Jason X (2001)
5/10
Big, dumb and stoopid, but fun
13 January 2005
Let's face it, if you're going to rent one of the later movies in a slasher movie series, you'd be an idiot to expect high art. The fact that this is the tenth movie in the Friday the 13th franchise, the most knuckle-draggingly, ball-scratchingly cretinous 'horror' series of all time AND it's set in space doesn't exactly suggest that this'll be an all-time classic, but it's a good fun way to kill an hour and thirty minutes nonetheless.

Okay, the plot is so thin even a slight breeze would make it disintegrate and the horror element is practically non-existent but then Jason movies abandoned that long ago in favour of just providing dumb escapism with inventive and bloody death scenes, which this film certainly provides. People are sliced in half, impaled on large spikes, blown up, one poor woman even getting her head dunked in liquid nitrogen and shattered on a desk, but the characters are so one-dimensional and it's so cheesy you're more likely to laugh than scream. And I defy you to watch the scene when Jason gets transformed into 'Uber Jason' for the first time and not have a colossal grin traverse your face. There's even a later scene which pokes fun at the earlier movie's clichés with a hilarious "beating one camper to death with the other" sequence.

This is not The Exorcist, it's not The Omen, it's even a very long way away from the original Friday The 13th, but as director James Isaac has said, "it's just fun." Get your mates round, pop open a beer, disengage brain and you've got a very entertaining ninety minutes.
106 out of 139 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

Recently Viewed