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DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 3, No. 46 |
 reviews the 10th film in the "Friday the 13th" series The DVD Edition |
 The "Jason X" DVD, now available everywhere. |
Jason Voorhees is dead
& well again in 2455 A.D.
of TheColumnists.com
The Jason Voorhees horror movie franchise began 22 years ago when Paramount gambled on an independently-made, low-budget "slasher" movie and took the original "Friday the 13th" on for distribution.
Nine sequels and one TV
series later, "Friday the 13th" is still hanging in
there, even though Paramount finally gave up on it and New Line
Cinema (NLC) took over distribution of the series. Not many horror
movie franchises last that long. For example, the original Universal
"Frankenstein" series only stretched to eight films
over 17 years, if you're generous enough to count "Abbott
& Costello Meet Frankenstein" in 1948.
The 10th in the series, "Jason X," debuted this past
summer without setting any particular box office records. The
film passed quickly to video/DVD, premiering on the home entertainment
market earlier this month. But don't for a minute think the party's
over for Jason. The DVD contains some promotional materials for
the next film in the series, which will pit Jason against another
NLC "monster"--Freddy Krueger from the "Nightmare
on Elm Street" series.
For those who generally avoid the "dead teenager" genre of horror movies, perhaps a little Voorhees history is necessary for you to appreciate what a departure "Jason X" represents from the series tradition.
Basically, Jason Voorhees is the heavily-demonized ghost of a deformed boy who drowned in Crystal Lake, a mountain summer camp for teenagers, some years before 1980, the setting for the first "Friday the 13th" film. His Mom (Betsy Palmer) never forgave the teen counsellors for letting Jason drown. Armed with various sharp instruments, Mom Voorhees began hacking to death any teens at the camp who seemed to be neglecting their duties, usually to party down in the nude.
In other words, Jason really didn't kill most of the victims in the original "Friday the 13th," although I believe he did finally reach up out of the lake and snuff a few in the film's final "Carrie"-style "hand out of the grave" moments. He also didn't have any need to wear his now trademark hockey mask to cover his deformed features in the first movie because he didn't get around much then.
However, by "Friday the 13th, Part 2," Jason appeared front and center. No longer a dorky kid, he now was a hulking adult with a hockey mask and a razor-sharp machete--his favorite chopping tool for mincing naked teenagers. As the years went by, it became pretty clear that Jason dies hard, if he dies at all. Hit him from six feet away with a shotgun blast and it may blow off a limb and make him stumble back from the impact, but it sure won't kill him. It's also obvious that Jason has an anti-sex drive. He never carries away naked teenage girls for his own kinky thrills--and the movies have been filled with some really awesome specimens of naked starlets. Instead, he seems bent on stopping all pre-marital sex. If Jerry Falwell came back from the grave wearing a hockey mask, the results might be similar.
Anyway, Jason's killing spree had topped more than 200 teenagers by the time the series had come to the ninth film, "Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday" (1993). He also had begun to roam away from Crystal Lake and his spirit had deserted his original body to take up residence in another. Many felt these were sure signs Paramount had used good sense in deciding to abandon the series. Eight years passed before there was another "Jason" film: "Jason X."
In the newest film, Jason (Kane Hodder) is cryogenically frozen, along with the comely young lady who tricks him into the freezer. Hundreds of years pass and the girl is thawed out by a professor and his youthful students during a training mission for cosmonauts in deep space. Her first words, right after "where am I?," turn out to be a warning: Don't thaw out the guy in the hockey mask!
Well, it's too late for her warning, of course. Like the dodo who tossed an electric blanket over "The Thing From Another World" in that famous 1951 sci-fi film of the same name, some dodo from the year 2455 lays out frozen Jason on a heater vent and the next thing you know he's looking for his machete.
I was prepared to really dislike this movie since I've always considered Jason Voorhees to be a cynical clone of John Carpenter's Michael Myers, the original "slasher spook" from "Halloween" (1978). They even named the Jason series after a spooky "day"--Friday the 13th--since Halloween already was taken.
But darned if I didn't sort of like it when I finally caught up to it on the DVD version. It's a pretty attractive package, including lots of background info on Jason and the earlier films in the series, along with comments from Kane Hodder, the Hollywood bit player/stunt man who has played Jason in most of the more recent films in the series.
But I think the real reason I enjoyed it was its sense of humor. You may not think it's all that apparent after seeing how much high tech gore Jason gets up to this time around, but no real horror/sci-fi buff can possibly miss all the references to earlier films nor the efforts of writer Todd Farmer and director Jim Isaac to make this the "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" of the Jason series.
Plot-wise, "Jason X" parallels Ridley Scott's original "Alien" in that the action almost entirely takes place on a huge space cargo ship, away from any nearby planets or rescue teams. Since "Alien" itself was in serious debt to the plot of an even earlier sci-fi classic--"It! The Terror From Beyond Space" (1958)--it's fun to see how Jason fits into that very specialized canon of monster movie situations, the one where a small group of humans is trapped in a closed environment while The Monster struggles to get at them.
(I've even used that plot myself in my serial "Doom Survivor," which ran in three parts on this website last year.)
For me, the film's highlight is the sequence when Jason has trapped several crew members and is about to hack them apart, only to be attacked from behind by a gun-toting female android who uses martial arts and some very high-powered armaments to literally blow Jason to smithereens, finally finishing him off with his own machete.
Did I say "finish him off"? Well, you know the drill in Jason movies. He may seem to be finished off, but you learn to never say die when it comes to Jason Voorhees. This time Jason is not only "reconstituted" by the spaceship's special "healing" equipment, but, in fact, gets seriously enhanced. As the film promotional line puts it: "Evil gets an upgrade."
The only way to really get the proper mind-set to enjoy "Jason X" is to think of it as a "Roadrunner/Coyote" cartoon. The violence is THAT stylized and that fast-paced. You may wonder, after the final credits on this film, how they're ever going to get Jason Voorhees back from the year 2455 in time to tackle Freddy Krueger back in smalltown USA. Personally, I think I see a way, but I'm not telling.
© 2002 by Ron Miller. The Ron Miller caricature is © 2001 by Jim Hummel. The "Jason X" illustration is © 2002 by New Line Cinema and New Line Home Entertainment.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
teaches classes in mystery and related topics at Whatcom Community
College and Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.
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