‘It’s gonna take more than a poke in the ribs to put down this old dog…’
People often complain that horror film sequels are too derivative of the source material. How do you take a silent killer with a penchant for butchering teenagers and do something new with that character over and over again? In the Friday the 13th franchise, the answer mostly seems to be “We don’t”. Many of the sequels are interchangeable despite fancy titles like Jason Takes Manhattan and Jason Goes to Hell. Despite its many detractors, I respect Jason X for at least trying to do something different. Franchise is going stale? Let’s launch Jason into space! Why the hell not…
Let’s not concern ourselves too much with the plot. Jason (Kane Hodder) is cryogenically frozen on a spaceship manned almost entirely by hot women scientists inexplicably wearing crop tops. He becomes unfrozen at some point and starts chopping people up culminating in his transformation to some kind of cyborg Jason. What more could you possibly want from the tenth Friday the 13th movie?
When horror legend David Cronenberg pops up and is duly dispatched in the first five minutes, you know the kind of movie we’re dealing with. Is the acting good? No. But is the plot interesting at least? Also, no. BUT. Is Jason X a lot of fun? Hell yeah! There are some great kills, some lovely callbacks to earlier entries and a fascinating sequence where Jason is dropped into a kind of virtual reality Camp Crystal Lake as some kind of weird distraction technique. It’s all wonderful, wonderful nonsense.
It’s hard to imagine anyone other than die hard Jason fans getting much out of Jason X but for the initiated, there are far, far worse Friday the 13th sequels out there. Jason in space. What a world.