Friday Week: Jason fucking Voorhees, that's what's going on

JASON X

2002

Directed by Jim Isaac

Written by Todd Farmer

Spoilers: high

Jason X is so-called because, fundamentally, New Line Cinema could not use the mark Friday the 13th for their Friday the 13th movies, but somebody involved—executive producer Sean Cunningham, director Jim Isaac, or writer Todd Farmer—intended to have some fun with it anyway: though I've never heard anyone say it aloud as anything besides "Jason ecks" (it occurs to me I might never have heard anyone say it aloud), it is the tenth Friday the 13th film, so you see what they did there; but you probably wouldn't ever hear it said as anything besides the letter "x," because that letter, especially around the turn of the millennium, has often been used to indicate something sleek and futuristic, indeed, exotic.  It is, then, a good little title, because Jason X is the one where Jason goes to outer space.

It's not dispositive as to whether you'll actually like the movie that resulted, but I do think you'd already know from that logline whether or not you're the kind of person who's going to hate it.  Once, I'd have been such a person, but, hey, what good does that do me?  It only surprised me to discover that Friday the 13th wasn't even the first wheels-fell-off horror franchise to have gone into outer space; Leprechaun did it with just its fourth movie back in 1997, and, see, that would worry me, because you shouldn't be running out of variations on core franchise elements by your fourth franchise entry, though I suppose it's true that Friday the 13th already was.

In any case, the concept of a contemporary horror series being flung into the future (a much-mocked trope though it barely even is one: besides the two above-named franchises, the only other one I know it happened with was Hellraiser, and it's not even a whole movie of it there) even prompted some thought in my soupy old brain: basically every work of science fiction ever made that considers humanity's future amongst the stars is founded upon a rock-solid basis of rationalism—Star Trek is, of course, the standard by which all else is judged, so even in that episode of The Next Generation about Beverly Crusher banging the sexy ghost, or that original series episode that proposed the body-snatching spirit of Jack the Ripper, you bet that some version of the term "energy being" got thrown around repeatedly, and it would feel absolutely wrong any other way—whilst horror, or at least the horror invoked by Friday the 13th, is the complete opposite of that, wholly irrational, a constantly-shifting work of artificial folklore that, for instance, is never going to explain how (or if) Jason stopped being a demon bug spawned in hell, and only in about half the movies ever bothers telling you how he didn't die in the last one, even though he clearly did.  So how does an urban legend told by 80s kids even operate, hundreds of years down the line?  Is Jason remembered?  Forgotten?  Do the tales of Jason prompt anything besides derision, or pity, towards the superstitious primitives who could have ever believed them?  Do you believe them now, motherfucker?  Just how does a worldview shaped by cold science, to the exclusion of all else, respond to what is, in essence, only the darkness beyond a campfire that's taken on the shape of a man?

I hate to disappoint you, and I can't claim to have any honest hopes sufficiently high to be genuinely disappointed myself, but these are not going to be questions contemplated by Jason X.  But it still brings them up, which I guess is something; maybe I even was almost capable of being disappointed by it, given that its inciting incident comes perilously close to asking these questions by accident.  Hell, its version of the slasher flick "not dead yet" reversal, which in this one occupies something like the entire third act, though seemingly instigated by nothing beyond a need to sell a new Jason toy that I have no evidence ever existed (but tell me with a straight face that's not what the technological revenant that subsequent comic books describe as "Uber-Jason" comes off as), even momentarily looks like it's sowing the seeds of Jason's own downfall, precisely by means of rationalizing him, by cutting him off from the primal magic that is his nature and turning him into something explicable, and therefore vulnerable, something lesser than the corpse at the bottom of a lake that never quite manages to drown.

I mean, of course every last thing in this entire movie is just a dubious means to a dubious end—Jason X only needs to get Jason to the future, then to space, in the same way that Jason X only needs to exist at all because Freddy vs. Jason was still languishing and Sean Cunningham, for whatever reason, determined there should be a new Friday, and this was the novelty scenario the wheel of fortune landed on this time.  But, anyway, we begin in a nearer future, a future that bad arithmetic will later indicate to be the present year of Jason X's production, A.D. 2000 on the dot, though the opening scenes' dialogue, and the apparently unremarkable existence of futurist concepts like "cryonic suspension," pretty readily establishes that this is the mid-21st century.  And that tracks, since by my reckoning The New Blood had already sent Jason into the future to the tune of about 2040.

So: in a year explicitly equal to or greater than 2010, Jason (Kane Hodder for the fourth and final time, and I think "the best Jason" would need to be effective more than 25% of the time, though he gets closer here than at any point since The New Blood) has been captured by the government, and they have tried their damnedest, in what is most unfortunately not a quick-cut montage, to execute him by numerous means; nothing has seemed to take, and he just gets loose and keeps killing.  (Later dialogue declares a body count of over 200, which means, cutely enough, that basically an entire other Friday series has happened between Jason Goes To Hell and Jason X.)  Finally, the revenant, chained and restrained for the moment, winds up in the care of Dr. Rowan LaFontaine (Lexa Doig, of essentially every turn-of-the-millennium not-Star Trek Star Trek that I never watched—except, somehow, Lexx—so I guess she had her niche, even if it's not too strongly evidenced here).  Rowan's semi-reasonable plan is just to freeze him until they can crack the problem of killing him, and it's kind of a shame he wasn't simply shot into space, like Gamera, but the movie does perceive (and only perceives) a need for a figure like Rowan, in order to get to a Buck Rogers/Idiocracy thing, that it obviously was never going to have time for anyway.  (I mean, I guess it's just Aliens, in the same way the movie desperately wants to be Alien with Jason; but Jason X doesn't seem to understand why it's stealing what it's stealing.)  Well, regardless, Rowan hasn't counted on a slimy interloper, Dr. Wimmer (David Cronenberg, doing a friendly favor, Isaac having served as an effects supervisor for the director before becoming a director himself; and thus concludes my parentheticals about the cast).  Wimmer, you see, wants to study Jason, for his curious immortality could be of extraordinary value to humankind.  And fair enough, except Jason Voorhees is magic, and I doubt what makes him Jason Voorhees is reproducible.

This will never come up again.  The upshot is a sub-sub-Silence of the Lambs Jason escape, whereupon he kills some guys, including Wimmer, and goes after Rowan, who manages to trick him into a cryonic stasis tube at the cost of her being partially gutted, the system being damaged, and the facility locking down with her in it as cryonic fluid preserves her body along with his.  Come the year 2455, both she and Jason are still alive, discovered by scavenger-anthropologists visiting from Earth Two, Earth One above being an uninhabitable wasteland thanks to, presumably, the usual reasons, though feudal capitalism and specifically the Microsoft Corporation are implicated.  The anthropologists, a student group led by Prof. Lowe (Jonathan Potts), take their pair of finds back to their ship, the Grendel, and that's such an erudite and insightful reference in the context of this franchise that maybe I actually should be disappointed in this screenplay.

But onward: either senselessly or via some world-building that doesn't quite come off, the Grendel is ferrying Lowe's anthropology class and a whole squad of space marines, whom I wish weren't here, led by Brodski (Peter Mensah), meaning there are like two dozen people aboard, though besides Brodski the marines only matter as a meat blob, and most of the anthropologists don't matter much either.  I'll congratulate Isaac on this, actually: when we get to 2455 and this impossibly-unwieldy cast, he's doing a bang-up job, given the limitations that the film is going to have, at somewhat individuating a lot of them and somewhat clearly designating the eight-to-ten who are going to be the narrative focus, while also even sort of gesturing, given their characterizations, at the idea of a dystopian future populated mostly by descendants of the stereotypes from previous Friday movies.  So, besides Rowan and Lowe, the non-exhaustive list includes serious scientist Adrienne (Kristi Angus), stoner Azrael (Dov Tiefenbach), horny couple Kinsa (Melody Johnson) and Stoney (Yani Gellmann), sarcastic Janessa (Melyssa Ade), decent-hearted Waylander (Derwin Jordan), positronics whiz Tsunaron (Chuck Campbell), and his creation, who wants to be his girlfriend, the android Kay-Em 14 (Lisa Ryder).  Okay, the last one's new.

I only mention Adrienne, though, because she provides what might well be—I don't know, kids—the single best kill in the franchise, tossed off as the very first one in the main phase of Jason X's mayhem, and not really lingered on, in a way that potentially suggests they (by which I mean Isaac and makeup effects artist Stephan Dupuis) didn't even quite know what they had here.  But fuck, it's astonishingly good: having set herself to freezing some Voorhees samples in liquid nitrogen, Adrienne has her own head forced into the roiling cryonic fluid, freezing it solid so that Jason can smash her entire face off on the counter, and it is basically the only act of violence in all ten of these movies that genuinely sickened me—there's something about her faceless corpse that's much worse than a merely headless one—and it's so earnestly frightful that it comes real close to taking it beyond "cool."  There's some decent work afterward, occasionally even creative work, but this feels very nearly outside of this dumbass movie's ambit, even if I am glad it's here.

But before that, we whirl through the cast, and Rowe is established as sleazy and possibly outright evil, and motivated to try to sell Jason as some kind of interstellar sideshow attraction, and the movie shakes out exactly the same as if he'd been kind and wasn't susceptible to sexual bribery from his students (if I ever had to show somebody just one scene to demonstrate 21st century filmmakers using "BDSM" as a visual replacement for sexuality, it'd be this one); but then Kinsa and Stoney had to go and start having actual intercourse, so if Jason Goes To Hell hadn't already done it, then Jason X would've, effectively incorporating this perennial criticism of slasher films into this slasher franchise, even when that's not a very sound reading of Friday the 13th films specifically, by way of a self-aware defensive crouch.  But at least it's funnier (and vastly more efficient) than Jason Goes to Hell was at the same joke, accomplishing this by nothing more than a simple edit, which I have to admit I laughed at, cutting immediately from what's presumably the initial penetration to Jason bolting up, his teen sex sense a-tingling.

Now we basically do Alien/Aliens, with Jason, and it's kind of okay.  The VFX looks bad, which I think we need to forgive ("it's 2002" takes care of a lot before we even get to how cheap it was), but so does Clive Thomasson's production design, which we don't have to take in stride, because cheap by absolute standards or not, for a Friday this was enormously expensive, costing as much as $14 million, and at that level this spaceship should not look worse than a television pilot, just a bunch of barely-dressed "it's in space, right?" sets that Isaac, oddly enough considering how deftly he handles the cast, never comes close to establishing as a geographically coherent set of spaces, obviously not on the level of, oh, say, Serenity's burly tracking shot, but on the level of regular old Firefly, or even Star Trek having comprehensible Michael Okuda-style diagrams.  (There's an outright baffling sequence where the core group shelters behind a door, and Jason crashes through a window, which makes perfect sense in Fridays 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7—I think that's the list—and much less on a spaceship.)  Derick Undershultz's photography is not really helping matters: it's extremely tidy, like the sets, and mostly mirrors their featurelessness; the "space" elements used here are mainly just the occasional, irritating reflection of prismatic console lights.  I'm not necessarily asking for new ideas about space, for to some degree that would even defeat the purpose of the experiment; but it'd be nice if it looked credible, something basically all previous Fridays did (besides Jason Takes Manhattan), simply by dint of being set in cabins and houses.  (I somewhat enjoy Maxyne Baker's "2002 in space! hence still mostly-skinny-girls-in-tight-pants" costume design.)

None of that is the reason the movie is bad, nor is it, strictly-speaking, "Jason in space is stupid."  But what this scenario does, unfortunately, is mess with the underlying Friday formula, basically "some people mill about being humans, then they begin to die."  Oddly, then, though The New Blood and Jason Goes To Hell are more blatantly taking their cues from A Nightmare On Elm Street, it's Jason X that most fully replicates its structure (and repudiating Alien's!), but not doing that well; and because we're in space, there is no medium-boil, we just get thrown more-or-less immediately into a running battle with Jason.  And that leaves a lot of potential unexplored about how Rowan responds to her new world, or skullduggery regarding how valuable Jason's secrets are, or simply how Rowan's paranoia about this corpse would land with all these scientists who would probably think, at best, that she's a traumatized lunatic.  And I get it: nobody who actually had good sci-fi world-building in them was ever going to waste it on "Jason goes to outer space."  But that still sucks, and Jason X isn't even always capitalizing on the sci-fi ideas it does produce: it's a future where death is more negotiable—Jason's actual first future victim is Azrael, his arm lopped off because the frozen machete-wielding corpse fell at him, and he's good as new within an hour—but this doesn't seem to have inspired any gags such that, perhaps, Hodder could've acted against.

It does manage some fun stuff with its plug-n-play sci-fi ideas: Jason wanders onto a holodeck, twice; there's an explosive decompression mediated by an extravehicularly-active Jason that sure doesn't sweat the science there; and there's Kay-Em, by some margin the film's best character (and her meatbag creator/boyfriend's the second-best), Ryder giving a performance that I guess I'd have to call amongst the franchise's best, despite disparate goals from those of the other bests.  She's not just being an emotionless robot, rather an extremely chipper, but otherwise extremely low-affect one, basically human except constitutionally incapable of panic, up to and including when her head gets punched off.  That's an amazing performance to have in the context of a slasher film—and, like with a lot of things here, I don't think the movie is always using it well.

It ultimately comes down to whatever the fuck this movie is doing with tone, constantly betraying its makers' unctuous desperation to tell you that, hey, they know their movie's stupid.  Maybe I'm stupid to think so, then, but damn it, this movie about Jason in outer space needed to be a lot more serious, and the only major thing that's mostly-serious is Harry Manfredini's (fittingly) action-adventurey score.  Now, yes, one must be tolerant of the turn-of-the-millennium dialogue that has difficulty discerning the boundary between honestly-funny comic banter and douchebaggery, but when it starts outright freebasing its Kevin Williamson/Joss Whedon influences, it gets intolerable, not so much "genre savvy," as I assume it's going for, but full-on fourth-wall breaking self-parody.  (This is on top of much grating cartooniness: Kay-Em's the best character yet her big bad-ass fight with Jason is so needleessly uncool; in this case, I wish they were Whedoning even more, because Whedon would've at least been too turned on to have treated the superpowered babe with anything but rock-hard reverence.)  I'm not necessarily "happy" with the holographic parody of Fridays past that they try to fool Jason with, even if it's a very funny take on New Blood's signature kill—though I actually liked the coda of two lovers on an alien lake witnessing Jason plunge through their atmosphere as a "shooting star," and going to foolishly investigate, because that evinces some modest understanding of what the franchise was ever actually about, rather than just importing a reductive parody into the series in a vain attempt to please people who'd never like these movies anyway—but a lot of the dialogue here, e.g. "this sucks on so many levels" uttered by someone being vacated into outer space, is its own anxious Mystery Science Theatre 3000.  It's distracting enough that it can never quite live up to the fun dumb time it promised.

Score: 5/10

Reviews in this series:

Friday the 13th (Cunningham, 1980)

Friday the 13th Part 2 (Miner, 1981)

Friday the 13th Part III (Miner, 1982)

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (Zito, 1984)

Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (Steinmann, 1985)

Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (McLoughlin, 1986)

Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (Buechler, 1988)

Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (Hedden, 1989)

Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday (Marcus and Cunningham, 1993)

Jason X (Isaac, 2002)

Freddy vs. Jason (Yu, 2003)

Friday the 13th (Nispel, 2009)