And so, we arrive at the final FINAL chapter in the original ‘Friday the 13th’ series. ‘Jason X’ an entry that is to the ‘Friday the 13th’ franchise, what ‘Halloween Ressurection’ is to the ‘Halloween’ franchise.
The plot? Its a non descript point in the near present, logically this takes place after ‘Freddy Vs Jason’ that would mean these events were happening in 2004. But this came out before FvJ and the last time we saw Jason was in 1993 (or 1995 ‘in film’ timelines) being dragged to hell by Freddy. So god knows when this is happening. A five year window between 2000 and 2005.
Jasons been captured after killing over 200 victims. he’s restrained in a military facility awaiting cryogenic freezing. The idea being that, due to his (seeminlgy new found) ability to regenerate his cells. he’s basically unkillable, and as the military cant find a way currently to finish him off, they’re just gonna pop him in the freezer till they CAN find a way to kill him in the future.
However, a rogue faction of the army has other ideas and want to try and weaponize Jason, so they bust him out. Theres a fight and both him and a female agent end up locked into a cryo tank and frozen. They’re found several hundreds of years into the future, by an expedition exploring a now totally ravaged planet earth. they’re bought onto their spaceship, thawed out and almost immediately Jason starts murdering again.
With the ship returning to ‘Earth2’, it becomes a race against time to stop Jason, before theres noone left to return home. Oh! and in the last 25 minutes he gets ‘upgraded’ into a solid metal demon murderer (If the poster didnt spoil that enough).
I really dont know how to feel about this one honestly, while im glad they’ve put the whole ‘supernatural’ aspect of the series on ice as things were getting a bit silly. There isnt really a whole lot going on here and some of the decisions that have been made havent aged all that well.
For a starters, this films tone is now way more in line with a campy horror comedy than a horror film with light comedy elements (as has been the case since ‘Part 6’) Where it works, its actually quite good fun. But the humour in this thing is incredibly cringy at times and it never quite seems to really settle on how far to go into the comedy aspects. A silly recreation of the sleeping bag kill from part 7 is fun. a weird psudosexual skit about magnetic nipples…less so.
Its absolutely a product of it’s time. Painfully early 2000’s in fashion, style and tone. I can appreciate that, but it makes the future scenes feel very dated at this point and where this thing creaks…it cant be unseen.
The script itself is actually kind of drab, barring a few funny cameos and a handful of jokey moments, this is really quite a flat script, the characters all feel mismatched given they’re supposed to be a professional expedition. The ship offered a great opportunity for some close quaters, suspensful thriller elements to help tie this slasher back to it’s origins of parts 1-3. But it’s all by the numbers. Jason wanders around the ship, slowly picking people off with little in the way of interesting kills or dialogue to help break the flow (with the obvious exception being the ‘deep freeze’ kill near the beginning.
I think my biggest problem with this is, just as it seems to be working up some steam to really get the thing going. It ends. Not a lot of interest really happens until we’re past the hour mark and the films act structuring is really uneven. With an opening act that lasts about 10 minutes, that gives way to a 2nd act that runs right up to the 70-80 minute mark and just idles into repetative and not particularly interesting kills. the third act DOES change things up a bit, but it mainly just gets incredibly dumb (in the best possible way I should add) leading to an ending thats kind of shrugworthy (I should also say, this film possibly has the worst ‘end credits’ for a horror film i’ve ever seen. No style, just ‘times new roman’ in white, on black with a overly quiet rock track. DULL.
The characters arnt that interesting, dont get developed very much and dont feel like they really exist in this space, and barring the comedy (my personal favourite being ‘Hocky was outlawed in 2024…’ I look forward to next year…) there just isnt a lot here.
The direction is PAINFULLY 2000’s in all the worst excesses. Im kind of glad we’ve moved on from this feeling like a generic ‘Made for TV movie’ as was the case with ‘Jason goes to hell’, but in it’s place we now have a film that feels like a ‘Sci-fi channel movie’. with really cheap and nasty looking CG effects, tiny poorly dressed sets, everything having a cheap plasticky looking feel to it and the ‘styalization’ basically just being ‘tint it blue…nice.’
I mean, the cast and crew do seem to work well together and whats delivered is absolutely of a ‘passable’ quality. But I just feel like so much more could have been done to really help give this thing polish.
On the cine front, decently composed shots are often hindered by the colour correction or CG, but theres some really cool ideas present here and the sequences are well edited, well structured and tell the story cleanly…well…up until the 3rd act where it feels like large chunks of the movie have gone missing (an example being the scene where Jason is ‘upgraded’, they show a shot of the computers running the upgrade ‘erroring’ and saying it needs to find ‘supplamentary materials’ to do the upgrade, the next scene; without explanation, Jasons got metal armour and is up and running with no issue…its odd.)
It has atmosphere, but the overreliance on digital effects has caused this film a lot of issues…Also; I have to say that ‘normal’ Jason in this film, is absolutely one of the worst looking designs of the entire franchise. It looks like a dollar store approximation of an ‘official’ Jason costume…and had it not been for ‘Exploded sausage’ Jason from ‘Jason goes to hell’ it would in fact be THE worst look that Jasons had in the series to date. ‘Uber Jason’ looks pretty cool though.
The performances are kind of middle of the road, not the worst the franchise has seen, but far from the best. I feel they lack a level of depth that really would have helped me get on with them better. And by the time Jasons up and running, i’ve already kind of gone off the main cast, which means I was less invested when they started to get picked off. They do okay, they have a good level of physicality, they use props and set space very well…I just feel like they didnt bring the A-game to this one.
And the scorings awful. It sounds like an ‘Asylum’ films take on star trek. dire.
I think, at the time, had the team behind this film realised that it would be the last ‘Proper’ Friday the 13th film in the original series…and the last Friday film till the 2009 reboot, they’d have maybe done things a little bit differently. As it stands ‘Jason X’ is a film that showcases some of the worst excesses of 2000’s studio film making, and while I will admit It absolutely has entertaining moments. I dont think this would be one i’d immediately grab if I wanted to catch a ‘Friday’ movie.
TYTD Reviews 