Review #11: Jason X (2001)

Cast/Notable Credits:
James Isaac (Director): House 3 (1989), Skinwalkers

Lexa Doig (Rowan): Andromeda & Stargate: SG-1 T.V. series

Chuck Campbell (Tsunaron): Urban Legends (2000), Stargate: Atlantis T.V. series

Lisa Ryder (Kay-Em 14): Andromeda & Forever Knight T.V. series

Peter Mensah (Sgt. Brodski): Tears of the Sun (2003), Hildago (2004), 300 (2006), The Incredible Hulk (2008)

Boyd Banks (Fat Lou): The Highwayman (2000), American Psycho 2 (2002), Dawn of Dead, Land of the Dead, Diary of the Dead

Trailer:


Okay, the Jason franchise has been dead for almost ten years now. Film technology has greatly improved, and special effects are now at the point where horror movies can really benefit from the digital technology. Now we need a new electrifying plot to get the series going again. Something fresh and unique. Something we haven’t seen in a Friday series before. How ‘bout Jason in space? What a fuckin’ great idea!!!!

So every one's favorite hockey mask wearing killer has been sent to the stars to share information with R2-D2 and battle the Klingons...wait...wrong Sci-Fi stories. He's been sent back in time to protect John Connor against the machines. No, that's not it. Even though he ends up looking like one of those machines. What the hell? How does it go? Ah. I got it.

Somehow, Jason has been captured by the government and chained up in a secret underwater installation at Crystal Lake. Forget the how the last time we saw him, he was dragged to hell by Freddy. Just think of it as clean slate. The government captured him. Deal with it.

Moving on past obvious plot and continuity holes, we find our beloved killing machine suspended in the air wrapped up with iron chains being guarded by some military private. I gotta say, I can't see what's coming next. Wink! Wink! Next we see our heroine, Rowan, whining to some military guys about what to and not to do with Jason.

Rowan wants to put him in some cryogenic freezer and pretty much put him on ice. The military guys on the other hand, want to study and dissect him because of his "unique regenerative tissue" abilities. I guess Jason is some what like the swamp thing. Cut off a limb and stick it in the sun light and...BOOM!...a new limb. Or something like that. A cheap way to explain why he can't die. In the end, the military guys get their way.

So they enter the room where Jason's being held captive and find a body hanging in the air by chains with a blanket over the head. Uh oh...I thinking someone got free.

Okay, now I got to go off a little bit. So you've captured the notorious Jason, and what do you do, you bound him in a few chains and let some Gomer Pyle private guard him. ONE private. Not hundreds. ONE. To top things off, he's being held in this huge, dark gymnasium looking room with one spot light that shines down. Really? A dark room with one light? Nah, there aren't any hiding spots in that room. If it was me, that room would be:

A. Small
B. Preferably round, eliminate corners or any other possible hiding spots (like pillars)
C. Well the f*ck lit. I mean, "Bring down the sun and place it in the room" lit.
D. And in the room there would be some sort of cage or cement cell where Jason would be inside of also. Not just hanging by chains in the middle of the room.

But that's why I'm not in the military. I'm too smart. Or at least not part of the "movie magic". I wouldn't stand for ridiculous scenarios like that.

Back to the story...the military dudes remove the blanket and guess what? Yeah. It's not Jason. It's the dead Gomer Pyle. Jason pops out of the dark and starts to slaughter the military guys. Jason chases Rowan through the complex, which is deserted except them. What a highly guarded military complex!

Rowan leads Jason down into the cryogenic freezer room, and gets him into the chamber, locking it and then starts the freezing process. All high and mighty on herself she looks into the chamber window to gloat at Jason. Still armed with his machete, he punctures the chamber door and stabs her. This creates a leak, or breach, in the freezing process and then the room automatically locks down and the freezer process then takes over the room. Both are frozen in time...not like Buck Rogers, well maybe like Buck...and no one ever comes back to the facility.

Four hundred some odd years later, Earth is an inhabitable waste land, and some futuristic college kids returning to Earth on some type of archaeological dig ends up finding the secret facility. They stumble their way down the the freezer room and find a frozen Rowan and Jason. They decide to take them both back to their spaceship to preserve them. Rowan thaws out and is in disbelief and unaware of them bringing Jason aboard also. And before we know it, Jason's in space. In the future. Slaughtering a new age of sex lovin', druggie college kids.

Villain:

There are three villains in the film, the studio exec.'s, Jason and Uber Jason or what I like to call, Terminator Jason. The Jason-1000 or J-1000. Regular Jason was played by Kane Hodder again. There was something off with his look in general. The famous hockey mask was missing it's trade mark red streaks, it was just plain white. A beat up and dinged white, but still white. That's the first look to the character that was "off". Another thing, Jason seemed to have a patch of fuzz hair. What's up with that?

Now on to the J-1000. Uber Jason looked awesome. He looked like the off spring if the terminator and the Bat-Man suit had a kid. It looked sweet. I couldn't relate to the Jason character afterwards. Since he became the J-1000, something was lost. How did he turn to Uber-Jason, well I won't spoil that for you. It's something that you have to see on screen. It would have been terrific to see him kill more as the J-1000.

Cast:

Onto the cast of the film, Lex Doig and Lisa Ryder played similar roles as they do in the T.V. series Andromeda. One's an android, the other is human and in this flim, they reversed roles. Lisa Ryder played an android that is trying to perfect herself to become more human like. Sounds like another Sci-Fi flick's android. Hmm. What could that show be? The female version of Data was a lot less like able and sympathetic than that one from the starship Enterprise.

The most enjoyable and interesting character in the film is Sgt. Brodski. Or as my friend Bookie refers to him as, Tae bo. Brodski was the leader of the ship's army grunts, protectors of the college kids. Jason dispatched the grunts as quick as he met them, but Brodski was the equivilent of Jason. He could not die! Taebo kept cheating death up all the way up to the final dual with Jason. A true trooper.

The rest of the cast were bit actors whose careers involve shows that pop up on the Sci-Fi channel. Fitting because this movie happens to pop up on that channel a lot itself. One other cast member of note is Boyd Banks (Fat Lou). He starred into two of my favorite Zombie movies, Dawn of the Dead and Land of the Dead.

SFX/Gore:

Jason X is the first Friday film to take advantage of modern computer state of the art special effects. Didn't disappoint me there. It was also the bloodiest of the franchise standing tall with twenty-eight deaths. Some how I knew that Part 6’s record would be broken.

Unfortunately a few of the deaths were sub par in the movie. Like the snapping of the necks. And some of the deaths were Jason's versions of Freddy puns. "He got screwed." Did they really need to go there? It was difficult deciding my favorite death scene. There was a wicked bad ass one and another that was just over the top hilarious. So I had to break it down to favorite and funniest death.

Favorite death: The frozen face smash. * Highlight to read * Outside of the opening scene cannon fodder, the movie had to set a tone with Jason being a bad mother f*cker. During his reanimation from being frozen, one of the college kids was dissecting the "assumed" dead Jason. With her backed turned to Jason, she continued to examine other test results. Meanwhile, guess who's come back to life?

She peers back over to the operation table and sees that Jason's gone, and before she could react, he sneaks in and grabs her from behind. Jason's covering her mouth with one of his hands as she struggles. His other arm is wrapped around her waste just under her twins.

As she struggles to break free, it appears that Jason's gonna pull up her shirt giving the audience the ultimate thrill. I remember every twist and turn the audience thinks they were going to pop out. The audience was like, "Ah. Ooh. Maybe. Ah." Unfortunately they didn't pop out.

Jason then takes the struggling girl and plunges her face into a sink full of liquid nitrogen, freezing it. After a few seconds he pulled her face out and smashed it on the counter, breaking it into a thousand pieces. End * That was TOTALLY AWESOME!

Funniest Death: Sleeping bag scene: * Highlight to read * Okay this was the best part of the movie hands down. It was late in the film and Uber Jason was on the heels of the survivors when they decided to slow him down by placing him in a virtual reality world sequence.

In the sequence two (V.R.) female campers offer Jason to smoke pot and have sex. They mock him, asking him if he wants to have premarital sex and smoke pot. The two girls then take off their tops and hop into their sleeping bags. They roll around giggling look up at the pissed of J-1000. The movie cuts back to the survivors frantically putting together an escape plan and when they cut back to Jason, he's got the sleeping bags in his hands.

Jason is slamming the sleeping bags with the V.R. girls in them into a holographic tree and each other. It was fuckin' hilarious. You could here the muffled sounds of "Ouch!" "Agh!" as Jason went to town slamming the sleeping bags. He ends the deaths by slamming the last one into a V.R. tree. * End

I just lost it. It was sooo funny. Shark and I were just gone for the rest of the film, we were laughing so hard. There were times I could hardly breathe. I don't think I've ever laughed so hard at the movies. I was laughing so hard I had stomach cramps. These deaths were similar to the original sleeping bag death in Part 7, but it was more drawn out and funnier.

TNA:

Well Jason X tried to live up on the TNA scale. It pretty much succeeded. There were seven hot chicks in the film. NO Shark Factor. We got to see the flashing of three sets of boobies. One of the sets happened to be a robot's twins and the other two sets came complementary of the virtual reality world. Technicality. Maybe. Do I care? No. Take 'em as we get 'em.

I gave credit for 1.5 sex acts. Where’d that number come from? How do we get a half? Well, I don’t know where that nipple prong thing was going…so I awarded a ½ point.

T.Gun's Take:

Jason in space…in the future…on a space ship…transformed with technology into the J-1000. You can’t write anything better than this. It's perfect. Just shows you what a big bong of weed will do in Hollywood.

Seriously, how did the writers of the film get the guts to present that to the big shots? Were they under pressure from a last minute dead line? So they got high and said, "Fuck it. Were gonna get fired anyway, so let's just think of the weirdest thing we can think of." And the producers bought it! Jason X also receives bonus points for reviving the franchise from the dead.

Officially the first Friday movie that I dragged Bookie to. For years, I thought it would never get on the big screen. He thought so too...and hoped so. But in the end, it was all good. An evening for the ages, as The Shark and Tool tagged along for the ride.

Surprisingly, one of the best nights out at the movies we’ve ever had. The end of the movie was just a blur because Shark and I couldn’t breathe because we were laughing so hard during the sleeping bag scene. Both of us had stomach cramps. I couldn't stay focused enough on what was happening because I couldn't get that scene out of my head. Thankfully it ended shortly afterwards.

The atmosphere at the movie theater was awesome. The crowd was a bunch of teens and college students who didn't take the film seriously. Everyone was happy to crack a joke at the masterpiece on screen. There was that creepy dude who came to the movie theater solo. He sat by himself at the end of the aisle. He was probably pissed at everyone for making fun of the film. Probably went home to mother's house and cried the night away and played with his Jason doll.

I pleased to say that Bookie hated the whole experience and to this day, still won’t forgive me for dragging him to see it. It's a winner in my book! Good times.

Misc. Movie Trivia:
-Film opened on April 26, 2002 and made $12.6 million at the Box Office ($6.6 million opening weekend)
-It was the least censored Friday film
-Had 4 different release dates before getting released