Friday the 13th Films Ranked: #3 ‘Jason X’ (2001)

#3 in my definitive ranking of Friday the 13th Films

I didn’t hate this film. It’s just about the most generic Jason Vorhees movie one could come up with, just with a thick Alien skin on top. However, Jim Isaac, the director, and Todd Farmer, the writer, had a decent idea of the appeal of Jason Vorhees slashers, and they did their best to deliver exactly what one would expect. I can see why the film would fail at the box office (it’s the tenth entry in a tired franchise that goes really out there in terms of setting) but also why it would end up successful on home video, though its IMDB rating (4.4) surprises me a bit. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not arguing that this is some hidden masterpiece. It’s not. It’s passable entertainment while it lasts and no more, but I’m kind of surprised that more fans of the genre don’t embrace it, I guess.

In 2010, Jason Vorhees (Kane Hodder) has come back from Hell somehow (supposedly they just left Freddy vs. Jason to explain that a couple of years later and moved on) and Rowan (Lexa Doig) is a government employee that wants to cryofreeze the killer and file him away, something her superiors don’t want for reasons to do with finding out the secret to his regenerative powers, or something. Anyway, things go wrong and both Jason and Rowan are frozen for over four hundred years when the crew of the salvage ship Grendel show up and discover them, resuscitating Rowan while leaving Jason to just come alive on his own.

Now, the special effects of the film remind me of the rendering power of that era’s output from the Sci-Fi channel, but there is still some small amount of thought put into them, like the nanobots used to bring Rowan back, the state of Earth as a dead planet, and the shape of the Grendel that seems to resemble a machete to a degree. I don’t hate this stuff. It’s presented in a way that I feel like Roger Corman would have done if he had been given the rights to the franchise and told to make a space film out of it (meaning that everything feels left over from another production), but it has this cheap, 90s feel that I find on the one had kind of cute and nostalgic but on the other just cheap.

Anyway, Professor Lowe (Jonathan Potts) is at the end of his rope financially, and when he’s told how much money he could make from showcasing the famous serial killer Jason Vorhees in the flesh, he gets green-eyed and intent on saving Jason. The irony is that none of that actually matters. The movie would have played out the exact same way had he been set on destroying Jason from the start because Jason is up and moving before Lowe has a chance to do anything about it, killing as he goes, taking out an entire squadron of marines without too much trouble.

There are two main appeals to these films, and they are the quality of the kills and the small bits of character-based comedy that occasionally show up (this series is interminable when it takes itself seriously), and on both Jason X delivers with some modest success. I often complain that Jason’s kills are blunt and unimaginative, but the defense would be that that’s emblematic of Jason himself. I wouldn’t argue that Jason needs to be finding interesting ways to use his machete, but that the filmmaking around his kills needs to be witty, and Isaac figures that out. For instance, all Jason has to do is push someone off a high point to kill someone. Fine, but the person doesn’t have to die boringly. Here, the person falls on a screw and then his dead body slowly turns around it. That’s letting Jason be himself, and finding an amusing way to let it play out.

The other side is the amusing side character stuff. It’s not nearly as funny as what goes on in Part VI: Jason Lives, but it’s delivered pretty consistently like one guy getting a cryofrozen mug stuck to his and or Sergeant Elijah (Peter Mensah) saying that one poke to the ribs won’t be enough to kill him, to which Jason responds by stabbing him again to which Elijah responds by saying that’d do it. It’s amusing. It’s not hilarious, but it’s decent.

Outside of those smallish elements, it’s still ultimately just a Jason movie in space. It’s about dumb people doing dumb things to keep things going. Like many actiony movies of the early 2000s, it also has an awkward Matrix influence (even Spaced has an awkward Matrix influence) that is so weirdly out of place. It’s about a series of kills, and despite the occasional fun one, it’s mostly just Jason stabs someone.

Eh, I don’t hate it. It’s far from the worst of this franchise. It has some consistent amusement here and there. It has no interest in trying to rise above the material in any way like Jason Lives did, but it delivers a mildly effective Jason movie.

Originally published here