Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on April 25, 2002, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
The irony is, the concept of Jason in space is the least problematic part of the 10th Friday the 13th installment. Certainly the goofiest idea yet explored by the franchise, it is nonetheless brought off about as plausibly as possible under the circumstances. Trouble is, once they’ve established this basic premise, the creators of Jason X do practically nothing with it, aside from utilizing the odd piece of futuristic technology. The possibilities for expanding the story go unexplored, and the setting is the only novelty in a film that otherwise plods through the same old knock-’em-off scenario with little imagination or invention. The movie’s a broken-down car with a fresh coat of paint.
It’s also a real disappointment after Jason Goes to Hell, which annoyed some fans by keeping Jason offscreen for the bulk of the story, but worked new wrinkles into his legend and pitted him against a few well-sketched central characters. Jason X doesn’t even have anyone who qualifies as a protagonist; you’d think that Rowan (Lexa Doig), the young woman awakened on a spaceship with Jason after centuries of cryogenic sleep, would become the film’s human focus, but she quickly recedes into the movie’s unmanageably large number of potential victims. Some of them are science students on a salvage mission to now-uninhabitable “Old Earth” whose key find, a frozen figure in a hockey mask, soon wakes up and takes up his murderous ways. The kids discover they’ve got a deadly visitor, a band of military “grunts” on board arm up to stop him, they stalk through dimly lit corridors and cargo bays and the suspense is absolutely nil, since we know very well that their weapons and training will be no match for Jason.
Those Friday fans anxious to see the onscreen deaths of actors who haven’t been killed in a Jason movie before may get a rise out of this entry, but it dispenses with its best “creative murder” (involving liquid nitrogen) early and doesn’t seem to be trying to build sympathy, or even identification, with its characters. They’re colorless targets in Jason’s hacking gallery, and it says something that David Cronenberg, cameoing as a scientist in the opening scene, invests his role with more personality than any of the principal players. (His regular actor Robert Silverman also turns up for a vivid, uncredited bit.) The dialogue is mostly sexual/combative banter of the type that seemed dated in the early ’80s, much less in 2455, and the film is riddled with lapses even in its own limited logic.
For example (and you might want to skip this paragraph until after you’ve seen the film): Late in the story, an android named Kay-Em 14 (Lisa Ryder, displaying more life as a cyborg than her co-stars do as humans) is given a quick “upgrade” by a young techie to battle Jason. She proceeds to kick his butt and blow him away with super-guns—but if these weapons are presumably already on the ship (the techie hardly has time to create them himself), why don’t the other characters use them before? It’s not long, of course, before Jason is inadvertently restored to armor-plated life (as “UberJason”) by the ship’s nanotechnology. But if said technology can restore someone who, like Jason, has a couple of limbs and most of his head blasted away, why don’t his would-be victims use it to revive those who have already become victims? (There’s a storyline with possibilities: a small group of people repeatedly bringing each other back to life as they attempt to stop their masked adversary.)
This stuff wouldn’t matter so much if the film were tense enough to forestall questions of plausibility, but very little of it is honestly suspenseful or scary; even the unveiling of UberJason is presented in a manner that makes it a big shrug. Postproducing the film on digital video has allowed the creative team to add visual FX of a scale (and quality) well beyond that of previous installments, yet the overall film is suffused in a dim, murky look.
Toward the end of Jason X, the filmmakers throw in a brief, satirical setpiece that’s genuinely amusing, and put a spin on the sequel-baiting ending that would be even funnier if it wasn’t clear that they really do intend to stretch the series further. These moments suggest a penchant for self-parody that serves this team much better than their serious attempts to continue Jason’s legacy. “Evil Gets an Upgrade,” say the ads, but too much of Jason X is mired in the retrograde.
