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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 20%
Worth A Look: 15.63%
Average: 17.5%
Pretty Bad: 11.88%
Total Crap: 35%
6 reviews, 124 user ratings
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| Jason X |
by Brian McKay
"Jason 'X' just misses the mark - but at least there's a few laughs."
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Although I never saw any of the films between III and IX in the bloated "Friday the 13th" series, "Jason X" doesn't exactly have me running to the video store to play catchup. It's basically the same dumb teen horror shit that we saw in the first movie, only the violence is more pointless, the nudity more sparse, and the suspense is nil. Only a few good killshots, a few funny one-liners, and one hilarious scene that pokes fun at the entire franchise make it watchable.The whole thing plays out like an Aliens/Terminator/Hannibal hybrid rip-off. It begins in the near-future with Jason strapped in at a research facility ala Anthony Hopkins on the dolly in "Silence of the Lambs". Apparently he has some mysterious ability to regenerate tissue, making him unkillable, so they have decided to cryogenically imprison him instead. Naturally he escapes, killing everyone except one young woman who lures him into a stasis chamber, freezing both him and herself in the process.
450 years later, a group of students on a field trip from outer space find the two and take them back to their ship to thaw them out. The young woman awakes to warn them how dangerous Jason is, but before she can convince them to chuck him out of the nearest airlock, Jason wakes up and the pointless and mostly dull carnage begins. That's really all you need to know, plot wise.
Like it's predecessors, Jason X is mostly laughable. What these kids are students of is never exactly clear. We are led to believe that they are capable of running both a spaceship and a high-tech medical lab, despite the fact that they look like they shouldn't be allowed to operate anything more complicated than a bong. Besides an annoyingly stupid stoner kid, a token black kid, and a Doogie-Howseresque whiz kid, the cast is mostly generic young hotties running around in belly shirts and showing off lots of cleavage (always appropriate for working in a lab environment). Oh, and there's a few adults thrown into the mix as well, although they prove to be even less intelligent and more perishable than the teens. The only halfway memorable performance comes from cute redhead Lisa Ryder as the ass-kicking android "KM", who could have just as appropriately been named "K-Y" since she serves as the whiz kid's sex toy when not beating up on the guy in the hockey mask. But even her acting is so bad that her performance is mostly memorable for it's high cheese factor.
"Jason X" wears out its welcome fast, and unlike its early predecessors, it makes no attempt to be at all scary. Nobody even jumps out for a cheap "Boo". Jason just walks around openly slaughtering anyone stupid enough to cross his path (which is pretty much everyone). A few of the kills are creative and amusing, and there is one Hilarious scene toward the end, featuring Jason and a couple of giggling bimbos in sleeping bags, that almost makes sitting through the rest of the film worthwhile.I suppose that there will be a Jason XI, simply because there will always be a market for dumb teen horror schlock. But in case you were wondering if "Jason X" brings anything new or interesting to the franchise, consider me the traffic cop at the scene of the accident who says "Move along, folks. There's nothing here to see."
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=4747&reviewer=258
originally posted: 04/29/02 06:34:01
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USA
26-Apr-2002 (R)
UK
N/A
Australia
15-Aug-2002
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