Jason X

The Friday the 13th franchise comes to a merciful close with this expectedly mediocre entry, with the narrative following Kane Hodder’s Jason as he’s cryogenically frozen and subsequently awoken on a spaceship in the year 2455 – where, naturally, he immediately begins murdering every single person aboard. It’s a rather out-there premise that’s executed competently by filmmaker James Isaac, as Jason X, written by Todd Farmer, essentially comes off as a slasher-movie take on both Alien and Aliens – although it’s clear throughout that the film is lacking in both the scares and thrills that defined those contemporary classics. And while the narrative is, in typical fashion, hopelessly lacking in interesting figures, Jason X does, at the very least, boast a handful of appreciatively over-the-top, ridiculously gory kill sequences. (After his resurrection, for example, Jason shoves a hapless character’s face into a bath of liquid nitrogen and smashes it.) The decidedly underwhelming special effects – the movie, for the most part, resembles a low-rent, made-in-Canada sci-fi television show – contribute heavily to Jason X‘s forgettable atmosphere, with the end result a somewhat anticlimactic capper to a seriously subpar series of films.

** out of ****