The Friday Night Horror Movie: Jason X (2001)

image host

There comes a time when a horror fan has to admit that the Friday the 13th films aren’t very good. I grew up in the 1980s, otherwise known as ground zero for slasher films. I loved the Friday the 13th films. Jason Voorhees is one of the greatest, most iconic villains of horror.

The reality is I never watched the full, uncut versions. I always watched them on the USA Network and TBS, or some other basic cable network where they were edited for television. Basic cable was different back then; they had to cut out the harder swear words, the nudity, and the more blood-soaked violence. I think I liked those films in part because my pubescent brain filled in those edited parts. I imagined what happened when the screen cut to something different.

I didn’t watch the uncut versions until I was in college. I gotta admit I was a little disappointed by them. What I had imagined was so much more gnarly and titillating than what was actually shown.

But also by that point I was fully into my film snob cinephilia. I was discovering the films of Martin Scorsese and Alfred Hitchcock. I had realized that films could be more than entertainment. That horror could be more than just fun kills and naked flesh. I was starting to turn my nose up at films like the Friday the 13th franchise.

I went to see Jason X in the cinema when it came out in 2001. I was a full-on film snob by then, but I was also feeling some nostalgia for the films of my youth. I was hoping for some dumb fun, and maybe a little self aware humor like the Scream film (the third of which had come out the year before.) What I got was dumb, but it sure wasn’t fun, and while there were some jokes, they weren’t the self-referential kind. 

I have not watched this film since that first viewing. But I own it on DVD. I’m still a horror nerd after all, and I own the first 8 films via a nice boxed set (which I reviewed, and you can read about at Cinema Sentries), so I just had to own the remaining films in some way.

And now, since it is Friday the 13th, I figured I’d give it a watch.

It begins in the Crystal Lake Research Facility, something that never existed in the other films. It seems to be designed solely to hold Jason and nothing else.  At least judging by how empty the rest of the facility is. Even though this film acknowledges that Jason is an unstoppable killing machine, they’ve left him in an unguarded, very large room. He is chained up and hanging from the ceiling, but why he wouldn’t be locked in a cell is unexplained.  Why there aren’t numerous guards all around him is also unexplained. There is one kid, and he does at least have a gun, but that’s it.  

The kid places a blanket over Jason’s head (the better for us and incoming soldiers to not be able to see who exactly is under the blanket in the coming moments). Rowan LaFontaine (Lexa Doig), the head of the research facility, has plans to cryogenically freeze Jason so that some future generation can deal with him. But before that happens, some dumb soldiers enter the room and demand his release. They are led by Dr. Aloysius Wimmer (David Cronenberg, who was apparently excited to be in a Friday the 13th film and rewrote all of his dialogue), who hopes to figure out how Jason is unable to die. 

Jason, of course, has already killed that boy from (and placed him in the chains and under the blanket) and wreaks havoc on the soldiers. He chases Rowan in the room with the freezing chamber, and she manages to shoot and push him into it. But just as he’s freezing, he pushes his machete (yes, for some reason these people kept his machete within grabbing distance of the supervillain) through the chamber door, stabbing Rowan and filling the room with freezing fog.

Despite all this carnage inside what one assumes is a famous and very expensive science facility, apparently no one bothered to come in and clean up. Or do anything at all.  For the film, flash forwards to the year 2455, and both Jason and Rowan are exactly where they fell, still frozen. 

A group of randy scientists and jokey soldiers find them and take them to their ship.  The Earth has long been abandoned due to massive pollution, but these guys like to visit once in a while and salvage what they can for resale.

They use their special futuristic microrobots to fix and heal Rowan, but figure Jason is too far gone to be saved.  Naturally, he comes back to life once he thaws out.  Lots of killing ensues. 

Some of it is pretty cool; a lot of it is pretty bad.

While some of the scientists are studying Jason, and letting Rowan know she’s now in the future. Others go off to have sex. Because this is a Friday the 13th movie, and you can’t have one of those without sexy teens doing what sexy teens do.

The leader of the ship is a greedy professor who hopes to sell Jason to the highest bidder (he’s still pretty well known in the future, and rich weirdos would like to have his corpse.). And if that doesn’t clue us in to how skeevy he is, there is another scene where he talks one of his students into having (kinky) sex with him – he dresses up in women’s lingerie, she twists his nipple (which by 2001 standars is extra wild!) in order for her to get a good grade.

There is also an android named KM-14 (Lisa Ryder). And if all of this is starting to sound like an Aliens riff to you, you are not alone.  This film was conceived because the Freddy vs. Jason film was locked in development hell over rights issues, and they wanted to have some Jason film out to keep fans interest up. They hired Todd Farmer to write the film, despite him having zero credits to his name. After some thought, he figured the only thing they could do to the character was send him into space and riff on the Alien films. 

But back to the kills. Most of them are fairly standard stuff – Jason hacking folks to pieces with his machete. (Poorly rendered) CGI allowed for them to do things like hack heads and arms off without too much blood and guts, or cut a guy basically in half. One lady has her head stuck in a bowl of liquid nitrogen, and then Jason cracks it like glass. One guy gets tossed onto a massive mining drill, and we watch him slowly slide around and round to the bottom (causing another character to say, when asked how the guy was doing, “He’s screwed”)

Yeah, there are a lot of jokes like that. One-liners coming after someone gets killed. They are more like the kind of thing you get in action movies from the 1980s than ironic in-jokes from a post-Scream world. At one point, to distract Jason, they use a holographic simulator to project a version of Camp Crystal Lake to him. Out come a couple of scantily clad girls who look him in the eye and say something like, “We love having casual sex.”

Jason eventually gets destroyed, but those fancy nanobots have a mind of their own, and they put him back together, but this time they add a bunch of Terminator-esque robot parts and create an Uber Jason.

This is a bad movie.  Probably the worst in the franchise. But you know what? I’m not mad I watched it. All the Jason movies are bad, but there is a certain level of fun in them. If you can turn your brain off before it begins and revert to some dumb teenaged version of yourself, you might find yourself entertained.

Female Prisoner Scorpion: The Complete Collection

image host

I’ve always been a fan of exploitation films. As a young teen, I loved the babes, the sex, the violence, the gore, and the exploitativeness of it all. I still love that stuff now, I guess, but I really love the unabashedness of those films now. Exploitation films are exactly what they say they are going to be. They don’t try to wrap that stuff up in artistic pretensions like so many other films do. 

Sometimes they are actually good movies too, as is the case with at least two of the Female Prisoner Scorpion flicks.  I reviewed the Arrow Video box set of all four films back in 2016 and now you can read them.

The Night Manager: Season One

the night managert

The Night Manager is a rather slow but still thrilling spy series starring Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie, and Olivia Colman. It also introduced me to the wonderful Elizabeth Debicki. Weirdly, some ten years after the first season, a second one has dropped. I haven’t seen it but I quite liked the first one. I’m thinking I need to rewatch it before diving into the second one. You can read my review of Season One over at Cinema Sentries.

Westerns In March: The Quick and the Dead (1987)

image host

Not to be confused with the Sam Raimi film of the same name, this The Quick and the Dead stars Sam Elliott, Kate Capshaw, and Tom Conti and was based on a book by Louis Lamour. I haven’t seen the Raimi film, but I’d bet my ten-gallon hat it is a lot better than this nonsense.

In the Wild West, Duncan McKaskel (Tom Conti), his wife Susanna (Kate Capshaw), and their 12-year-old son Tom (Kenny Morrison) are traveling to Bighorn, Montana, where Susanna’s brother is camped with Custard. The rest of the wagon train were stricken with consumption.

They come across an old, worn-down town and ask a man named Doc Shabbitt (Matt Clark) for help. He says they can stay in an abandoned house for the night, but Duncan decides Shabbitt’s gang looks a little too shabby, and they decide to move along.

That night Shabbitt’s men steal two horses from our heroes.  And then comes Con Vallian (Sam Shepherd). He’s half Native American and a full-blooded badass.  He’s also the kind of guy who likes looking at Susanna and saying things like “Your wife sure is a handsome woman.”  And then says it again. And again. Seriously, half his dialogue is saying inappropriate things to her. It is all kinds of creepy, and he’s the hero of this film.

Anyway, Vallian tells Duncan about the stolen horses and how Shabbit took them. He also says if he doesn’t do something about it, then Shabbitt’s men will think them weak and will keep coming back for more stuff and his woman. Vallian says he’ll take care of it, but Duncan says, “No” it is his battle to fight. Vallian says “ok” and you get the feeling he wouldn’t mind if Duncan got killed so he could have some good times with that “handsome woman.”

Duncan goes to the men and demands his horses back and nearly gets killed for it. Luckily, Vallian came in behind him and saves the day. When they return to camp, the boy hails Vallian as a hero and she starts looking at Vallian like maybe he’s a handsome man.

The rest of the film is like this. Shabbitt or his men will attack, and Vallian will defeat them. Tom wishes his dad was more like Vallian, and Susanna finds herself taking waterfall showers within Vallian’s view. 

What pissed me off about all of this is that Duncan is a good man. He’s smart and fair, and he doesn’t lack for courage. He goes after Shabbitt just as much as Vallian, and he’s not afraid to look Vallian in the face and tell him to stop saying such things about his wife. He isn’t as tough or masculine as Vallian or as good with a gun.  But he still deserves respect.  And he isn’t getting it from his wife, his son, or even the film.

Now I will say that Tom does sometimes say to Vallian that his dad is tough. That he fought bravely in the war. And other than one good kiss, Susanna doesn’t give in to her temptation. But it is still a weird and rather lousy way the film frames Vallian as a hero. This is a TV movie so thing do work out in the end, and if they hadn’t I would have thrown my boots at the TV.

The action is rather dull. Shabbit and his men aren’t particularly interesting or threatening, and the rest of the film never really goes anywhere. There is a romanticism to the Old West that I suspect comes from Louis Lamour’s book, but I sure hope he treats his characters better. 

Now you’ll have to excuse me, I’m going to go watch the Sam Raimi film in hopes it will help me forget this mess.

The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (1939)

image host

Once again we’ve run into a film that I had forgotten I watched. I pretty much request to review anything that is offered from the Criterion Collection because they are always good, or if not good, at least interesting. Seeing this title, I instantly remembered I had seen it, but I couldn’t tell you anything about it. Reading my review makes me want to watch it again.  

The story is about a Japanese kid who wants to be an actor but isn’t very good at it.  He has to make many a sacrifice to hone his craft, as does his lover. The film dives into what it takes to make great art and if the sacrifice is worth it. You can read all my thoughts here.

Snowden (2016)

image host

Edward Snowden was a former NSA contractor who leaked thousands of documents proving the USA government was spying on its citizens. He was a complicated dude and not completely aboveboard, as one can assume since he’s become a Russian citizen, but also a hero for leaking those documents and letting us know what our government has been up to. This was all back in 2013, and considering everything else that has happened in this country since then, it all seems a little like “nothing much” which is a crazy thought in and of itself.

But I don’t  like to talk about politics in these pages, and I’ll leave it at that.  Of course Oliver Stone made a movie about Snowden, and I got to see it on the big screen back then. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.

Little Murders by Agatha Christie

image host

There have been a million adaptations of Agatha Christie stories. This French television did something original with it. They essentially removed Christie’s detectives (Poirot, Miss Marple, etc.) and inserted two original characters while keeping the plots. 

I reviewed this back in 2016 and haven’t watched it since, but I’m thinking it is time for a rewatch.  You can read my full review here.

Dead End Drive-In (1986)

dead end drive in arrow video

The thing about watching a lot of movies is that I can’t always remember all the details of every film.  Or any of the details.  Or whether I’ve even seen the film. The thing about writing lots of movie reviews is that when I forget about a movie, I can go back and read my reviews to jog my memory.

So it was with DeadEnd Drive-In. I probably would have recalled seeing this if you had asked me about it, but I wouldn’t have any idea what it was about.  But reading this old review makes me want to watch it again.

You can read it over at Cinema Sentries.  And yes, this is me once again going through these old reviews and posting them here.

Somewhere In Time (1980)

somewhere in time

Somewhere in Time is a film I’ve always felt like people loved. I thought it was a revered minor classic. I watched it many years ago and was a little disappointed in it, but when I got the opportunity to review this new UHD release from Kino Lorber, I figured it was time to give it another try.

Furthermore, I was still disappointed in it. Apprently, I was wrong thinking everybody else loved it because all my Letterboxd followers feel the same as me and all the reviews I’ve read find it to be mostly average.

Christopher Reeve becomes obsessed with an old painting of Jane Seymour and finds a way to travel back in time to meet her. 

Reeve and Seymour look beautiful, and the idea of the story is interesting, but I never really bought into the romance.  And the film didn’t seem all that interested in the time travel aspects. 

You can read all of my thoughts over at Cinema Sentries.