Horror Movie Review: Jason X (2001)

The 10th & final (excluding the crossover movie Freddy vs Jason & remake) Friday the 13th movie continues the trend set by most of the previous films…ignoring what happened in the last. In the 8 years since Jason Goes to Hell, the masked menace has seemingly escaped Hell & been captured by the US government.

Attempts to kill him have failed…Jason just won’t die. A scientist, Rowan is planning to freeze Jason in stasis but before she can a group of soldiers arrive to get him hoping to take advantage of his regeneration ability. Alas, Jason breaks free & kills everyone except Rowan who leads him into the stasis chamber. She manages to freeze him but gets stabbed in the process & collapses in the chamber alongside him.

445 years later…

A group of students alongside their professor are on a study trip & find the facility with the frozen Jason & Rowan inside. Earth is dead so humans now occupy a place cleverly titled Earth 2. They take the frozen bodies aboard their ship & return to the vast unknowns of space. They manage to bring Rowan back to life while Jason is left for dead in the morgue.

Ho-ho…we know how this goes right? Jason isn’t dead, he wakes up & does what he does best; kill everyone in sight except this time…it’s in space.

There is a lot to enjoy in Jason X, there really is…it takes a much more tongue in cheek approach to the slasher genre & while a lot of the lines are groan-worthy they will still raise a smile.

One of the more entertaining parts of Jason X are the imaginative kills, Jason is on form here using his surroundings & any tool he can get his hands on. I had to applaud his use of liquid nitrogen when first wakes up from his frozen state.

Most of the cast are forgettable & are just there to die as quickly as possible, 445 years later & these teens haven’t learned anything new. The better acting & more memorable stuff comes from the more experienced actors who have a lot more fun with their roles. Brodski in particular is the high point of the movie getting to be both heroic & deliver some excellent lines. After being stabbed through the back he tells Jason that ‘It’s gonna take more than a poke in the ribs to put down this old dog’. So Jason stabs him again & he follows up with ‘Yeah, that oughta do it’.

Brilliant & it endears you to him instantly.

A character that doesn’t fair as well though is the female android KM-14, quite possibly one of the most annoying characters to ever appear in any Friday the 13th movie ever. The love story between her creator & herself is disturbing particularly when it’s just used as an opportunity to show some tits.

Her upgrades at the end that sees her turn into Trinity from the Matrix & spout some of the most clichéd & piss-poor lines ever drags the movie down significantly. I get that they had to have Jason beaten so he could turn him into Super-Jason but it goes on for far too long.

Talking of Super-Jason…I’m not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand I admire the attempt to change things up but it just looks far too comical to enjoy really. The process was shown earlier when they revive Rowan so it doesn’t make much sense that Jason would be bigger, stronger, have armour plating & a new mask.

You can’t really complain too much about Friday movies not making sense though, if you want deep, thought out horror look elsewhere.

Jason X has many a reference to previous Friday films that are worth keeping an eye out for but the cream of the crop is the holographic simulation that is used to confuse Jason. It shows Camp Crystal Lake with 2 nubile teens talking about how much they love drinking, smoking pot & having pre-marital sex. All things Jason stands against…when it clips back to them Jason is beating one to death with the others body in a sleeping bag. It’s great.

A final shot of a shooting star seen by a young couple at a lake & Jason’s mask sinking to the bottom is nice little hint that maybe things aren’t quite over yet.

“It landed in the lake…come, on, let’s go check it out”.

See you next time Mr. Voorhees.

Entertaining at times & with a real desire to change up a tired formula, Jason X hits a lot of the right notes. It’s let down by a poor final third, awful acting from KM-14 & a big cast that are mostly irrelevant. So then…let’s do Freddy vs Jason, finally.