by Daniel Stephens

Created on: March 23, 2009   Last Updated: September 08, 2011

Jason X (James Isaac, USA, 2001)
Dir. James Isaac; screenplay by Todd Farmer; starring Kane Hodder, Lexa Doig, Chuck Campbell

The beauty to watching a film you have zero expectations of is that when it delivers, in the smallest, almost insignificant way, it can be a thrilling event. Jason X might be yet another addition in the Friday The 13th franchise but its way better than some of the awful later sequels. You can tell it's post-Scream with its self-reflexive attitudes but unlike many of the slasher films that appeared after 1997, director Isaac puts most of his effort into playful use of the character and to not taking itself too seriously. The film is silly and at times quite funny, but it doesn't insult its audience by trying to be something that it's not. Isaac knows his limitations and runs with what he's got. It makes for a frequently enjoyable entry in the series.

After the federal government fail to kill Jason through various executions including hanging and electrocution, they decide, because of his ability to regenerate dead tissue (oh, that's how he keeps coming back to life is it!) that he needs to be experimented on. However, he escapes when they try to move him to a new facility and Rowan (Lexa Doig), a government official sent to make sure he stays locked up, gets killed trying to get Jason in the cryogenic freezer. Four-hundred years later, a group of students and their teachers, find the perfectly preserved bodies of both Jason and Rowan. Taking the bodies back to their spaceship, they manage to revive Rowan, but by the time she's told them about Jason's destructive capabilities, it's too late and the killer is running a deadly rampage aboard the ship.

It would be foolish of me to continue singing the praises of Jason X without clarifying that it isn't, by any stretch of the imagination, a very good movie. The production design is awful, and the plot is a cobbled together mismatch of all the Alien movies. In fact, you can make up the whole story from each of the Alien films. For instance, scientists find the cryogenically preserved body of a woman who defeated an unstoppable killer (the beginning of James Cameron's Aliens), and then bring her and the killer aboard their spaceship which docks with a larger mother ship (the set-up in Ridley Scott's Alien).

We then see the scientists and students not heeding Rowan's warning about Jason (David Fincher's Alien 3), before the unscrupulous Professor Lowe decides he can use Jason for his own monetary

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