Jason X (2002)

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Jason X (2002)

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The latest installment of the Friday the Thirteenth series, if it can even be called that any more, takes place one hundred years in the future. Jason Vorhees (Kane Hodder) is being held at Crystal Lake Research Facility (give me a break), about to be cryogenically frozen until the authorities can figure out a way to kill a guy who keeps coming back to life (give me another break). Before the authorities can either act on their promise or break it in the tradition of we've-got-to-study-this-guy-for-money schtick, Jason breaks free and goes on his last rampage of the twenty-second century.

Research scientist babe Rowan (Lexa Doig) traps him and freezes him, but is frozen herself, and when the two wake up several hundred years in the future, they find themselves on board a salvage ship full of horny teenagers and greedy scientists. Sound familiar? After that, it's only a matter of time before Jason wakes up and starts his kill-crazy rampage, but not before he "gets an upgrade" and becomes Super Jason. He can stop bullets, rip through steel walls, survive in a vacuum, everything but scare us. Still, after ten movies and eight failures, we ought to know better by now.

One good thing, perhaps the only good thing about this movie is that it can make fun of itself. The deaths aren't particularly gruesome, but they try to be, and many of the victims wind up making fun of them as they occur. When trapped in a shuttle about to implode, one of the horny teenaged girls exclaims that "this sucks on so many levels" right before she is sucked through a hole in the hull. Clever. Then, the badass military lieutenant goes one-on-one with Jason and is stabbed in the gut. "It's gonna take more than that to get this brother down," he breathes into his assailant's face, whereby Jason stabs him again. "Yep, that did it," the lieutenant mutters, and falls to the ground. At this point, I would have traded places with him if it meant I would have gotten out of the theater.

Presumably, screenwriter Todd Farmer set this movie up as an extended reference to Alien, but it spells more of a ripoff than a tribute to me. Whether or not they plan to do another movie is anyone's guess-room was left for one at the end of this one, but it would have to take place on a future Earth, in a future camp with future horny teenagers. It could work. That's the really scary part, now that I think about it.

-Long