Welcome to YNTE Horror Night, a spinoff series of YNTE Movie Night! This month we'll be analyzing "Jason X", the tenth movie in the Friday the 13th series. As always, tons of spoilers ahead. You've been warned!
At this point, everyone wanted to make Freddy vs. Jason, but for one reason or another, it just wasn't happening. So while waiting to make the film they all wanted to, they put together and crapped out another movie to tide people over.
Couple that with the fact that it's set in the future, in space, so as to not be saddled with all that pesky "continuity", you've got the formula for greatness right there.
Jason starts this movie in government captivity, where scientists are running tests on him to try and discover how he is seemingly invincible. It's interesting to note that they've ALREADY retconned the mystical reasoning introduced last film. He's chained up in a device that looks like one of Houdini's straightjackets. And like Houdini, he escapes from it. Unlike Houdini, instead of taking a bow, he starts with the murderin'.
He kills everyone in the facility except the one cleverest lady scientist who manages to lure him into a cryrogenic chamber. Unfortunately before he can be frozen completely, he stabs her through the door, causing them both to be cryrogenically frozen.
Many years later, the room is discovered by a team of scavengers. They assume Jason is too far gone to save, but think they can bring the lady scientist back to life. So they bag up both bodies and return to their spaceship, which flies them out to an orbital space station where they plan to perform the medical procedures.
At this point the movie looks like a low budget, Stargate rip-off, SyFy Channel original movie. If I walked into a room where someone was watching this, asked them what it was, and they said "A Friday the 13th film" I would not believe them.
They must be spiking the water with horny juice on the spaceship, because nobody on board can go 5 minutes without having sex. One couple starts making out on top of the operating table Jason is still on. One guy puts on a woman's nightgown and has a female crew member tweak his nipples with oversized tongs. One person tries to add nipples to a robot so he can fuck that robot. Seriously.
Well, it should be no surprise to anyone that Jason comes back to life to kill these oversexed spacemen. His first victim is the lady that was doing the autopsy on him, and after killing her he picks up an incredibly impractical surgical tool that happens to look exactly like a machete, but a future machete. FOR SCIENCE.
Jason then proceeds to take out a whole squad of heavily-armed soldiers, one by one, guerrilla-style. The dark, enclosed areas of the spaceship really do a good job of upping the suspense. Or rather, they would, if the film took itself seriously, which it does not. At one point Jason throws a body onto a corkscrew drill, and the body spins around its impale wound. When a soldier finds the body, she reports to her commanding officer "He's screwed."
The pilot prepares to take the ship in to dock with a space colony, knowing that there are many armed commandos on the colony who can take care of Jason. Unfortunately, once the pilot lines up the ship for dock, Jason kills him, and the ship plows through the space colony, blowing it to smithereens.
There's a really touching scene where the robot lady tells the dude crushing on her that there's only a 12% chance of survival. Then they make out. She says that the odds just improved to 53%. Then they "go for 100", which happens off camera, but I'm guessing it means sex. I don't have the calculation skills of a sexbot but I'm pretty sure fucking instead of trying to escape actually LOWERS your odds of survival.
They all have a great plan for leaving in the shuttle, but one scared idiot attempts to fly off without the rest of the group before the shuttle is detached from the ship and it crashes and blows up.
Just when it looks like everyone is doomed, the robot-lovin nerd comes back. It turns out that after the robot sex, he reprogrammed her from a sexbot into a killbot. Despite the fact that he programmed her to kill with flair, not efficiency, she still manages to kill Jason pretty completely. She even blows off a good 3/4 of his head. Everyone, even the lady from the past who KNOWS Jason is unkillable, accepts that he's dead and continue going about their day.
What nobody thought of was that they left Jason's body was left on one of their Science Healing Beds. There's not enough organic tissue left to revive him, so he is augmented with robot parts, replacing Jason Vorhees with the unstoppable cyborg "Jason X"
The group manages to blow Jason up and shoot him out into the vaccum of space, but he punches a hole in the hull, causing explosive decompression. One lady gets sucked out, but before she dies she screams "This sucks on so many levels!", which is actually a pretty accurate review of the movie.
A ship comes to rescue them, unfortunately, the hatch is jammed and they can't get to the space-bridge connecting the two ships, and the hatch controls are on the OUTSIDE of the ship. One guy puts on a space suit and goes to try and unjam the controls from the outside, which begs two questions:
- Why the hell would you put the hatch controls on the OUTSIDE of the ship?
- If you have space suits, why not just space suit up and float to the other ship?
The movie ends with two immoral campers by a lake seeing the "shooting star", and deciding to go check it out.
The next Friday the 13th film is finally the crossover, Freddy vs. Jason, which begs the question, which film should I do next? Freddy vs. Jason? Nightmare on Elm Street (for a primer), or should I put the Friday the 13th franchise on ice for a while and do something else, like Scream? Let me know in the comments! One way or another, I'll see you back here next month with a new review!
Catch up on past installments:
Jason Goes to Hell - The Final Friday
Friday the 13th Part VII: Jason Takes Manhattan
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