Happy Spooky Season! Mikey Neumann, the creator of FilmJoy, joins us for our Halloween special with something he found in the back of his freezer: Jason X (2001)! Ten films and 22 years after a machete first found its way into a camp counsellor, Friday the 13th finally arrived at the setting every tired franchise eventually reaches when the well has truly run dry: outer space.
Directed by Jim Isaac, a Cronenberg effects alumnus making only his second feature, and written by then-newcomer Todd Farmer under a New Line regime still working out how Scream's self-aware humour ought to be applied to a decade-old slasher icon, Jason X cryogenically freezes Jason Voorhees at the dawn of the 21st century and thaws him out four and a half centuries later, aboard a research vessel that has returned to a long-abandoned Earth.
It is, in the plainest possible terms, Alien with a hockey mask, a film happy to wear its influences on its sleeve while asking, not unreasonably, whether an unstoppable killer is any less unstoppable once you've made him some sort of cyborg. But, as we reach the film's 25th anniversary (!), can we finally decide if it deserves to escape the Oubliette? Find out!
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