Halloween 2011: "Jason X" Review

    Slashers. One of the quintessential movie genres to be watched during Halloween. In the past we've had nightmares, serial killing Shatners and lots and lots of Saw. But of all the slashers, perhaps none are more iconic then Friday the 13th's own Jason Voorhees. The classic Camp Crystal Lake killer has made a ton of movies. So, what do you do with an iconic summer camp killer for his new movie? Why, shoot him into space of course! This is Jason X.

    The idea behind Jason X began when Freddy Vs. Jason was still in development hell and New Line Cinema wanted another Jason movie out to hold people over. The somebody said "Hey, you know everything that make the Friday the 13th series fun? Ya, let's get rid of that and send Jason into space." And that my friends, is how stupid is born.
    The film follows Jason (Kane Hodder) as he and Rowan (Lexa Doig), a woman he tries to kill, get frozen solid and revive on a spaceship in the year 2455. Jason, of course, does his thing, while Rowan team up with several young students and military grunts. Guess who wins.

                                                             "Oh, it's just a delivery boy"
    The key thing about Jason X is that you'd think with a premise like "JASON IN SPACE", the movie could have fun with this and be a cool tongue-in-cheek movie. You'd think. Instead the movie take the premise seriously, which leads to the film biggest downfall: it's boring. Other than a couple cool kills, it's just Jason stabbing people. A lot. And to make things more frustrating, one of the film's coolest deaths, a woman get sucked through a ting hole with a metal grate over it, happens off-screen. The other great death, Jason killing two girls in sleeping bags, happens at Camp crystal Lake, not up in space. The only cool space death we get is the liquid-nitrogen head smash and that is significantly less coll if you've seen that one episode of Mythbusters.
    The other aspects of the film falter too. The acting, namely by the young cast, is awful. The only passable ones are Doig and Peter Mensah (who I bet gets called Michael Clarke Duncan a lot). The story is the same, cliched story we see in every Jason movie these days, with little to no variation on the "Kill-Chase-Die-Return" formula. The special effects are laughably bad. Even the spaceship looks lame. The one really cool aspect of the film, the upgraded Jason, appears only for the last 15 minutes of the film.

Still cooler then Transformers.

    In the end, Jason X is a failure IN SPACE! The acting is bad, the story is cliched, the action is generic and the film squanders is potentially fun premise. It's not horrible, but it's still 2.5 out of 6. Now, if you'd excuse me, IT'S ALIVE!

P.S. With all of the bad snow coming up north today, we have heard the possibility of power outages, which means Halloween 2011 may have to be put on hold for a while.