Jason X

A bittersweet day, as we reach the end of our journey through eleven Friday the 13th DVDs. I promised myself I wouldn’t cry…

If you are a traditional fan of the series, you might prepare to be shocked Although Jason X (often referred to as Jason Goes to Space) is the most maligned installment in the franchise, the one that everybody hates, it is my favorite Jason Voorhees movie. Why is this? Maybe it’s because of the visual gags and humor in the script or the incongruity of having such an old-school horror icon in a sci-fi setting. Maybe it’s Lexa Doig. I’m not saying having Lexa Doig in a movie automatically makes it a good movie, but it does earn it some points.

In the near future, Jason has been captured, but the government doesn’t know what to do with him. They’ve executed him by various means, but he just keeps regenerating and coming back. A scientist (Doig) has come up with a plan to place him in cryogenic stasis until such time as they can figure out how to exterminate him. At the last minute, a government scientist (played wonderfully in a cameo by David Cronenburg) steps in to take Jason so the military can do research on him. Doig protests to no avail.

You know this isn’t going to work out well.

And it does. Jason breaks free and slaughters Cronenburg and the soldiers. Doig manages to lure him into the freezing chamber, but just before he freezes, Jason manages to rupture the chamber, and Doig freezes with him. I am sad at this.

450 years in the future (the movie can never keep straight how long it has been, so it is best not to pay any attention to the timeline) a group of students on a field trip discover the cryogenic facility. It seems the earth is now unliveable, and visitors just come to plunder things. They discover Jason and Lexa, and take them back to their ship. Noticing how hot she is, they revive Lexa, but aren’t stupid enough to do so with Jason. No need, he wakes up all on his own, and before you can blink, the body count is rising (Jason kills more people in this movie than in any other). The deaths are fairly imaginative, a head dunked in liquid nitrogen, a soldier impaled on a giant screw in order to set up a pun, and a lot of traumatic amputation.

Things look grim for the future folks, when one of the geeks modifies his nipple-less android (Lisa Ryder) into a fighting machine(Geeky nit-pick: He says he’s given her an “upload”, but he means an “upgrade”). She kicks Jason’s ass, and leaves him dead and in pieces on a table. Well, that’s that.

Except the table Jason lies on is the medical table, where they use nanobots to rebuild tissue. Uh-oh. The nanos do their stuff, and Jason is reborn. Where they were short tissue, they used metal from the ship, giving us a sort of Mecha-Jason, even more deadly and hard to kill. After a totally illogical explosive decompression scene that lasts for a couple of minutes (it’s explosive decompression, it would be over in a flash, and if not, it wouldn’t be powerful enough to send people flying through the air), everyone decides to just leave him.

The best part of the movie is a scene set in a virtual reality simulator much like the Enterprise’s holodeck. To distract Jason, Doig programs a replica of 20th century Crystal Lake, complete with giggling, topless coeds asking Jason to have premarital sex (You know Wesley Crusher did shit like that all the time). This causes him to go wild trying to kill girls who aren’t even there.

So anyway, that’s it for the old Jason movies. Barring family complication, I should have a review of the new Friday the 13th up by early next week.
Ki-ki-ki! Ma-ma-ma!