Jason X (2001)

[runningscared]

Movie: Jason X (2001), directed by Jim Isaac

Watched on: HBO Max

Ran: 7.52 miles, 9’29”/mile, 01:11:23 (slow recovery run)

 

Friends, sometimes you just want to watch something stupid… and I mean brick-stupid. Not necessarily bad, mind you, though in film the two often go hand in hand—and yes, there are times when you want to watch something bad. But right now I’m not talking about those times. I’m talking about when one feels a deep, unrelenting itch to see some seriously ill-conceived idiocy, if only to reaffirm the fundamental absurdity of this human experience we’ve shaped for ourselves. And at times like those, I either go see a Beckett play, or I reach for a big bowl of popcorn and the panacea that is Jason X.

 

Jason X, you see, is a film that EXCELS at being stupid. It is a masterpiece of fatuity, Michelangelo’s Pietà if Michelangelo’s whole deal had been carving beautiful statues out of huge blocks of pure dumb. It is, to put it mildly, GLORIOUS.

 

Let me break it down for you: in the original franchise continuity there had already been nine, count ‘em, NINE Friday the 13th movies, the two most recent being Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan and Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. So when resurrecting everyone’s favorite unstoppable killer for one more spree, the filmmakers asked one all-important question: once you’ve already freed Jason Voorhees from the environs of Camp Crystal Lake and sent him first to Manhattan and then, perhaps redundantly, to Hell, where can you send him next? Space. The answer is space.

 

Also, the future.

 

In space.

 

And thus, Jason X was born!

 

The story makes perfect sense: since no one’s been able to keep Jason dead, scientists at the Crystal Lake Research Facility decide to cryogenically freeze him instead. Naturally, a whole lotta people die in order to make this happen, but one of the scientists, Rowan, manages to lure Jason into a cryo chamber and start the freezing process. He stabs her through the glass just before he freezes, and some of the super-freezy cryo gas comes through the stab-hole and freezes Rowan, too. So Rowan remains stabbed and frozen outside Jason’s cryo tube for like 400 years, as apparently that’s how super-freezy cryo gas works and also no one bothered to go to the facility or follow up on any of the dozen-plus dead people, etc. because that’s totally a thing that would happen.

 

Cut to the year 2455: Earth has long been abandoned because it’s become too polluted to sustain life. Humanity’s fled this garbage heap and started a NEW garbage heap on Earth 2 (seriously, they named it that), and the only people who visit Earth Classic anymore are archaeology classes on field trips—one of which has just found Jason and Rowan still frozen, despite a dead and abandoned planet probably not having a working electrical grid to power the cryo tubes and Rowan isn’t even in one anyway BUT I DIGRESS. The students bring Jason and Rowan on board their ship, thaw out Rowan and heal her stab wound—it’s no biggie, they just routinely reattached some dude’s arm, it’s THE FUTURE after all—and then laugh at her primitive grasp of science as she warns them all that no matter how dead he may look (spoiler: he looks plenty dead, it’s gross), Jason’s about to kill them all.

 

Predictably, she’s right, and Jason goes on Baby’s First Space Rampage while Rowan tries to assist the crew and space marines with what she knows about the phenomenon that is Jason Voorhees. (Think Aliens with Rowan as Ripley.) It’s impossible to spoil the “surprise twist” since it was in the previews and ON THE DANG POSTER, so basically once Jason is cut to ribbons by the adorable ass-kicking lovebot KM-14, the ship’s nanotech rebuilds him as a sleek futuristic Jason with upgrades and, yeah. Like I may have mentioned once or twice, it’s dumb.

 

The body count is INSANE, since Jason has to tear through TWO military squadrons (one terrestrial and one in space, natch), as well as everyone else he encounters. Most of these 20-odd kills are therefore of the quick and practical variety, but Jason does manage to offer up two of the more entertaining onscreen deaths in the entire franchise, namely 1) submerging someone’s head in liquid nitrogen for a few seconds and them smashing it against the countertop, and 2) impaling someone on a giant industrial upward-pointing drill bit so that the corpse slowly rotates as gravity pulls it downward. Be warned: there’s plenty of CGI, which I guess I should consider sacrilegious in a Friday the 13th flick, but honestly it felt pretty at-home in a movie like this.

 

The low-rent Canadian cast performs admirably, the characters are mostly simple but reasonably engaging (the android being the most likable character should be a red flag, and yet it works here), and overall, transplanting Jason into space works far better than it has any right to. If you can embrace the stupidity, Jason X is super-entertaining. I mean, I was 30 when I first saw it, and it made me SO ANGRY, people. These days? I just flat-out love it. Maybe it’s because I’ve mellowed, or maybe it’s because the background radiation of stupidity on this planet has risen exponentially over the past, oh, four years or so (hmmmm…) and Jason X’s now pales in comparison.

 

Whatever the reason, I will happily watch Jason X on a loop until what’s left of my brain withers and dies. If you decide to join me, keep an eye peeled for a David Cronenberg cameo, and enjoy your last chance to see Kane Hodder behind the hockey mask.