Jason X (2001)

Jason X (2001)
Watched June 1, 2009

SYNOPSIS
Three words: Jason. In. Space.

SHORT REVIEW
"Jason X" is among the worst entries in the "Friday the 13th" series.

REVIEW
Well, not only was "Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter" not the final chapter, "Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday" wasn't the final Friday either. Some wise guy decided to revive the series by putting Jason... in space, joining the likes of Leprechaun and other franchises desperate to make some more money. And, unfortunately, for the most part, it sucks.

So, Jason and some other girl get frozen in a cryogenic chamber, and are awakened in the year 2455 by a bunch of futuristic people, that, for the most part, look and act exactly like people in 2001 would. Yeah, there's a robot, but there's also sluts and people desperate for money, so apparently the world hasn't improved much in 450 years.

Anyways, through means unknown to the characters, the audience and presumably the filmmakers, Jason wakes up and starts to kill again. And, luckily for him, there's a bunch of dim-witted people from the future who are practically asking to die! And so it begins...

I don't know why, but I really love the 80s feel and look that the original "Friday the 13th" films have, and it's part of the reason I love them and all other slashers from that golden age. Of course, since the film was made in '01, it doesn't have that 80s feel to it. If anything else, it has the look and feel of a straight-to-video POS from the 2000s, what with the awful acting and bad CGI. If I didn't know better, I definitely would have guessed that this was DTV. I'm surprised it got a theatrical release, to be honest.

There's a couple cool kills, but overall, it's a Jason film, so they're primarily machete-based. At least for the most part, the kills are on-screen and not shyed away from. Actually, that's not necessarily true, because a good many kills are off-screen, but it's not PG-13 by any means, either.

The biggest thing wrong with "Jason X" is that it seems to lack that sense of fun that the originals had. Even if most of the sequels were awful, they were still fun. Not so for most of "Jason X". Maybe it's just because I felt obliged to hate "Jason X" and it took the fun out of it, but it just didn't have that... oomph, I guess is the way to put it. It really only gets fun in the last 15-20 minutes, after that goddamn annoying chick died (more on goddamn annoying chick later). The scene with the virtual reality Camp Crystal Lake is pretty freaking hilarious, though, and the sleeping bag scene is by far the highlight of the movie, and a great parody on the original films.

Okay, goddamn annoying chick time. As seems to be par for the course in slasher films, there's a wise guy, or wise girl in this case, in "Jason X". But the wise guy character is never so annoying as it is in "Jason X", where the wise girl will never shut her fucking mouth, and everything that comes out of it is just unfunny bullshit one-liners that aren't even "so bad they're funny" one-liners. They just make you shake your head in anger or disappointment or whatever. She finally dies, and amazingly, after she's dead, the film gets about 10 times better.

Even with the satisfaction of having that annoying-as-hell girl sucked through an air tube into oblivion, "Jason X" is really not that good. Out of the original ten entries (this doesn't count "Freddy vs. Jason" or the "FT13" remake), I'd probably have to place "Jason X" as tied with the 8th best. It's at least better than "Jason Takes Manhattan" (isn't everything?) and is about the same as "Jason Goes to Hell". I might actually place this ahead of "Jason Goes to Hell" just because at least "Jason X" didn't have some fucking worm thing that was supposed to be Jason's soul or whatever. Still, even if it's better than two entries, it still sucked. I give "Jason X":
2 out of 5 chainsaws (PRETTY BAD, SKIP IT)

P.S. And no, I don't think "A New Beginning" is the worst entry in the "FT13" series. I actually kind of liked that one.