Jason X upgraded it to a bad hangover with a dog barking outside your window. Maybe the idea of Jason on a spaceship isn't intrinsically bad, but I don't care to speculate. This movie didn't earn it.

Jason is being held captive by some government agency, about to be taken away by some other government agency. Agent Jerk, from the new agency...you know what? This part doesn't matter. There's a festival of mindless hubris and incompetence and Jason and his recent captor wind up frozen. Then it's 400 years later and a spacefaring salvage crew pick them up from a now-uninhabited planet Earth. Why is it the worst people wind up frozen for future generations? People thaw out Jason Voorhees or Khan Noonien Singh, but where's the secret bunker with Einstein or Ghandi? Hmm?

Anyhoo, Frozen Girl displays her previous uselessness by not mentioning that EVERY TIME Jason is unrestrained or unfrozen he gets up and starts killing everybody. And then Jason gets out and starts killing everybody. This is where I mention the production values in this crapfest, which are not quite as good as those on Babylon 5. Sci-fi movies with sub-tv level sets and effects are bad enough, but the reason this movie fails so completely is the complete lack of imagination on every level. The actors, the ideas, the costumes, the sets...none of this carries an interesting slant on the future. If there were a finite amount of sci-fi footage available in the world, the makers of this movie would be heavily fined.

With this tepid setting as background, they do an Aliens knockoff bit as a cadre of space marines get picked off one by one. Each time somebody says "Sarge, I found so-and-so," Sarge says "how is he?" (They're dead.) Then they knock off Jason Takes Manhattan for a while, until the awful, comic-relief girl Data knockoff gets an upgrade to a Trinity knockoff and blows his ass up. BUT, he lands on one of the nanotech med tables (which we saw repair some machete wounds earlier) and the nanites turn him into what an employee at a gay S&M club on a Borg ship might look like. You might think a cyborg Jason would possibly be cool, but somehow they manage to miss.

By my usual standards I'd give this one and a half stars, because of two creative deaths: the girl whose face is nitro-frozen and then shattered, and the guy who's dropped on the giant, upright drill-bit thing, because his body slowly spins around as it slides down. But I just wanted to slap this movie.