Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		3.0
Overall		4.0

Jason X Blu-ray Movie Review

Loving the Alien

Reviewed by Michael Reuben September 15, 2013

Jason X is being released as part of Friday the 13th: The Complete Collection.

When New Line Cinema sent Jason Voorhees to hell in the ninth installment of the Friday the 13th series, they never expected "hell" to become development hell. As the years rolled on, producer Sean Cunningham began considering ideas for an interim film to keep the flame burning while the long-delayed Freddy vs. Jason continued on its lengthy detour. After many pitches, one more far-fetched than the next, it was screenwriter Todd Farmer who persuaded the reluctant Cunningham to consider a story with Jason in outer space. One can only imagine the state of desperation that Cunningham must have reached even to consider the idea.

Due to internal problems at New Line Cinema, the U.S. release of Jason X was postponed until 2002, although shooting was completed two years earlier. The film was a box office dud, the third worst in the history of the franchise after Jason Takes Manhattan and Jason Goes to Hell. Unfortunately for the studio, Jason X cost much more than those films, due to the CG budget which, while modest by the standards of a major studio, drove the cost of a Friday the 13th movie into the stratosphere.

But Jason X deserves a second look. It's the wittiest and most creative variation on the Jason Voorhees character since director Tom McLoughlin's invocation of Universal and Hammer horror films in Jason Lives. When Farmer dreamed up the notion of sending Jason into space, he wasn't stealing from random sources, like the pilferers who slapped telekinesis onto The New Blood or snatched bodies for Jason Goes to Hell. Farmer actually had enough smarts to borrow from a source that shared its narrative DNA with the original Friday the 13th—namely, Alien, which its writers described as "Jaws in space". Many, including the creators of Jason X, have compared Jason Voorhees to the shark in Jaws. Like both the shark and the unstoppable alien of Ridley Scott's film, Jason appears, kills and vanishes, but he himself has no character "arc". He doesn't change from one kill to the next, or even one movie to the next. It's Jason's predatory single-mindedness that drives the arcs of others—if they survive.

Like its immediate predecessor, Jason X makes no effort at continuity. To the credit of Farmer and director James Isaac, however, their film does establish a clear narrative framework at the outset, so that the film can be watched and understood by someone who had never seen a previous installment of Friday the 13th. It's the year 2008, and the notorious mass murderer Jason Voorhees (Kane Hodder in his fourth and final outing) has been captured and sentenced to death by the U.S. government. There's just one problem. They can't kill him, because nothing works. His cells spontaneously regenerate.

At the Crystal Lake Research Facility, a scientist named Rowan (Lexa Doig) is preparing to put Jason into cryogenic stasis until an effective method of execution can be determined, when she is interrupted by one Dr. Wimmer (a sly cameo by director David Cronenberg, for whom Isaac had worked on several films). Wimmer wants to remove Jason for study, over Rowan's strong objections. Jason, of course, has other plans entirely, and Rowan just manages to freeze him as she collapses from a fatal stab wound and is frozen herself by a ruptured and leaking cryo-chamber.

Jump forward to the year 2465. Earth has become uninhabitable (the script is appropriately vague as to the cause) and humanity has relocated to a distant "Earth 2". Professor Brandon Lowe (Jonathan Potts) brings a group of students on a field trip to the original Earth, where they discover the frozen remains of Jason and Rowan, in a scene that recalls Ripley's rescue at the beginning of Aliens, from which Farmer has borrowed several key story points. These include a contingent of bad-ass soldiers on board Lowe's spacecraft to ensure the safety of the professor and his students, led by a tough sergeant named Brodski (Peter Mensah). Farmer himself plays one of the grunts, named "Dallas" after the captain of Alien's ship, the Nostromo.

Back on Lowe's ship, the Grendel, Rowan is thawed and healed using 25th Century nanotechnology, and she awakens like Ripley to a world that she doesn't recognize. But one thing is familiar. As soon as she learns that Jason has been brought aboard, she tries to warn her new acquaintances, but to no avail. Like Paul Reiser's Burke in Aliens, Lowe is already calculating the profits from such a rare find, and he doesn't want to hear that the thawing corpse in his ship's morgue is already regenerating into his familiar deadly self. As soon as Jason rises from the table, he begins working his way through everyone on board, starting with Lowe's intern, Adrienne (Kristi Angus). Next come the students (some of whom, like Crystal Lake campers, can't wait to hop into bed), the Grendel crew and the soldiers Lowe sends to hunt him.

The innards of a spaceship turn out to be a natural habitat for a single-minded predator like Jason, just as they were for the hostile life form in Alien, which also had a talent for appearing where it was least expected and then vanishing before help could arrive. Science officer Ash's pithy description of the alien applies equally to Jason—his structural perfection is matched only by his hostility. Ash would no doubt admire the "purity" of Jason's purpose.

I haven't yet mentioned the android. No effective Alien riff would be complete without one, but Farmer has made it a female. Her name is "Kay-Em 14" (Lisa Ryder), and one of Lowe's students, Tsunaron (Chuck Campbell), has eyes for no one else. In the great tradition of Aliens' Bishop, she comes to the rescue at a desperate moment, using weapon upgrades created for her by Tsunaron in an act of geek worship. In the great tradition of androids in the Alien series, she ends up losing her head, but at least she does it for love.

Late in the film, Jason himself gets a 25th Century upgrade, courtesy of an accidental encounter with the nanite healing technology that was used to heal Rowan. It's the spiffiest he's ever looked, and the famous hockey mask has been replaced with something that I'm convinced was intended to evoke the mask worn by yet another implacable hunter, the intergalactic sportsman from Predator. At heart, though, he remains the Jason we've always known. To create a diversion while they attempt escape, the few surviving occupants of the Grendel simulate a holographic reminder of his early days. It's a rendering of Camp Crystal Lake with two topless teenage girls proclaiming their interest in sex, which, in Friday the 13th terms, is like hanging a sign around your neck that says "Kill Me". It may be the funniest thing in the movie.

Jason X Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Although Jason X was shot on film by cinematographer Derick V. Underschultz (HBO's In Treatment), every frame was scanned into the digital realm at Blu-ray resolution, where the effects were designed and rendered, editing was done and the final color timing was finished. This is common practice today, but it was considered revolutionary when Jason X was made. The result, whether output to film, as would have been the case for the 2003 release, or translated to Blu-ray without any intervening analog stage, as is presumably the case here, has a substantially different look than any prior Friday the 13th film.

The image on Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray is generally bright, detailed and colorful. Even in scenes set in environments with low light, darkness is never total. Isaac made a conscious decision to head in the opposite direction from the dark dystopian futures that have become standard in science fiction movies. Wherever possible, he had Underschultz (or the CG techs in post-production) keep the scene illuminated. Even the desolated Earth isn't plunged into total darkness; it's just a dirty brown mess of swirling dust and wind.

The color palette of the various quarters aboard the Grendel and its shuttle is soft and pleasing by design, in keeping with the benign vision of the future that the arrival of Jason violently disrupts. The blacks of space outside the ship are solid and deep. If there is any criticism to be made of the image, it's that the CG work is somewhat dated, lacking the organic quality that today's best CG artisans have the experience and computing power to lend their creations. However, this is not the fault of the Blu-ray. Fine detail in non-CG elements might also have been improved if an upper limit hadn't been initially imposed by the decision to shoot a smaller negative and scan the film elements at no more than HDTV resolution. (This is explained in more detail in the accompanying featurette.) Again, though, this is not a fault in the Blu-ray.

Jason X shares a BD-50 with Jason Goes to Hell. However, the virtual absence of extras for the latter film has allowed sufficient room for the compressionist to deliver an average bitrate of 22.93 Mbps, which is somewhat lower than one would like for a film with so much action but is enough to provide an image without noticeable artifacts.

Jason X Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Outer space has always provided sound designers with room to play, and Jason X is no exception. The good ship Grendel is alive with sounds of equipment and machinery, both mechanical and electronic. Sequences like the nanotechnology reconstruction of Rowan (and later Jason) are full of subtle sound cues accompanying the labor of the tiny machines. Big effects like the roaring winds of the now-deserted Earth, or the cryostasis imposed on Jason and Rowan at the beginning, or a spectacular collision between the Grendel and a space station, or an explosion rigged by the Grendel survivors as an emergency life-saving measure, all register with forceful impact and the full involvement of the surround speaker array. The track has wide dynamic range and deep bass extension when it's needed. This is the first Friday the 13th film to have a truly impressive 5.1 soundmix. The Blu-ray's presentation, of course, is lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1.

Harry Manfredini once again supplied the score, but now that he was writing for an entirely different kind of Jason film, Manfredini was free to write in a new style. Taking full advantage of the expanded audio capability, he wrote a more expansive musical experience to accompany Jason into the final frontier.

Jason X Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Commentary with Director Jim Isaac, Writer Todd Farmer and Producer Noel Cunningham: This commentary is a rather lackluster affair, with everyone except Isaac clearly not taking it seriously, perhaps because their enthusiasm for the film had waned after the long-delayed release and poor reception. Isaac does provide useful background on his prior work with director David Cronenberg, which led directly to Cronenberg's cameo appearance in the film (the famed horror director even rewrote his own dialogue). He also discusses some of the themes and technical challenges.



• The Many Lives of Jason Voorhees (480i; 1.78:1, enhanced; 29:56): This 2002 video short followed the release of Jason X and served as a kind of pre-release publicity to Freddie vs. Jason. It traces the history of both the Friday the 13th franchise and so-called "slasher" films in general. The excerpts heavily favor the more recent entries released by New Line, but the interview subjects are an interesting group. They include Kane Hodder, Sean Cunningham, former New Line CEO Robert Shaye and former host of TNT's Monstervision Joe Bob Briggs.



• By Any Means Necessary: The Making of Jason X (480i; 1.78:1, enhanced; 17:33): The cast and crew of Jason X discuss the origin of the project and describe what was then the novel process by which the film was photographed and edited. Today, scanning every frame of a film's negative into a computer for a digital manipulation and editing is standard practice, but when Jason X was made, the process was brand new. The featurette provides a close look at an early form of the process that would come to be known as a "digital intermediate".



• Theatrical Trailer (1080i; 1.85:1; 2:01).

Jason X Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Farmer's script left open the possibility of pursuing Jason's story in the world of "Earth 2", but the box office failure of Jason X doomed any such possibility. Besides, New Line was eager to move forward with its plans for Jason vs. Freddy, which finally hit theaters the year after Jason X's U.S. release. Jason X stands alone as a quirky variation on the series' core theme of the terror caused by an unstoppable, unreasoning killer who has locked on you for no special reason and can't be bargained with. That kind of monster is truly . . . alien. Recommended.