Okay, we’re now on the 10th Friday the 13th movie, and this alone should alert you you’re heading for a barrel of crap. If so, your film radar is suitably developed, but switch that beeping screen off. It’s misleading you. And don’t expect a full-horror fare – this is comedy/action with the horror being a simple springboard. This is to the Friday 13th Series what ‘Army of darkness’ is to the Evil Dead series.
What Jason X is is a fun, dumb film that has just enough wit, action and snippets of cool dialogue and self-reference to make it a tip-top popcorn movie. And believe it or not, no less than David Cronenberg apparently liked the script and premise enough to do a cameo. Good times!
So I think this is actually non-canon and doesn’t really follow on from number 9, and is set in the future, where a deep-frozen Jason is recovered from the now-uninhabitable Earth, but then circumstances and lack of attention allow the big guy to thaw out.
Okay, Jason comes back to life on a space ship, that happens to be carrying space-Special-Forces guys, a group of college kids, and a very cute lady robot.
After some fun dispatching the grunts in various amusing and ‘ouch!’ ways, it’s time for Jason to do that hoodoo he does so well. Along the way, he does his usual machete thing (of course), has a face-off with the ladybot who gets suitable software updates to turn her into a terminatrix (played by a lady that reminds me a lot of Karen Black), and he appears to be dead. But… he is rendered lifeless in the medic lab, where the nanobots used to repair damaged tissues have escaped, and the little fellows find their way into Jason, giving us… BIONIC JASON!
There’s lots of funnies that are even funnier if you know anything about the Friday 13th series, but you don’t really need this background to enjoy – it’s still pretty good without this. The most amusing is, when the few survivors need to distract Jason for a short time during escape, they create a holodeck around him of Camp Crystal with 2 hotties in sleeping blankets who say stuff like ‘we just love premarital sex!’ – suitably enraging the big lug while escape is attempted.
This is way, way better than it has any right to be.