This is a movie review... I will outright spoil things this time! So beware of fairly major spoilers of a ridiculous plot.
Synopsis: Jason (don't say you don't know who that is) is cryogenically frozen until he's discovered by people hundreds of years in the future. They thaw him out on their spaceship and actual (unintended, I think?) hilarity ensues.
Scariness Type: Medium gore, teensy bit of jump scares. The biggest shock I experienced was seeing how much of the gore was off-screen! Or not seeing, as the case may be.
Rating: 1/5 Machetes.
Good Stuff: Uh... hmmmmm... I had fun laughing some of the time.
Bad Stuff: This is a straight-up Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie, only for some reason they accidentally released it in theaters. Have you ever seen Axe Cop? Because I think the same person wrote this movie. Or if you're not familiar with that, Half-Life: Full Life Consequences is also similar. Written by a skilled team of seven-year-olds during their recess, this movie does seem to suffer as a result of that design-by-committee mentality. The sets, the costumes, the acting, the effects... wow. Now I like bad movies, and I had some fun in that regard, but it was a little hard to take overall.
There's not enough room on the internet to contain a detailed complaint about every stupid thing in this movie, but let me throw down a couple (spoilers will be happening, but were you somehow unaware of how the plot was going to turn out?)...
- The future people are interested in Jason because of his amazing ability to regenerate. Then when he's killed by an android with a rocket launcher (duh), the future peoples' regeneration technology is what puts
him back together. This isn't so much a plot hole as a reverberating echo of incomprehensibility that rebounds off of itself in an infinite loop. Also on that note, if blowing up his head was sufficient to kill him, how did they not try that when they apparently had him in custody for years attempting to execute him in various ways? Did they even try beheading?
- These people! I get more frightened and concerned dealing with a nearby bee than these people do with an unkillable murderer staring at them from five feet away with a machete! The entire movie, everybody is totally blase, and not just in a bad-acting way. There had to be twenty people killed in this movie, and yet still the survivors would just look at him and be like "uh oh, guess we should think about getting away!" instead of screaming in terror. In the future, everybody's on Xanax.
- You know how Arnold Schwarzenegger always has a one-liner when he finishes off a badguy? Well, since Jason doesn't talk, this movie has the victims do their own one-liners. The best is when a guy gets stabbed through the chest and says "It'll take more than that to bring me down!" So of course Jason stabs him with something else. Instead of just dying, he adds "Yep, that'll do it!" I mean, clearly the comedy is intended, but... yeah.
Other Stuff: There's an old showbiz saying: if you show a guy's arm being re-attached by nanobots in Act 1, you better resurrect a serial killer with them in Act 3!
My Take: First off, let me say that there are two kinds of people in this world, plus a third kind that doesn't count. There are Nightmare On Elm Street people, and Friday The 13th people. And people who don't care, which don't count. I'm a straight up Freddy guy myself. He's a goofy guy with personality, who has
a claw glove and kills people in their dreams, which automatically means all kinds of strange things will happen and there will be surprises. Jason is a lumbering hulk with zero finesse, who walks up and smashes people in reality, which means nothing interesting will ever happen. Half the kills in this movie were just him slamming somebody into a wall. He's basically a zombie that won't die. So Jason movies are zombie movies with only one zombie. And I don't need to write a thesis to explain why that isn't interesting.
Anyhow, it's clear this was a knowing parody of Friday The 13th movies. I mean, they really didn't even try to scare you. I admit, I haven't seen more than a couple minutes, fifteen+ years ago, of Friday The 13th movies, but I am quite sure they went for the jump scares and the gore. In this movie, you have more action and sci-fi than spooky surprise (and more unintentional comedy than either). So I get that they knew the idea of Jason In Space was silly, and they went with that, but boy... they did a baaaad job. For future reference, I don't rate bad movies 1/5 in general. A GOOD bad movie could be 3/5, maybe 4/5 if it's awesomely bad. But this is a bad bad movie. I considered going up to 2/5 because I like to reserve 1/5 for things I actively hated watching and maybe even turned off early, but that just seemed too kind. I had fun, but if I wasn't committed to watching it for this review, I would've turned it off. Actually I would've let myself fall asleep, I was really tired!
Artistic Nonsense: Rather than a theme, I want to point out the one interesting thought this movie brought me. I thought it was kind of interesting to see the scientific take on this supernatural legend of the monster of Crystal Lake. It's kind of a fun thing to see this closed-in little story (people massacred at a camp, and the police never find anything out), and see what happens the light of day is shone upon it, and the world at large sees it. It is also, however, the exact opposite of horror. When you expose something and examine it in detail (unless it's an internal organ), the clinical nature of that removes any semblance of fear. So that's a fun concept, handled terribly. To be honest, coming from the Jason stories, I don't think it could've turned out well.
Tomorrow, our movie will be
Shiver, which I really don't know anything about. It involves a town where lots of people are getting killed, and nobody knows why. Something like that? We'll see.
