Jason X [DVD] [2002]

The review title says it all. This film makes up for a lot of the previous entries in this particular franchise. Behind only the original, and Pt 6 (Jason Lives), this is by far and away the best film to be linked to Jason.

The character development eclipses that which you would expect to see in your average stalk and slash film and the makers must have had their tongues so firmly in their cheeks that anyone looking on must have thought the cast and crew were all lopsided.

Now that can go drastically wrong if done badly (See Freddy's Dead) but when executed well (no pun intended), it takes the genre in the only direction which will keep it alive and killing.

The big budget shows through the sets, the music, and the SFX. Had this been a low budget affair, none of this would have worked.

The plot is fairly simple, and along the same lines as all other films of this type - group of kids and a relentless killing machine. But transfer that into the future, with shameless borrows from the sci-fi genre and what you have is the same situation, with countless new ways to die. Add to that the best script of any of this series, the usual money mad scientist, the survivor of a previous encounter, who no-one beleives and the horny teenagers and what you have is an all out killfest with a sense of humour.

For the purists who want their horror without comedy, I can only say that when you get that type of film, you still get comedy, but unintentional as opposed to carefully constructed.

Jason has got to be the meanest looking killer, in size and the way he carries himself. It used to be Michael Myers from the Halloween series, but with H20, and the short dude playing Michael, that mantle was wrenched away by Kane Hodder in the role he has imposingly made his own.

The other 'Jasons', in films 2 - 6 were all a little on the thin size. That just made Jason look gangly, like a basketball player who found a hockey mask. Pt 6 got around that by having a great script, music and a sense of humour. But imagine how much better it could have been with Hodder in the drivers seat.

The teenagers are a suitable mix of cute kids and geeks, and KMU14 has some of the best lines I've heard in a horror film.

This film also has some hilarious references to a future that possibly awaits us, spoken of in a past tense by the grizzled old veteran.

Finally, without putting a spoiler in this review, all I can say is if you thought Jason was unstoppable before, wait till about three quarters of the way through this.

Roll on Friday the 13th 11, and by that I don't mean Freddy Vs Jason, which shamefully has someone else playing Jason but at least has Robert Englund as Krueger.

It will be interesting to see how they manage to bring number 11 out of the end of this, and all I can say is, they're never going to beat this film but if they do, we could be talking film of the genre (with respect to The Exorcist, Halloween and American Werewolf In London).

Watch this film with a beer, some freinds (male and female) and with the volume tturned up full blast, and I challenge you to be disappointed!!

Jason Rules!

Back in 1980, we were introduced to Jason Voorhees in the surprise summer hit, Friday The 13th. Though he was not the killer in the first F13, that honour goes to Betsy Palmer who played his mother, he does make the briefest of appearances at the end which, ironically, was the film's only real scare. He took over as killer in Part 2 and in Part 3 he first donned his now legendary hockey mask. Parts 1 through 7 were set in Crystal Lake and were pretty much the same thing again and again. Then he took Manhattan and then he went to Hell. That was the last time anyone would see him for nine years, until, in 2002, he got about as far away from Crystal Lake as he could get...
In Jason X our unstoppable killing machine (Played by the unimitable Kane Hodder for the fourth time) is hurtling through space, 455 years in the future. I know it sounds excruciating, but the final outcome is quite remarkable. Jason X blows F13 Parts 1 through 9 right out of the water and is without question the best in the series so far. But then if you do something 10 times you're bound to get it right eventually.
The plot is pretty basic, Jason and a sexy scientist called Rowan are cryogenically frozen and then found 455 years later by a group of archaeology students. Rowan is thawed out, Jason comes back to life and then we're back on familiar slasher-flick territory, the only difference being that he's on a space ship. Temporarily deprived of his favourite machette, Jason has to seek out other methods of slicing, dicing and generally obliterating everything in his path, including two absolute showstoppers, one involving a bath of liquid nitrogen and the other, a massive drill bit. He's screwed!
Jason X is also unique because the other characters are actually very likeable. They're complete comic book characters and, for the first time while watching an F13, I found myself cheering the good guys. The best characters are Janessa, the sassy brunette who gets all the best lines and KM-14, the ass kicking android who gives Jason a serious run for his money. But despite them there is no denying who the star of the show really is. Jason X eventually pulls something out of the bag for the Matrix generation to drool over, when Jason becomes Uber-Jason, a cybernetic parody of himself. Parody is always present in this film. For example, Jason reenacts a death from Part 7 and this time it's deliberately funny instead of the unintentional screamer that we got first time round. During that sequence Crystal Lake makes an unexpected cameo. The things that are likely to get you killed by Jason are finally made clear, they are beer, pot and pre-marital sex. Oh and watch out for horror director David Cronenberg making a brief cameo as a sleazy scientist in the opening scenes.
This was the most surprisingly good film of 2002, and it doesn't try to be anything other than what it is, lots of fun and great entertainment.
By the way, watch out for Jason later in 2003 because the prayers of horror geeks worldwide has finally been answered. It's going to be Freddy Vs Jason! I can't wait!

First off, I have to say I personally really enjoyed this movie. I'd seen a few of the early Friday the 13th films prior to this, and had a fairly good idea of the overall quality of the series. Which is where this particular episode is interesting, as it departs completely from what has gone before. Jason X is more or less the Friday the 13th series' "Army of Darkness". It has intermittent scares, and the odd sequence that'll make you jump, but largely it plays like a violent slapstick comedy. This is a complete polar opposite to the straight as you go, scare you silly and gross you out approach that the rest of the series adopts. Which is where people who watch this start to divide up into two separate camps. Most of the people who hate this film say something along the lines of either 'this isn't a horror film, and I paid for a horror film' or 'this horror film sucks, why isn't it more scary'. They'd be right. It isn't all that scary (though people who've never watched anything horror-tinged wouldn't necessarily be advised to start here), and it isn't a straightforward horror film. But, there's the other side of the argument which is that this is a respectful and knowing spoof of the slasher genre, made by slasher fans for slasher fans (unlike Scary Movie, which is a pointless, rude string of direct insults to the horror genre) and it's a good, fun way to spend an hour and a half. I fall on the 'this movie is good fun' side of that argument, because although I do like my horror, and I like it pretty scary and intense, I was entertained throughout this movie. The trouble with this film is that in order to totally enjoy it, you have to get the jokes (many of which are direct references to earlier Friday titles, like the recurring machete or the sequence where two girls get smashed against a tree in sleeping bags) and be on board with the horror bits which aren't gonna phase a horror fan but will probably put off the more squeamish among you (though it didn't scare me, I recently watched it with a friend who watched a lot of it with their eyes shut making vague 'arrggh...' sounds in the corner). At the end of the day, this is a good movie that stops itself being a great one by not making a firm decision about what it wants to be. It's too horror for teen-comedy kids, and it's too teen-comedy for the more pretensious of the horror hardcore. If you don't have a definite kind of movie you want to see, you'll probably love this, like me, but if you have a definite idea of what you want to see, I wouldn't bother because you'll probably be disappointed. On a final note, this movie is a very violent 15, and I have a firm suspicion that it just slid under the 18 bar. The one thing Friday fans are unlikely to be disappointed at is some of the more gory kills (the corkscrew kill in the middle of the film is pretty cool). For once, the UK release is more or less intact and uncut, including the infamous 'half a bloke crawling across the floor' sequence that got cut out of most other countries edit of the film. There are some pretty inventive SFX shots here, so that side is pretty cool. On DVD this has good special features too.