Jason X (2001)

There's a memory burned into my brain from the early 2000s: sitting on the sofa with my dad, a rental DVD in the player, and the two of us exchanging increasingly baffled glances as Jason Voorhees, the hockey-masked slasher who once stalked teenagers around a woodland lake, floated through a space station killing people with what I can only describe as laser eyes. That film was Jason X, and the confused silence in that living room said everything the one-star rating already tells you.

Let me be clear: this isn't just a bad Friday the 13th film, though it absolutely is that. It's a full-blown sci-fi trainwreck that represents perhaps the most spectacular case of franchise brain-death ever committed to celluloid. The series had been wobbling for years before this. I've sat through Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, which threw out almost everything that made Jason, well, Jason, and replaced it with body-hopping nonsense. That film at least had the excuse of trying something genuinely different, even if it failed. Jason X doesn't even have that. It looked at a decades-old horror icon and thought: space. The answer is space.

The plot, and I'm being generous calling it that, involves Jason being cryogenically frozen, surviving 457 years, getting defrosted on a futuristic spacecraft, and eventually being rebuilt as some sort of cybernetic killing machine the film calls "Uber-Jason." At each stage of this escalation I kept waiting for some self-awareness sharp enough to make it worthwhile. It never arrives. The tone lurches from po-faced action beats to smirking campness so rapidly you get genuine whiplash. There's a moment where a character delivers a line about not being in Kansas anymore, and it lands with the thud of a joke so lazy it circles back to being depressing.

The kills are grotesquely overblown in a way that stops being fun almost immediately. Gore can work in this genre. It can be shocking, darkly funny, even inventive. Here it just feels like the production was compensating for the total absence of tension. The original Friday the 13th, and even the better sequels like Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, worked because there was genuine dread around Jason. You felt the threat. In Jason X, he's so absurdly indestructible and so far removed from any recognisable human context that there's nothing to fear. He's a cartoon. A very expensive, very tedious cartoon.

The dialogue is cringe-worthy throughout, delivered by a cast of horny, disposable space students who exist only to be dispatched in increasingly daft ways. There's a bio-chamber scene I won't fully describe, but it's the kind of thing that would have felt like a tired punchline even in a direct-to-video knockoff, let alone in a film carrying one of horror's most recognisable names. Someone wrote that scene. Someone filmed it. Someone watched it back and approved it. I find that genuinely fascinating in the way you find a car crash fascinating.

The real question, and I keep coming back to it, is who exactly greenlit this. Who read a script about space hockey Jason and decided that was the direction? Who looked at a franchise built on primal, lakeside fear and thought the logical next step was a futuristic spaceship with laser-eyed murder robots? I'd love to sit in that pitch meeting. I'd love to understand the logic. Because watching the finished film offers no clues. It doesn't feel like a decision made by people who loved the character, or even by people who wanted to make an entertaining bad movie. It just feels confused and, worse than that, boring.

One star, and that's being generous for the unintentional entertainment of watching my dad's face during the Uber-Jason reveal. Jason Voorhees deserved better than this. So did we.

Rating: ★  | Year: 2001  | Watched: 2025-10-01

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Related on Movies With Macca

More with Kane Hodder: Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993) · Friday the 13th Part VII - The New Blood (1988)
More from the 2000s: Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) · Daredevil (2003) · Apocalypto (2006)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)
More science fiction: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Fantastic Planet (1973) · Nightmare City (1980) · The Long Walk (2025)