Jason Voorhees, like most horror icons, has had a few more film appearances than necessary with the number of sequels to his first appearance firmly in the region of ‘far too many’. Ever since the original Friday The 13th terrified audiences and put an axe in Kevin Bacon’s head, the cult of personality surrounding the hockey mask wearing killing machine has only grown and festered over the years, stagnating in atrocious films, yet being kept afresh with new generations clamoring to see yet more hapless victims to the monster’s machete.
Jason’s appeared in just about every kind of thing there is to appear in for a murderous, assumed immortal fiend. Some great films, some bad films, some drastically bad films, retro videogames, new videogames, a TV show… No wait, he never made an appearance in the TV show, scratch that. But there is 
one film that he’s sliced his way through that holds a bit of a special pantheon in my mind; Jason X. Now, I’m not saying this tenth canonical appearance of Voorhees is anywhere close to completely forgivable – it’s not – but it is one that comes with understandable baggage that does go some way to nullifying some of the criticisms.
The whole reason for Jason X‘s being is that Freddy Vs. Jason was in production hell, the bowels of corporate bureaucracy, and they wanted to release something to satiate appetites. Jim Isaacs decided that he would do that most joked of sequels for our fine camp-killer, he would take him and send him to SPACE. It’s like any other Friday The 13th film – some daft young-ish people, some mildly sexual scenes, some serios murder, and all in SPACE. It’s a perfect recipe. Well, perfect recipe if you’ve an ailing, crippled franchise that needs to either stay dead or get a serios makeover. Jason X got a lot of hate on release, and most of it, frankly, it deserved, but I can’t help but ponder that perhaps some of the criticism leveled at it wasn’t taking aim at this film, but rather just being sour over what had happened to Jason over the course of the nine films that preceded it.
After the original trilogy had established Jason as this unstoppable creature of pure bloodlust, with some serios mammy issues to boot, everything had derailed, with Jason Goes To Hell and Jason Takes Manhattan being the epitome of stabs in the dark at trying to kickstart life into the old boy, with the latter only having Jason actually in Manhattan for a mere sliver of the 100 minute run-time. Everything that had made Friday The 13th so good, Jason so outstanding as an icon had disappeared. The destructive force of dysfunction personified, the want for a vengeance so strong that it made him superhuman, all of this had just apparated into thin air, and all that was left was a lad in a dodgy trench-coat gutting folks and wandering the streets looking for his next fix like that smelly old guy just off main street.
Jason X was, and remains, an attempt at an antidote to that. “We need to put him somewhere new!” Space. “He needs to have new challenges and hurdles.” Space. “There needs to be another deus ex machina to stop him.” Space. Immediately, the hard questions are solved and the script hasn’t even been written yet. But with the damaged state the Friday lore was in, a serios film couldn’t really be done. Well, it could, but whose left to actually take it seriosly? Die-hards will dissect and collect it no matter what, and the curios crowd won’t bother outside of teenage boys looking for a film to sneak into with their dates so that they’d get creeped out and want to cuddle. And in the series’ frail state, what’s even left to make a serios story out of? So, you 
make a film that knows its bad, revels in its own badness, and strives for that ever high-reaching of accolades “not the worst film I’ve ever seen.”
Of course, the first questions to be answered is “how does Jason end up in space?”, which the film opens with. Jason X offers a very campy future, one I’m sure is a middle-ground between budget restrictions and wanting to align with the right kind of science fiction films – Star Wars, this ain’t. The brightly-lit architecture of the ship much of the film takes place in is like a rejected Star Trek design, with much of it just being regular technology, just with nano-bots and see-through computer screens to add that zesty 2455 flavor. Earth is uninhabitable, so Jason and another woman are found by a crew who are just looking for, well, stuff to sell on Earth Two. They find Jason and another human woman, his last victim before meeting his cryo-demise. They bring them on-board to study them, and naturally Jason thaws and continues doing what he does best, which is killing folks in brutal ways, including smashing their heads into the wall.
Jim Isaacs didn’t even really try to make Jason X scary, more it seems he just wanted to create a cast of unlikable humans, bar one, a soldier-type hero, and have Jason mow through them. It works, and for all the tense moments of films in the series past, they aren’t really missed because at this point Jason wasn’t scary anymore, he was a killing machine, pure and simple. So, why not have him just kill people? Skip the melodrama and focus on the many ways people can die in space, which includes someone blowing themselves up in an escape shuttle and being disintegrated and sucked out into 
space. Oh, and the introduction of Uber Jason after a nasty scrap with the resident killing robot. It’s regular Jason infused with metal and looking a little like Lord Zed on steroids.
You can tell Jason X came out after Alien Resurrection, with much of the spirit of that monstrosity having been transplanted into this one. The one difference is that Jason X absolutely enjoys being a satire of its own creation, a chance to end the series with a film that basically says “Hah, man we stink!” and bathing in cheesy, charming science fiction tropes, the same soup that gave birth to films like Space Truckers. Many of the Friday The 13th films suck, is this one any different? Not really, but at least it knows how bad it is, and that at least makes it more entertaining than most of them.
