31 MORE Days, 31 MORE Screams: Day 13 (Jason X)

NOW LOADING "CHCHCHCHAHAHAHAH.EXE"...

Look, it's a Friday the 13th in October. I had to come back to this well. Of course, I was spoiled for choice on how to make a grand return... or so it would seem. I gave the original Friday the 13th a bit of a shakedown for being evil last year, and in many ways that reading stands. What we have in the subsequent sequels is an entirely new beast. Jason Voorhees, The Man Behind The Mask, starting a killing rampage that would last for ages. Where to drop in on one of horror cinema's most iconic Slasher Beasts, though? The beginning? His revival. Oh no. No no no. Let's go balls out with what is, if not the worst film in the franchise, the one with the most desperate grab for reinvention. Jason X. Friday The 13th Part X: JASON IN MOTHERFUCKING SPACE. The very end, so to speak, of Jason Voorhees. Oh, he'll continue on through reboots or whatever... but in the Prime Timeline of the Friday the 13th Cinematic Universe which began in 1980, this is where Jason Voorhee's adventures end.


2010 is the end of Jason, as the government now has him on lockdown. Of course, some stuffy official type wants to keep him alive to research his regenerative power. Here's a tip, big guy, it's box office returns and VHS sales. Of course, Jason breaks free and rampages his way through some guards... but in the end, it has to a girl who finishes him off. Though stabbed, our lady Rowan manages to freeze-dry Jason and herself in a cryo-statis unit. That's it. You can set stories before this point with Jason in the Prime Timeline, but the canon dictates it: 2010 is the end of Jason as a menace to planet Earth. All the sexy teens of the world can unite in a mass orgy and beer-drinking contest and they'll have no comeuppance. This is the end... but only for us. The sexy teens of the year 2455 unseal Pandora's Slasher and his Final Girl, taking them out into the vast reaches. Space. The final frontier. These are the killings of a revived Jason Voorhees. Now, I know in last year's writeups I made a big deal about the horror tropes where if you do drugs or have sex, the monster gets you. It's not some kind of hyperbole, and this big dumb movie knows it. We intercut between a couple having sex and Jason reviving right then and there, the implication being that somehow the presence of some space college kids fucking is enough to get the monster back on his feet and slam-dunk a lady's head into liquid nitrogen. He's pretty quick in getting one of the sexhavers, but the other is spared... for now. Here's where things get strange. There's no real... rhyme or reason to this stalking attack. This entire place isn't crawling with sexy teens for Jason to avenge his mother with. Most of his kills come from soldiers, as the movie briefly turns into some sort of Aliens knockoff with Jason as a stealthy stalker, killing folks from the shadows. It's... weird! Really weird!


Alright, on to some juicy bits I guess. After fucking up lots of people and stabbing them in various gnarly ways, Jason is eventually overcome by an android girl who has an absolute shitload of guns. The future has evolved, and its Final Girls have evolved with it. No longer content to scream, instead this Final Girl is ready to stand on equal footing with this unstoppable murder man and blow his limbs and head off. That should be the end of it... but no. Oh no. If a Final Girl can evolve... so can Jason. Even in the future we can have techno-mishaps, and this particular techno-mishap in the med bay leads to nanomachines rebuilding Jason into some sort of mechanized cyborg thing. Uber-Jason, as the credits call him, is only in the last 20 minutes... but he's clearly the most threatening this Slasher Beast has ever been. He punches Final Android heads off like nothing and is impervious to bullets. He cannot be stopped. Only distracted. A holodeck is used to send him back to Crystal Lake, 1980, where a bunch of Sexy Teens want him to drink beer, smoke weed, and have sex. He beats them to death in their sleeping bags. The immutable nature of the future's evolution shines through. Rowan, the android girl, and her creator live instead of just one girl at the end of it all. The final defeat of Jason comes from the determined hands of the heroic Sgt. Brodski, a black man who rams Jason in deep space and sends the pair of them flying down to a planet below, burning up in re-entry. Uber-Jason's mask floats to the bottom of a lake. Here lies Jason Voorhees, born 1946 and died (for good) in 2455. This movie is... well, it's a movie. It's the silliest concept, and it's hard to say that it really works. I will say that my first viewing was a lot better, because I watched it with a pal and we made fun of it. It's one of those movies, despite being a film where lots of people get murdered. It doesn't even really have the same ethos of punishing those sexhaving teens, barring those one or two moments in the film where Jason does that. In the future, he has lost his way and just become a shambling machine, killing because... he can? I don't really know. It's not the worst movie ever, but this is the spooky season. Get a pal who likes the red stuff, watch it with them, and mock the heck out of it. You'll have some laughs, probably.