Uncle Don’s Views of Nil Repute
Like Franco, you’ve been told this guy was dead many, many times. But
there up on the screen, making more comebacks than Michael Jordan, was
our felonious friend, our murderous moron, that ingenious idiot Jason
Voorhees.
Having sprung into being 20 or so years ago as a mute purveyor of
morbid mayhem, here in his 10th life (exceeding the number allotted to
life) he’s that goofball in a hockey mask and ragged clothes desecrating
the silver screen in “Jason X.” The producers didn’t even bother to
attach the “Friday the Thirteenth” appellation to this incredibly asinine
installment.
Oh, just as certain as the sun rises, there will be a part 11. There
will always be dunderheads and droolers who need this type of cinematic
entertainment along with the like-minded editors who send such creatures
to review such drivel.
The music crescendos as the names of a plethora of never-weres,
not-gonna-bes and has-beens scrolls across the screen to be viewed by an
audience of less than a dozen.
Jason in no longer terrorizing nubile teenagers, he’s now after
knuckle-headed scientists. Guess what? You wanna know why Jason can’t
croak? You don’t? Well, I don’t care. I’m gonna tell you anyhow.
He can’t croak because he can regenerate dead and damaged tissue. Wow.
What a revelation. But somehow, by convenience or by contrivance, Jason
and this pretty good looking scientist babe are frozen solid for 450
years. Oh, and the scientist, allegedly born decades after this practice
stopped, has a smallpox vaccination on her arm.
Taken aboard a spaceship by a crew whose common characteristics are
bad acting and really ugly clothes -- in concert with marginal mood music
-- these two are defrosted like a couple of minute steaks with all sorts
of steam and stuff coming off them.
The crew dissects the clothes off the babe scientist. As for Jason,
he’s taken apart like a junior high science experiment. Oh, wait, he can
regenerate. He’s alive. Alive! And the crew, they’re dead. Dead! And me,
I’m bored. Bored! But the movie isn’t over. Jason still has a few of the
crew left to do.
Catching this bad boy isn’t rocket science, he’s been nailed in the
previous nine installments. Jason’s been electrocuted, gassed, drowned,
shot, hanged and cut into more pieces than a jigsaw puzzle. Want to make
this clown go away? Well, how about this for an epiphany -- Don’t make
any more sequels.
I’m sure you’ll be impressed with the remainder of the movie. Stop me
if you’ve heard this before. A space ship picks up a potentially
dangerous object from a dead planet and brings it on board. The thing
emerges and, while slinking through the ship, wipes out the crew one by
one. The head of the expedition wants the thing kept alive for the
potential profit-making potential. The plucky female scientist says kill
it.
The resident SWAT team is killed off one by one. The thing never
speaks, reasons or thinks. It just acts. The plucky scientist saves the
few remaining crew and kills the thing -- or does she?
Jason schleps around the space ship promulgating death and destruction
among the random bits of machinery that passes for a set in this movie.
Down dark hallways and up random passages, he stalks and is stalked. Like
a Ginzu knife, he slices and he dices as we are subjected to dialogue
like this: “Let’s go to work,” “It’s all over,” “I’ll meet you there.”
And that ubiquitous pair, “We don’t have time for this,” coupled with “I
can’t believe it.”
Jason’s finally caught and his appendages removed like the Black
Knight from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” But like the old man from
the same flick, he’s not dead yet. And unfortunately, neither is this
series. The ending, insulting even to those of us possessing at best an
ephemeral level of intelligence, is idiotic even by “Friday the
Thirteenth” standards.
Lamer than a three-legged dog, “Jason X” is.
“Jason X” is rated R for strong horror violence, language and some
sexuality.* UNCLE DON reviews b-movies and cheesy musical acts for the
Daily Pilot. He may be reached by e-mail at ReallyBadWriting@aol.com
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