Review #931: 'Jason X' (2001)

With Freddy Vs. Jason still stuck in development hell, Friday the 13th producer and creator Sean S. Cunningham wanted to ensure that audiences didn't forget about the monster in the hockey mask and gave us a tenth entry, coming 8 years after the previous film. With the last two instalments attempting to change the formula (getting him out of Camp Crystal Lake and then turning him into a body-jumping ghoul from Hell) and becoming two of the most hated entries into the franchise in the process, Jason X faced a battle to bring the well-worn slasher genre to a modern audience. Well, all gore-seeking teenagers love space, right?

When the title is a film's cleverest attribute, you know it's in trouble. In the near-future, Jason Voorhees (Kane Hodder) is imprisoned in Camp Crystal Lake's research facility, where a bunch of silly scientists (including David Cronenberg) look to transport him to another location in order to carry out further research. Naturally, Jason breaks free and kills everyone, just before being frozen along with the sexy doctor Rowan (Lexa Doig). They are discovered almost 500 years later by a group of explorers from Earth II, who take the two corpses aboard their ship, bringing Rowan back to life using advanced science. With Jason now established as a supernatural being who cannot be killed, he is soon alive and kicking and butchering the annoying crew one by one.

With the post-modern horror boom still in full swing thanks to Scream (1997), Jason X plays mainly for laughs. Clearly made with the series' fans in mind, it features various winks at the audience and just may have worked had the script, actors and production values been anything other than abominable. Bad special effects can have its charms, but Jason X looks like a mid-shelf TV show most of the time, with the only inspired effect coming from a poor female doctor who has her face frozen with liquid nitrogen and then smashed to pieces on a work surface (one of the best Jason killings in the entire franchise). Rather than being funny, it feels symbolic of what a parody of itself the series has become. The fans will surely disagree, but the Friday the 13th films have never been good, and Jason X is the poorest of them all. It may not tell us how to kill Jason once and for all, but it demonstrates how to kill a franchise.


Directed by: James Isaac
Starring: Kane Hodder, Lexa Doig, Jonathan Potts, Lisa Ryder
Country: USA/Canada

Rating: *

Tom Gillespie