Jason X, Audience 0

Jason X (2002)

Turn the lights back on at the Satellite of Love, 'cuz this is Mystery Science Theater 3000 fodder, bots and girls.

Yes, when you'e done nine previous movies and your slasher series has become bloated and tired after soaking in Crystal Lake these many years, what else can you do but shoot your unstoppable masked killer into outer space?

They spent about $13 million on this turd pile. How many hungry and orphaned kids could have been fed and sheltered with that money? A lot, that's how many. Instead we get something that looks exactly like one of those bad Syfy channel movies, with shaky production values and a goofy cast filled with somewhat familiar TV actors.

And the story, good grief, the story - it was just a lame rip-of of Aliens and Alien. You see there were space marines on board a ship full of space college students (WTF, right). The space college students are from Earth 2, and are visiting our ratty, now-uninhabited Earth 1 with their terribly acted space college professor, where they stumble upon Jason Vorhees doing his Good Humor Man impression in cyrogenic freeze. Of course they bring aboard their ship a giant, hockey-masked freak wielding a machete. Jason quickly thaws out and gets down to bi'ness. First the grunts go after hockey head, get hacked and stabbed, and then he goes after the space kids. The majority of the cast was in their 20s it seemed, even the hardened space marines, so the movie should have been titled, Jason versus the Space Kids.

Now some of the sets come across as pretty decent, they look like they were designed and built by pros with a keen eye and love of the genre; others are of the "lets shoot in a dark warehouse with concert scaffolding and stacked boxes" variety (in other words, severely cheap ass). The CGI is TV quality and mostly laughable; the designs of the space ships are crude and look like pre-animation school student work.

But the worst part is that the kills are uninspired. After nine movies where old hockey face has slashed, stabbed and skewered everything that moves, and some of that gore was during the hey day of the 1980s horror craze under latex-master Tom Savini, you expect these kills to be something special. Use some frakking imagination for Freddy's sake! Jason simply stabs more than a few people, which we've seen 17,486 times already (not counting the Friday the 13th rip off slasher flix). Since Jason doesn't talk, the kills need to be "fun" and creative (especially creative). I laughed just once when he was using a coed in a sleeping bag to bash a second coed in a sleeping bag, which the director said was an homage to a previous Friday film (and I ain't talking about the Friday film with Chris Tucker as Smokey neither). Come on, people, you put Jason IN SPACE. IN A SCIENCE FICTION FILM. Have some fun with that!

The only other laff was when Jason comes back and he's all "robocized" with nanites and metal scraps. He was so ridiculously muscular and over-defined he looked like one of those dolls for He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.

Nevertheless (and believe me, this movie is all "less") this is a stupid, stupid movie, and should be watched with many beers, pretzels, chips, assorted nuts, and most of all, lovers of crap cinema.