Ha.
Right up until just before I rented Jason X on Sunday night, I was under the impression this tenth entry in the series, which came nine years after the last entry, was just another standard reboot, that put Jason Voorhees in just another series of standard Jason Voorhees situations.
Lo and behold, this is a Jason that has been dormant for 450 years, meaning that everyone who was originally charged with dispatching him did, finally, successfully end the Jason Voorhees threat, at least in their lifetime. And then in the lifetimes of about 20 other generations. So, for all practical purposes, forever.
In fact, Earth itself died before this Jason came back to life. We learn fairly early on in Jason X that the planet is no more, at least as a practical home for human beings, having become unable to sustain life. The ship our characters are aboard is en route to Earth 2, though not for the first time, I don't think. These may be the last humans remaining, but I don't think the movie ever says that, and if so, they are certainly not a collection of Earth's best and brightest. Then again, once again I started watching too late at night, and would not be able to verify every little detail of what happens in this movie.
Before we get too far in, I want to make a random observation about this series in terms of its cast.
I've enjoyed pointing out, every once in a while, when a "real" actor makes an appearance -- in other words, someone who has gone on to do something else after this. Those sorts of actors were plentiful in the Halloween movies; Paul Rudd is in one of the worst of those movies, if you recall. Such actors are very much the exception in this series, such that in some movies, there aren't any to be found. There is one in this movie, and it's a funny one: David Cronenberg in an acting role. He exits during the cold open.
But by the late date of 2002, I thought for sure they'd try to get someone with some name recognition in the movie -- beyond a guy known more for his directing than his acting -- even if they had a mandate to keep the budget low. I thought 2002 was close enough to our current era, when they would absolutely include someone recognizable. Nope.
And the names of non-famous actors just sound made up, don't they? Like names you'd only see in a straight-to-video movie. Consider some of the names that appear in the opening credits of this movie:
Lexa Doig
Dov Tiefenbach
Melyssa Ade
Peter Mensah
Barna Moricz
Who are these people?
Even the director, James Isaac, sounds made up. But my favorite made-up name in the credits is the director of photography: Derick V. Underschultz. Underschultz? That's a thing? He doesn't even spell my first name in one of the two most preferred ways.
While we're talking credits, for some reason at the very end I noticed the name of a person in a role called "fact checker," which is a simply hilarious concept in any film, let alone this one. We all know that films have creative license and are not bound by facts, especially when they include all those disclaimers about coincidence resemblances to persons living and dead. But that's especially true in a film set in 2455. Anyway, man with this title is called Morris L'Explicateur.
And yes it's a joke. Apparently, there is an old industry trope of a character known as Morris the Explainer, whose only role is to advance the plot through exposition. I'm not sure why someone decided to assign him to the role of "fact checker" in Jason X, though it does appear to be unique to this movie, at least according to Google's AI.
So how the hell did Jason get into cryogenic freeze?
It's certainly not as a result of anything that happened in Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, which I watched on Saturday night and wrote about yesterday. You may recall, if only from reading my post about it, that Jason gets dragged down by the hands of Hell at the end of that one, though given the supernatural element of that, maybe that's a less definitive rather than more definitive final resting place for him.
Most of these movies have at least connected the dots between where Jason ended up at the end of the last movie and where we find him at the beginning of this movie, but not Jason X. And part of that might be a rights issue. I'm mentioning my viewings to my team of writers in an ongoing messenger chat, and one of them told me that the words Friday the 13th don't appear in the title of Jason Goes to Hell because they didn't have the rights to use them. That's also true here. So if you're just trying to make a buck on IP, maybe you don't care if the internal logic of your mythology -- such as it is -- is sound.
But yes, they've got a neutralized, though very much alive, version of Jason at the start of this movie. He's suspended in air and chained up in a secret laboratory, but we do see an eye flickering around behind the mask as proof of life. This is only the near future, not the distant future, and in this secret research facility, they are experimenting with cryogenics. Why they want to use the world's most notorious serial killer as a test subject is beyond me. I'm sure they did explain it and I nodded off for a second.
Anyway, just before he's put into freeze, he escapes and kills a bunch of people, including David Cronenberg, but then he and another woman are both frozen, to awaken in the 25th century. Because why not?
It's funny to watch this just on the heels of watching Idiocracy on my birthday earlier this week. I didn't mention this on the blog, because I didn't have anything really new to say about Idiocracy on my fifth viewing. But yes, my wife surprised me with a birthday viewing, also a first-time viewing for our kids, at least the older of whom seemed to like it. Anyway, a cryogenic freezing from the early 20th century to the 25th century is, indeed, what happens in Idiocracy also, though I hardly think Mike Judge took inspiration from Jason X.
So yes, entirely new setting, entirely new technologies (including those that can keep reviving Jason as he gets blown up and torn apart again), and yes, androids! An actress named Lisa Ryder -- still not someone I've heard of, but maybe not with such a made-up-sounding name -- plays this android, and she might have been one of my favorite parts of the movie. She's a good android, in the mold of someone like Bishop from Aliens ... and I wouldn't be surprised if these filmmakers did take inspiration from Aliens. Anyway, there's some decent humor related to this character, like the time she is trying on artificial nipples for her shipboard boyfriend as a way of being more human. (Otherwise she's smooth like a Barbie doll.) Her perky good humor keeps things lively enough.
The rest of the plot is probably not worth going into. It's not as ludicrous as I'd hoped it would be, outside of the general premise. I did find there to be one or two interesting bits of sci-fi technology in it.
And Jason does get a makeover near the end, to a new, more badass version of his character design. Though this comes pretty late and isn't as satisfying a reveal as you would hope.
There's only one more movie I have to watch, which is Freddy vs. Jason, and which came only a year later in 2003. I'd say that this being a mashup movie, it's likely not beholden to the narrative in either series. I'll wrap up this epic project on Friday night, one night before Halloween.
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