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Slash
and groan
>>
It’s Friday the 13th all over again in Jason X
by
MARK SLUTSKY
 by
MATTHEW HAYS
Just when you thought a franchise was down, the finer members of the
film community prove that as long as something’s potentially profitable,
there’s still life in it.
And so Jason X is born. The tenth entry in the Friday the 13th series,
this film joins the Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers Halloween entries
as being a virtually unstoppable chain. (Brace yourself: Halloween:
Resurrection opens later this summer and Freddy vs. Jason is slated
for a fall release.) Despite repeated “Final Chapter” title
promises, Jason is indeed back, and this time, in a rather obvious effort
to rip off James Cameron’s Aliens screenplay, Jason’s in space
in the future.
In fact, he’s
frozen on the planet Earth, along with a babe-like heroine who finds
herself thawed out by humans some 400 years after being frozen. Whatever
you do, don’t thaw out Jason, she gasps as she’s brought back
to life. Too late. He’s out and about, wandering around the space
ship and slicing and dicing whoever he bumps into. When our heroine
says he should simply be destroyed, a corporate evil guy says they have
to get him back to civilization as a profit might be involved. Funny,
I seem to remember all of this unravelling between Sigourney Weaver
and Paul Reiser in another movie.
There are laughs to be had here. Certainly, the people behind the movie
aren’t so stupid as to possibly believe they were actually setting
out to make something good. But as John Waters has asserted, there’s
good taste in bad taste and bad taste in bad taste. This falls into
the latter category. As a killing machine, Jason just isn’t interesting
enough to hold anyone’s interest. The shark in Jaws has more personality
than this fellow does. Jason just wanders around, hacking indiscriminately.
Thus Jason X doesn’t really work as camp. Nor does it work at keeping
the slasher genre alive. The level on which Jason X does succeed, however,
is as an ongoing make-work program for talentless young actors. This
film is populated by scores of them. :
Jason X opens
Friday, April 26
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