10 DAYS OF 13 REDUX: JASON X

Kills:
Possibly thousands, but 25 confirmable and 4 virtual reality (offscreen
and left hanging in Jason’s place, one machine gunned, one choked,
tossed and machine gunned, one face destroyed by pole, one chain choke,
one impalement of a famous Canadian, one body used as a ram, one face
frozen and then smashed, one surgical machete through torso, one WWF
backbreaker, one face versus wall, one chiropractic neck snap, one big
ass drill to the chest, one throat slit, one hooking, one bisection
with additional crawling away, one chopped to pieces, possibly
thousands killed in exploding space station, one decapitation, one
electrocution, one brave self-sacrifice by explosion, one stupid
accidental shuttle crash, one sluicing through a metal grate into
space, one burning up on atmospheric re-entry, one virtual slicing in
half, one virtual beheading, two virtual babes smashed to death in
sleeping bags)

Best Kill:
Jason wakes up grumpy and with knowledge of liquid nitrogen – he shoves
a girl’s face into it and then smashes her visage into a thousand
chunks.

Sex, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll: Archeological piracy for gain. Kinky, creepy sex for grades. Regular sex. Making out with a robot.

The Comeuppance: Surving
the loss of an arm, a leg, most of his head and a massive space ship
explosion, Jason has a fiery entry into the atmosphere of Earth 2,
where he lands in a lake.

The Movie: The decision to hire Spike Lee was a controversial one for many fans of the moribund Friday the 13th
saga, but even they had to admit that his concept of reinventing Jason
Voorhees as a crusader for racial equality – by any means necessary,
including via machete – was inspired. “I didn’t drown in Crystal Lake,”
Jason famously intoned. “Crystal Lake drowned in me.”

Okay,
so that never happened. But wouldn’t it be cool if it did? While Jason
X has a great director on the payroll (sadly not in the director’s
seat), Spike Lee would probably never go near this series. Which is
probably a good thing, to be honest; a Friday the 13th
film wouldn’t be any good if it wasn’t trashy, gory fun. And despite
the naysaying of many fans, that’s exactly what Jason X is – big dumb
fun.

The truth is that the series never took advantage of what Jason Lives
had been able to accomplish and, over the course of just three films
had completely shit the bed. The world had changed as well; post-Scream
no one could get away with making the kind of straight-ahead slasher
films that Jason Voorhees was known for. New Line had unsuccessfully
tried doing something new with the franchise with Jason Goes to Hell, and for eight years, the longest break in the series to date, it looked like the subtitle The Final Friday was true. But then someone had a brilliant idea: throw Jason Voorhees into Aliens and see what happens.

What happens is a silly, bloody bit of madness. The film opens in the near future (allowing plenty more pre-Jason X
adventures, by the way – he has almost 80 kills to rack up to meet the
number we’re later told he’s accumulated) where Jason is held by the
government. Found guilty of mass murder, he’s proven impossible to
execute (remember, he was blown to pieces in the last film and still
came back) and now the plan is to cryogenically freeze him. Until
someone invents better killing technology, I guess. But then David
Cronenberg shows up and that never bodes well. He wants to keep Jason
for research into his remarkable healing powers; during an argument
about this, Jason escapes and slaughters a whole bunch of people. He
mortally wounds a woman who works at the Crystal Lake Research
Facility, where he’s being kept, but not before she manages to
cryofreeze them both.

Cut
forward 400 years (I know this to be the case because not only are we
told the year is 2455, someone says that it’s been four centuries since
Jason was frozen and someone else spells out that it was four hundred
years. For the people in the cheap seats) and the Earth is dead.
Everybody’s moved to Earth 2 (hopefully not the terrible TV show that
almost ate Clancy Brown’s career alive), and only archeologists ever
come visit the old homestead. One group of them find the frozen bodies
and bring them back to their spaceship; the girl is able to be thawed,
but data indicates Jason’s dead. Oh well, I guess that’s a short movie!

Except
of course not. Jason gets up and begins killing the shit out of
everybody he can; not only are there a bunch of students onboard,
there’s also a contingent of Space Marines (dom’t know why, but it
turns out to have been a good idea). Jason X quickly turns into a rip-off of Aliens set
inside what looks like a Canadian warehouse. But Jason’s tougher than
the Marines, killing them all before moving on to the kids.

Blah
blah blah. Jason rampages around for a little while as the Survivor
Girl tells everybody just how fucked hey are. The important thing is
that there’s a robot on board, and we get to finally see what the
outcome of a long debated Jason vs robot fight would be: she shoots off
an arm, a leg and finally the vast majority of his head. Oh well, I
guess that’s a short movie!

But
wait! There’s more, as they say. In the future they have medical nanite
technology, and for some reason (there’s a weird hint that this is
supernatural – the system decides Jason is too fucked to fix but then
it goes overridden) these nanites take an interest in Jason and they
rebuild him. They have the technology. They have the capability to
build the world’s first bionic mass murderer. Jason Voorhees is that
mass murderer. Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster.
Jason Voorhees is the Six Million Dollar Retard.

I
can see why a lot of people don’t like this film. It’s too tongue in
cheek, to be sure. And the change of setting is incredibly dopey, but
unlike Jason Goes to Hell,
which mostly did away with the familiar Jason altogether, this film at
least has the sense to take that character and see how he deals with a
new situation. I think it’s sort of brilliant, and if they had just
called it Jason’s Space Odyssey
(it did come out in 2001 after all) I probably would have given this an
even higher score. Maybe it’s watching all previous nine over the
course of little more than a week, but the formula had lost all
potency, and something drastic needed to be done (what really needed to
be done was to just drop the whole franchise, but that’s neither here
nor there).

There’s
a lot to like in this film. I like the opening, and only wish we could
have seen the attempts to execute Jason. I like Cronenberg showing up;
his presence always makes a movie a little bit better than it should
be. I like the design of the future – one guy is running around wearing
what appears to be a bath mat. I like the characters, believe it or not; the script isn’t interested in being serious, so the characters get
to be a little bit sillier. I like the robot vs Jason scene, which is
like a total parody of Kurt Wimmer’s whole directorial career (even
though it’s aiming at The Matrix. But any low-budget rip of The Matrix will always look like a real Wimmer film). I even like the look of Cyborg Jason.

There
are two things I like most of all: I like Jason’s best foe to date,
Sgt. Brodski, a guy who’s almost as much of an unstoppable killing
machine as Voorhees is. Brodski seems to be killed off pretty early on,
but he shows up alive and comes to save the day a couple of times. He
even survives being in the explosion of a whole spaceship! And that
explosion comes as Jason and Brodski are meeting for combat; it’s
actually a pretty great shot.

Even
more than Brodksi, though, I feel like the whole film is worth it for
two scenes on the holodeck. First Jason stumbles on two people play a
VR game and tries to kill them and is very confused(he manages to kill
a monster, though. I wonder if I should have counted that in the kills
section), but the real joy is later. Trying to distract Cyborg Jason,
the resident nerd programs a holodeck recreation of Crystal Lake circa
1980, and two babes show up offering Jason beer, dope and pre-marital
sex. “We love pre-marital sex!” they announce, taking off their tops
and climbing into sleeping bags. Jason beats them to death using each
other. It’s funny, but it’s also the perfect example of why you can’t
make these movies anymore: everyone knows the rules, and if you don’t
acknowledge that you look stupid and if you do, you’re Scream IV. Someone needs to reinvent the whole genre, which in a weird way is what Jason X is trying to do.

Of
course what it’s really done is kill the series. At the end of the
movie, Jason lands on Earth 2 and two teenagers out for some nookie
think he’s a meteor and go to check him out. The concept is that this
is a reboot of sorts: Jason’s back in a woodsy, lakey environment and
even on Earth 2 in 2455 there are dumb, horny teens. But you can’t make
another movie with a Cyborg Jason because while it’s fun, the whole
idea is so stupid as to be only usable once. By the time Jason X is over a complete reboot or a total remake are the only possible options.