10 Hilarious Things About Jason X
I visited my buddies in Austin for the last time this week before moving my shit out to the Pacific Northwest next week. We had some good meals, listened to some terrific music from Austin’s freshest bands, and best of all, had a lot of good conversation. Still, one of the most fun activities of the weekend was watching Jason X while we stayed at my friend Curran’s place. Curran and his partner Masashi own a ridiculously large collection of horror videos and dvds–they best me in terms of horror fandom hands down.
When faced with the wide array of choices, we decided to watch a Friday the Thirteenth installment I’d never seen: Jason X. I’d caught some of the film on television (back when I had cable) but had not viewed it in its entirety. I found the film to be just as schlocky as expected, and hence, a pleasurable viewing experience.
Jason X (2002), by the way, stars that irrepressible, hockey-masked villain, Jason Voorhees, in the tenth installment of the series. In this version, a company attempts to transport Jason to a research facility to better understand his ability to survive any form of execution. Of course, everything goes wrong, and Jason and incredulous scientist, Rowan, both succumb to freezing after a cryogenic tank breaks. Nearly five hundred years later, a group of researchers discovers the two frozen beings and takes them aboard a funky looking space ship (more on that later) where they thaw out and all hell breaks loose. It’s like Alien meets Terminator meets…well, Friday the Thirteenth.
It may shock you to know that Jason X does not presume to be a serious entry into the horror genre, but revels in poor acting, lame dialog, and the worst CGI since Jaws 3-D. Here’s the trailer:
Here are ten things about Jason X that will keep you laughing from beginning to end:
1 Writing – Much of the film’s attempts at comic relief rely upon the lowest form of humor: the pun. After one unfortunate victim becomes impaled upon a large drill, one of his comrades says, “he’s screwed.” One character cries out, “this sucks on so many levels” when (surprise, surprise) being sucked out of a ship after Jason punches a hole into the outer wall. Some of the kills seem built entirely around the punny line that follows.
2 Animation – The film uses CGI to create the world of outer-space, but apparently the $11,000,000 budget couldn’t buy much in the way of quality. The ships portrayed look completely ridiculous, like someone tried way too hard to come-up with something unusual.
3 Costuming – Along the same lines, the characters wear the most ridiculous, lurid clothing throughout the film. The odd textures, colors, and layering fail to evoke a consistent style of the future, except in that the ladies tend to bare midriff and/or cleavage. This still gets at what I’m talking about it:
Some of the pretty young things working the ship in Jason X. From the-adventurers-club.typepad.com.
4 Kink – The film also uses kink as a source of humor. Android Kay-Em 14 dresses like a dominatrix when facing off against Jason, but my favorite thing: a sex scene between a female student and male professor featuring a pair of tongs used to twist the teacher’s nipple. As a orgasms, he cries out: “you passed!”
5 Weird Science – The film portrays a future in which limbs can be reattached in a jiff and bodies frozen for four-hundred years merely need be covered in ants to reanimate. Yes, ants. This technology also benefits Jason, who despite being shot up into a chunky paste by Kay-Em 14 inexplicably reemerges as a cyborg. The script makes few attempts to explain how this technology works, which actually seems more honest to me even if it makes for perplexing entertainment.
6 Characters – Besides the final girl, Rowan, everyone else in this movie is pretty unsympathetic. Both annoying and idiotic, you will not mourn the loss. The Professor Brandon Lowe, who learns that Jason will likely snag him a lot of money, exudes the same kind of sleaziness that Paul Reiser did in Aliens but without the subtlety. One death after another feels like it belongs in the Darwin awards.
7 Kills – The kills are ridiculous: getting sucked into space through a grate; dipping a girl’s face into liquid nitrogen and shattering it; the famous sleeping bag kill with two simultaneous victims. Ugh.
8 Plot – The twists and turns prove to be both imaginative and nonsensical. Why, for example, do Jason and Rowan’s bodies lie untouched for nearly five hundred years?
9 Action Sequences – The face-off against Kay-Em 14 proves more hilarious than heart-stopping due to the silly stunts:
This clip highlights the final hilarious thing about Jason X
10 Acting – Sure, the writing stinks, but the delivery is worse. The actors frequently overact, miss their beats, and provoke unintended laughs.
I could easily come up with more hilarious things about the movie (the score, the ending, etc…) but that would ruin my whole X/10 parallel. Besides, the many surprises along the way may be the most entertaining thing about Jason X, and what kind of fan would I be to give all of that away?
