Crim at the movies: Jason X

How do you improve a slasher movie about good old Mr Voorhees, Camp Crystal Lake’s very own deranged groundskeeper while keeping a ‘Modern and fresh’ appeal onto a classic franchise.

Easy, set the movie in the future and put him on a spaceship.

It is the year 2008 (five years after Freddy vs. Jason took place) and Jason Voorhees is captured by the United States government and held at the Crystal Lake Research Facility. In 2010, a government scientist decides to place Jason in frozen stasis after several failed attempts to kill him with a bunch of wacky scientists hoping to look into Jason’s rapid regeneration abilities for their own purposes.

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Unsurprisingly breaking free of his restraints, Jason kills the guards protecting him as a survivor named Rowan lures Jason into an "ice" pod and activates it. Just as the Cryogenic stasis chamber performs it’s magic, good ol’ Jason ruptures the pod with his machete and stabs Rowan in the abdomen as the room soon froze over. 445 years later in 2455, Earth has become too polluted to support life and has moved to a new planet, Earth Two. We then follow a team of scientists finding Jason and Rowan and taking them onto their ship and trying to reawaken both of them.

And it all goes downhill from there...

This movie is a slasher movie, so when it comes to having a nice fascinating story, do not expect anything worthy of being placed in a museum. The fact that this is the tenth movie in the Friday the 13th franchise alone is an achievement. This movie has been attacked ruthlessly by other critics across the internet and in real life, but seriously, it’s a sequel to Friday the 13th, were they really expecting something special out of this? Yet again, would you really expect something special out of what is easily the worst sequel of the entire franchise? Anyway, let’s kick this review into motion.

The plot of the story is that in layman’s terms, its Jason in space killing a bunch of annoying characters. Any sort of horror in this movie is now gone, alongside the days of Jason simply committing killing sprees on Camp Crystal Lake. The story is cheesy enough to be placed onto a sandwich and be eaten. The whole aspect of ‘Jason Voorhees in space’ is enough to either force you to watch the movie or essentially turn your attention off straight away. It’s basically ‘Jason is found, people from the future bring him back to life unaware of who he is, Jason takes out machete and then proceeds to kill almost the entire spaceship to the last man and women and then the remainder of the story focuses on this ‘last survivor’ or survivors finding a way to defeat Jason.’ It’s the same formula for almost any other Slasher movie, although to me, slasher movies rank low for me. But at least the producers were creative enough make something new instead of having another ‘Jason in the present killing horny teenagers’ movie. But....oh wait, did I mention the sex that is smothered like butter across this movie. Yep, that’s still there. *Sigh*

Oh yeah, and Jason becomes a god-damn cyborg at some point in the movie

Nanomachines, son ​

There is almost no characterizations at all in this movie and the killings are not really very interesting, yet alone done well. Some of the characters have the audacity to say really stupid jokes while they are dying. You are stuck with boring characters, many of whom have little to no relevance in the plot and only exist to serve Jason and his staggeringly high body-count (Funfact, Jason has the highest body-count of any slasher villain of over 300+ in all, ironically, 13 movies that he’s been in.) That being said, further into what is already a terrible yet somewhat watchable movie, he wipes out the entire population of a space-station and then the spaceship he was on. These characters are not only unlikeable and boring, but seeing how it’s a slasher movie, you know exactly what is going to happen to them sooner or later. The plot is weak, so weak that you could likely break all the bones in it’s body if you poked it. The horror element is practically non-existent and dumb, but this franchise movies abandoned making it’s franchise actually scare long ago in favour of just providing dumb story-telling with bloody death scenes, which this film certainly provides. Jason’s victims are sliced in half, impaled on large spikes, blown up, one unfortunate female meet her maker when she had her head dunked in liquid nitrogen and shattered on a desk (Which honestly, was quite cool). While you get to watch these characters die and as you watch them live about their daily lives and their duties, they are so one-dimensional and cheesy to the point where you would stop caring about the characters within the first fifteen minutes of the movie. Visual aspects are terrible, but where Just good enough to entertain my eyes. They all end up dying horrifically and then while the civilian characters are now basically useless to fight against this killing machine, we’re treated to what is likely one of the worst scenes in the entire movie. During the climax of the film, the would be victims try to distract Jason with two hologram girls. These girls offer Jason a beer, some pot, they strip naked and then proclaim, “We love premarital sex.”

Jason isn’t into this sort of thing... ​

While this movie is horrible, it’s really just another teen slasher movie based on a thirty year old franchise that is begging someone to essentially put it out of its misery. However, it does not mean that the movie is not fun. I would not define this as a 'real' movie, but much more than I ever expected from "Friday the 13th" ever again. I'd say it is the only really watchable entry in the series in several years, and if there are no more after the 2009 remake (and I hope not), "Jason X" is not a bad way for FXIII to end.

This is just one of those movies. Stupid, yet enjoyable. If you wish to watch this, turn off your brain and your concept of realism. Sit down with a friend and laugh.

This movie has scored two out of five Lionhearts.