Summary:
Jason Voorhees is frozen in carbonite for four hundred years until he’s brought back on a space ship.
My Thoughts:
I wish I could’ve just been in the room when this movie was pitched. Jason goes to space? I mean, I thought we had jumped the shark with the last entry: “Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday” (what a lie that title turned out to be), but this entry takes the cake as far as bizarre evolutions of 80s Slasher staples.
If you’ve read any of my reviews for any of the other “Friday the 13th” films, you’ll know I’m not exactly a fan of Jason. His brand of horror- frat boy horror, as I’ve called it before- just doesn’t appeal to me. His franchise is incredibly formulaic, and you know exactly what you’re going to get with every entry: stupid teenagers go off into the woods to have sex, maybe smoke some pot, and then they get killed by a redneck (or his mother) with a machete. Yawn. Where’s the originality? At least with the “Child’s Play” films we’ve got some weird puppet animatronics; with the “Nightmare on Elm Street” movies we have the cool dream sequences; and with the “Halloween” movies we’ve got Donald Pleasence’s crazy performances and Michael’s hilarious inability to die. This series hasn’t ever brought much to the table in originality- it just feels like a cheap knock off of “Halloween”.
However, though I pretty much hate the so called ‘good’ staples of “Friday the 13th” franchise, I, personally, get a huge kick out of the later entries which fans of the franchise typically tend to hate. I really thought “Jason Goes to Hell” was hilarious, and I absolutely enjoyed my hour and twenty-five minutes. This film, similarly, seems to be reviled by fans of the original, but I sort of loved it for a while. This movie isn’t good by any stretch, but it’s so darn bizarre that I just kept asking myself how in the world this movie possibly existed, and I kept being surprised (not in a good way) by what I was shown on screen. To the film’s credit, it does actually have some somewhat creative ideas, though, most of those ideas have been stolen from far better sci-fi films (“Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back”, “Terminator”, “Alien”) and cobbled together into a literal-Frankenstein version of those movies.
The movie starts with a weird hellish montage before suddenly we’re shown Jason chained up in a lab, about to be frozen in carbonite (were told this by script typed on screen, not through exposition). If you’re actually following along with the series, you’ll remember that Jason was sent back to hell (and then Freddy Krueger’s arm popped out of Jason’s grave- kind of hinting at “Freddy vs Jason”), so it doesn’t actually make any sense continuity wise that he’s suddenly be chained up in a lab, but hey, whatever. Some idiot doctor (played by THE David Cronenberg- turns out James Isaac did some work on “eXistenZ” so I bet the roll was a favor) thinks that Jason shouldn’t be frozen because a person that can’t die is too valuable to science, and should be researched. He tries to release Jason and, predictably, things go wrong and Jason murders almost everyone in the facility in about three minutes flat (some good deaths there, though!). The only person remaining is a person named Rowan (Lexa Doig, ‘Andromeda’), and she is able to lure Jason into the chryo chamber and freeze him, but unfortunately she is stabbed in the process and ends up also getting frozen (even though she’s outside of the chamber, but whatever). Four hundred-ish years later, a space salvage crew shows up (all of them looking like Star Lord at the beginning of “Guardians of the Galaxy”) and they take these two frozen humans to their space ship where they wake them up and things again go awry.
I was all on board with this movie for the first act- it’s so ridiculously out there that I couldn’t help but just enjoy the crap out of what was happening. And then, we get to the space ship and the space ship crew starts acting exactly like the stupid teenagers in the woods. There’s a moment where three scientists are examining Jason’s body and two of them start fooling around as the examination is going on, so the other person just dismisses the two that are making out so they can go have sex. Is that how ship protocol would go? Anyways, after a few quick pointless scenes of nudity and sex, the killing gets going and the film starts to ramp up.
Anyone that watches a multitude of slasher flicks knows that after a while, the only thing that really differentiates the films is how the killers kill, and Jason has tended to stick with a machete. In this film, he actually gets to branch out quite a bit, and a lot of that is thanks to the space ship setting. He kills a person by sticking their face into liquid nitrogen and smashing it against the wall; he kills another person by throwing them onto a giant drill; another person gets sucked out into space through a small hole in the ship (ALA “Alien IV: Resurrection”). There’s just a variety of kills in this movie that are more inventive than people give it credit for.
The characters in this film are incredibly stupid, and that, of course, sheds a fair amount of light on the logic issues in the film. There’s a moment where the characters find a way to kill Jason, but they’re so stupid that they leave the body parts on a futuristic machine that automatically revives whatever it is that has been placed on it, so of course Jason comes back as a cyborg to kill once more. There are also some terribly dated moments where the writers didn’t quite understand tech lingo yet (“I gave her an upload!”- you mean ‘upgrade,’ pal, but nice try).
Verdict:
If you’re asking me if this movie is good, my answer is no; not by a long shot. If you’re asking me if this movie is entertaining, then my answer is absolutely; it’s one of the more entertaining movies I’ve seen this year. This movie doesn’t succeed in being scary, nor does it do anything to advance Jason’s overall storyline (I’m pretty sure most people wouldn’t consider this cannon), but there are plenty of gory, sometimes hysterical, kills that fill this film’s meager runtime.
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