Jason X

"I don't give a damn about my bad reputation,
You're living in the past, it's a new generation." -Joan Jett, Bad Reputation

Little did Joan Jett realise that, just two short decades later, knowledge of the lyrics to her songs would, itself, be enough to ensure a Bad Reputation, if one of an altogether more mundane variety- but, as daytime soap operas have taught us, it is quite impossible to fetch one skeleton from your cupboard without the whole regiment of them tumbling after like fiendishly-grinning dominoes; and so, let me confirm what you thought you might have seen over my shoulder as I shuttled my Joan Jett-appreciation skeleton in and out of the cupboard like a poorly animated Ghost Train feature. As the UK waits with bated breath for the impending release of Jason X on DVD and video, I -I, I say- (Oh, gentle reader! A sadder and a wiser day you shall never know!) am amongst that almost negligible percentage of the population of this sceptred isle who have already seen it- a sacrifice which would be rendered fruitless were I not to share with you the cursed lore for which I have damned myself.

(By the way, that last bit about sacrifices started off as an allusion to Christ, but I changed it to a reference to Faust. Note the ease of the transition, Literature students- don't say I never tell you anything.)

Jason X, in case you didn't know, is the tenth instalment of the now legendary Friday the 13th movies, in which our hero, the implacable Jason Voorhees, is cryogenically frozen and reawakens on a spaceship several centuries later. You need know no more of the plot and premise of the movie than this- indeed, you already know the thrust of the rest of the action. Jason goes on killing spree, is apparently killed, returns from ostensible death to embark upon a reprisal of his earlier killing spree, is DEFINITELY, INDUBITABLY, ABSOLUTELY and IRREVERSIBLY dispersed into his component molecules, leaving behind only a couple of exhausted heroes/ines to fall into each other's arms, and his hockey mask as an ironic reminder that, to the iconic antiheroes of schlock horror, death is just like being tricked into watching Friday the 13th, Part VII, a brief journey through an unconvincing landscape throughout which one has nothing better to do than to plot bloody revenge on all responsible, finally disembarking at the same point that one had got on, even more annoyed than one had been to begin with. Does the same description hold true of Jason X? Well. Let's see.

The movie's opening credits are actually quite impressive, you know. Surging along a seething river of jetting lava, spiralling up and down the cragged spires and jagged rocks to the haunting refrain of muted, tortured screams, the visual depiction of what is assumedly the Hell to which Jason was flung at the end of Part IX is not at all without merit- the surprise when we spin out of the black, empty void that is Jason's pupil and realise that the Hades we had been coursing through was actually the fibre of his physical being is worthy of at least a nod of the head, and possibly even an appreciative "Ooh!" or "Aah!". It's an interesting and subtle start which belies the expected genre of the movie.

If this movie was filmed in strict chronological order, I think it must have been at this point that the producers of the movie choked on their prawn sandwiches and held a gun to director James Isaacs' head for the rest of the shooting. No pun intended.

Isaacs' approach to directing this movie is, plainly, that of someone forced into an unpleasant duty to people who he thinks he can easily outsmart- it is 10,000 lines written by a boy who thinks his inattentive audience will not notice if he amuses and vindicates himself by writing "Mr. Napier is a fat bastard" once every few hundred lines or so. Jason X is a faint burlesque of the entire Friday the 13th series, a surreptitious snigger at the genre and -let's be honest, here- the fanbase it attracts. The movie not only embraces the recognisable conventions of shlock horror, but flaunts them openly, inviting derision of them. The spaceship is populated almost exclusively by pretty teenage girls whose only functions are to bare their breasts and be caught in compromising situations with the pretty teenage boys; Jason's absolutely motiveless slaughter of them is so top-heavy with bathos that when, towards the end of the movie, he drifts determinately but motionlessly through the vacuum of space in pursuit of his escaping quarry, his machete still clutched in his relentless claw, it is all the viewer can do not to be amused. Jason X massively scales down the slaughter, blood and scares of the earlier movies -adolescents looking for an excuse to put their arm protectively around their date's shoulders will be much disappointed- in favour of making a nonsense of its own premises; when Jason 'dies' first time around, the movie explicitly highlights the fact that his demise is just a plot device. He is killed not because the heroes come up with an imaginative and foolproof way to stop him; their little ploy of shooting him LOTS and LOTS and REALLY REALLY HARD for the 256,190th time in the movie only succeeds because there's not so much as thirty minutes of the film left to go and we STILL haven't caught even a glimpse of the much-vaunted Uberjason. Like almost all horror movies, Jason X relies for its narrative thrust almost entirely upon repeatedly demonstrating the impossiblity of an event's occuring -Jason dying, the rescue spaceship arriving on time- then having that event occur. And this is all very well and good, but... what's the point?

Isaacs consistently makes fun of the genre in which he is working, but the problem is that the jokes are simply too muted to be funny and too aimless to be satiric. His contrived manipulation of and commentary on cheap horror is actually considerably less funny than most of that cheap horror itself- cynics, like myself, who intend watching Jason X for no other reason than to laugh at the tortuous conventions have their fun utterly ruined by Isaacs' insistence on shouting out the blindingly obvious punchline to all the jokes. At the other end of the scale, Friday the 13th enthusiasts, despite assertions to the contrary, will fail to understand or enjoy most of what's going on here, simply because Friday the 13th enthusiasts are an overwhelmingly cretinous bunch and Isaacs rarely has the courage to avoid playing things at least nominally straight. Mocking its projected audience whilst throwing them the occasional bone -in the form of a gratuitous sex scene or a shiny new Jason- Jason X is an object lesson in how to leave no-one satisfied.