It Ain't Easy Being Green

[EN: Check out my collected writings on Wes Craven's works in the new "Wes Craven" page on the top bar or right here.]

Year: 1982

Director: Wes Craven

Cast: Louis Jourdan, Adrienne Barbeau, Ray Wise

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

The early 80’s were a tough time for Wes Craven. A decade or so out from his terrifying debut The Last House on the Left, and half that from his grisly but mediocre sophomore effort The Hills Have Eyes, he just wasn’t finding purchase in Hollywood. In 1982 he was only two years off from altering the face of world cinema with A Nightmare on Elm Street, but for now his CV boasted the meager one-two punch of Deadly Blessing and Stranger in Our House, a TV movie with Linda Blair (yeah, we’re gonna get to that one).

So when he was offered the opportunity to direct a high profile superhero movie based on the DC Comics character Swamp Thing, do you think he would say no? Of course not. Superhero movies didn’t have quite the caché that they do today, but Superman had crushed box office coal into diamonds, so who was Wes Craven to tempt fate? Now, was the grindhouse horror director remotely equipped to handle an action-oriented blockbuster with a studio breathing down his neck and slashing the budget to ribbons so savagely they probably inspired Freddy Krueger?

Of course not.

In Swamp Thing, government scientist Alice Cable (Adrienne Barbeau) is sent to a remote research lab in the swamp to replace an injured worker during the last week of the operation. There she meets and becomes enamored with Dr. Alec Holland (Ray Wise), who is working with his sister to create a recombinant cell with both animal and plant DNA for… reasons. Science reasons. When the wicked Dr. Arcane (Louis Jordan) storms the lab to steal the formula, Holland is accidentally coated in it and falls into the swamp. This transforms him into the monstrous Swamp Thing (Dick Durock), and he sets out to save Cable from Arcane’s clutches, while he attempts to recreate the formula and use it on himself.

I mean, wouldn’t YOU want to look like this?

Swamp Thing represents a lot of firsts for Wes Craven. His first superhero movie. His first action movie. His first Wilhelm Scream. Of course, it also represents a lot of lasts because he would never do any of those things again. And while I’m delighted that he got a shot at operating outside of his horror wheelhouse before his single true departure from the genre in 1999’s Music of the Heart, it’s for the best that his action career didn’t go anywhere.

The sequences in the first act that develop character and build the world are pretty solid, but Craven’s script flails once the actual Swamp Thing is introduced. And yes, Craven himself got to write the script on this thing, because literally nobody gave a rat’s ass about overseeing comic book movies in the 80’s. But I digress. Swamp Thing’s powers are ill-defined (we don’t find out a key strength of his until the final 20 minutes, in which Cable sedately repeats it to him as if we should’ve known this the whole time) and his heroism is poorly staged, as Adrienne Barbeau wanders vacantly through the swamp, gets captured, and twiddles her thumbs until he leaps from the reeds to her rescue over and over and over again. It’s like Groundhog Day if Bill Murray were a damsel in distress.

The action sequences are spectacularly hammy, too. There’s a decent boat chase at one point, but every fistfight is as lumbering and slow as an old Godzilla movie, using that 40’s cinema standby of people falling down even though their opponent’s fist is clearly a foot and a half away from them. What makes this even more embarrassing is that most of the fight scenes involve David Hess, a participant in Craven’s most luridly brutal and realistic depiction of violence, in 1972’s The Last House on the Left. It’s a major stumble for a director who had found his voice, but hadn’t quite locked down his visual mastery yet.

Watching Swamp Thing, it’s almost impossible to believe this was only two years later.

The second and third acts range from boring to dreadful, but when Swamp Thing is good, it’s at least amusingly campy comic book fun. Wise and Barbeau have enough chemistry that I’m willing to go along with their preposterous love story, and though Cable is hardly an empowered female character, she gets a couple opportunities to kick an appropriate amount of ass. Then the comic-y flair comes in with the absurd squiggly wipes Craven uses to transition between scenes. And it’s impossible to completely hate a movie that has a scene where a character grabs the corner of their face and removes their impeccably lifelike Mission: Impossible mask.

Probably the single best element of the film is Jude, a ten-year-old comic relief gas station attendant who accompanies Cable on her Act Two journey. This is almost certainly damning Swamp Thing with faint praise, because he’d probably be the worst thing in any other movie, but the characters (played by Reggie Batts) exemplifies the best of Craven’s occasionally lever, quippy, and warm screenplay. Too bad he’s shunted to the side for a grand finale featuring this masterpiece. 

And I didn’t think any Craven effect could be worse than the werewolf in Cursed.

As you can see, Swamp Thing is no charmer. It’s a parade of shoddy special effects and circuitous narrative, plodding endlessly through a flat, tedious swamp. And the cherry on top is the score by Harry Manfredini, who – as he has with every other film he’s composed since 1980 – liberally slathers the film with shrill outtakes from his Friday the 13th score, smothering it with blunt strings that completely ignore the tone of whatever scene they’re in, blasting it into sub-slasher oblivion. Swamp Thing is a disappointment, but so were most comic movies of that era (Hell, DC is still churning them out). I’m not shifting the blame entirely from Craven, whose hands were all over this project, but the director took a shot at material he was wholly incompatible with. It’s an admirable venture but an unsuccessful one.

TL;DR: Swamp Thing is an admirable failure from a director ill-equipped to handle the genre.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1049

Census Bloodbath: Over The Hill

Year: 1985

Director: Wes Craven

Cast: Tamara Stafford, Kevin Spirtas, Michael Berryman

Run Time: 1 hour 26 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

In 1983, Wes Craven was in dire straits. His debut films The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes were artistically successful but they hardly made him a millionaire. His follow-ups were a score of TV movies and the modestly received Deadly Blessing. And in 1982, he took a bath on Swamp Thing, a mainstream comic book adaptation and an attempt to escape being pigeonholed into low budget horror. He was in dire need of a paycheck.

When the opportunity arose to slap together a cash-in sequel to one of his classic tiles, The Hills Have Eyes Part II was born. Craven has later said that he was so desperate that he would have directed Lassie vs. Godzilla.

He should have directed Lassie vs. Godzilla.

What happened was that this star-crossed sequel ran out of funding, abruptly halted shooting, and the incomplete film was wrenched from Craven. Producers papered flashbacks from the original film over most of the missing bits (though not as obnoxious a number as are present in clip show films like Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2) and said “screw it,” releasing the Frankensteinian hellbeast onto the world without Craven’s approval.

Even with Craven’s approval, this sequel – which draws influence from the ever-popular slasher genre rather than the grindhouse spirit that birthed it – wouldn’t be any good, but by peeking between the lines we can spot the zany experiment the film might have turned out to be. The film is his only attempt at a straight, by-the-numbers slasher and it goes disastrously awry. Even at the best of times, Craven’s concepts were far from straight. So that’s how we ended up with this bizarre, piecemeal aberration:

In The Hills Have Eyes Part II, surviving family member Bobby Carter (Robert Houston) shows up for ten minutes, never to be heard from again even though it’s implied he’ll arrive to save the day. Since his family’s fatal run-in with a mutant desert clan of cannibals, he has joined a dirt biking team, for which he has invented a new brand of turbo fuel. Yeah.

He wants to try and sell the fuel at their next race, but when he discovers it’s located in the same tract of desert where his family was murdered, he has a mental breakdown and decides not to go. He leaves the team in the care of his maybe girlfriend Rachel (Janus Blythe), the now-civilized daughter of the cannibal clan.

This hasn’t happened in quite some time, so it is with considerable relish that I invite you to Meet the Meat: The dirt biking team includes Harry (Peter Frechette), the requisite prankster who kicks it first; Hulk (John Laughlin), who has a bandana and no other distinguishing traits; Jane (Colleen Riley of Deadly Blessing), Harry’s girlfriend who takes a shower; Sue (Penny Johnson) and Foster (Willard Pugh), the Token Black Couple containing the Dude Who Acts Astonished Every Time He Sees Boobs Even Though He’s In A Committed Sexual Relationship And Has Presumably Dealt With Them Before; Roy (the delightful Kevin Spirtas of Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood), the team leader whose body really goes with his outfit; and Cass (Tamara Stafford), Roy’s girlfriend, a beautiful blind psychic. Yeah.

This bundle of textbook slasher archetypes (minus Cass, of course) decides to take a shortcut through the desert, as they’re all running late because they forgot it was daylight savings time. Yeah. When they run out of gas, they are fallen upon by surviving cannibal Pluto (Michael Berryman), now led by his uncle, the Reaper (John Bloom). Thus ensues a night of murder, mayhem, dogs having flashbacks, and dirt bike chases through the sandy mountains.

…Yeah.

As you have probably gathered, this movie is pretty damn weird. While Craven’s supernatural-hewing instincts would lead him to create one of the most immortal horror icons the world has ever seen, this script seems to have been collected from all the crumpled balls of paper that lay scattered beneath his brainstorming desk. Mind you, there’s a lot in this film that Craven can’t be blamed for thanks to its half-finished nature (i.e. Bobby’s abortive inclusion and an extremely murky fate for Rachel, who is knocked unconscious, whereupon the script forgets about her and apparently leaves her to die), but he’s not exactly off the hook.

There’s plenty in this film that just plain isn’t very good. The pacing is maddeningly off-kilter and the main character vanishes for at least half an hour, the dialogue is stale and frequently laughable (i.e. this sick burn, used to taunt the killer out of hiding: “The Reaper sucks!”), and every single aspect of the script feels like an unpolished first draft. Which, in all probability, it was. But that still can’t excuse the frustrating inability to light the African-American cast members at night, allowing their edges to spill off into the inky blackness, leaving only leering Cheshire Cat grins behind.

And don’t even get me started on the score by Jasonsmith Harry Manfredini, who I quite enjoy, but spends his tenure here shamelessly ripping off his own Friday the 13th score. Or the escape plan, which involves lighting a ring of fire and then running through it. Or Pluto’s modernized outfit, which looks like he’s readying for a community theater production of Davy Crockett 2065.

I’m simultaneously relieved and heartbroken they never made Hills Have Eyes III, which was reportedly going to be set in space.

But for all its considerable deficit, The Hills Have Eyes Part II is more than a little fun. It’s tremendously goofy and impossible to take seriously, but coming to it as a slasher connoisseur, it’s a hoot. If you can mentally separate your expectations of Craven from the proceedings, you can kick back and gawk at the cheesy slasher mayhem, dirt biking, the awkward reveal of Cass’s blindness midway through the movie (as we’ll discover, surprise blind characters will turn out to be a kind of motif in the more lunatic Craven entries), and the fact that the dog – Beast – puts up a better offence than the humans do, even pushing Pluto off a cliff like he’s the evil queen in Snow White.

It’s a haggard morsel of a film, but plumped with some classic bad-good nonsense. And there are a handful of crumbs in the film that manage to muster up tension, largely related to the cherry red dungeon of horrors in the basement and the fact that Cass must use every sense but sight to escape her tormenters. And once the body count gets going, it rockets up at a steady clip. So even though it’s malnourished pabulum, at least it’s over quickly.

The Hills Have Eyes Part II has next to nothing to offer the civilized viewer, unless they want a more or less firsthand account of the poisonous effect of desperation and studio tampering on the art form of cinema. But while its position as a cautionary tale is stronger than its entertainment value, there are still some wisps of bizarre joy to be milked from this engine running on fumes. Don’t watch it without removing your brain and placing it on a cool shelf a safe distance from the screen. Or better yet, just don’t watch it.

Killer: Reaper (John Bloom) and Pluto (Michael Berryman)

Final Girl: Cass (Tamara Stafford)

Best Kill: Beast pushes Pluto off a cliff.

Sign of the Times: Foster asserts that it ain’t natural to be in a place without a disco. It’s probably a good thing he didn’t live into the 90’s.

Scariest Moment: Cass discovers the bodies of her friends, but she has to touch them all to “see” them.

Weirdest Moment: Dog flashback! Come on!

Champion Dialogue: “All he does is growl at rocks – his mother must be a thoroughbred cement mix or something.”

Body Count: 7

1. Harry is crushed by a falling boulder.
2. Hulk is impaled on a spear.
3. Foster is dragged under the bus.
4. Jane is hugged to death.
5. Sue has her throat slit.
6. Pluto falls off a cliff.
7. Reaper falls down a mineshaft.

TL;DR: The Hills Have Eyes Part II is an inept, slapdash cash-in sequel.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1387
Reviews In This Series
The Hills Have Eyes (Craven, 1977)
The Hills Have Eyes Part II (Craven, 1985)

Census Bloodbath: April Fool's Slay

Year: 1986

Director: George Dugdale, Mark Ezra, & Peter Litten

Cast: Caroline Munro, Simon Scuddamore, Carmine Iannaccone

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The reignition of the Scream franchise with the MTV drama series (which ain’t half bad, if you can turn off that part of your brain that can reliably calculate human ages – if any of those tousled hunks are actually in high school, I will buy myself a hat so I can eat it) has got me thinking. The slasher genre is a malnourished, formulaic bunch, but these satirical pastiches presume that they’re all the same.

They’re not. Now, I’m not saying that slasherdom is an overflowing fountain of abundant innovation. Far from it. But if a sufficiently insane teen is inspired by the series to check one out and picks a title at random from my Census Bloodbath list, more often than not, they’ll end up with a grimy urban thriller like Eyes of a Stranger or a meandering, personality-free attempt at drama like The Outing rather than a traditional slice ‘n dice pic like Friday the 13^th.

Even films with every generic element in place (killer in a mask, crop of partying horndogs, anniversary of a past trauama) can defy expectation – if only for the fact that either the rules hadn’t been invented yet, or else they were so stale and musty by the time the film was made that the producers attempted to lacquer them up with harebrained ideas that appeal to the increasingly easily bored bloodthirsty teens. As a result, almost no slasher is what we can call “typical.” Which is where Slaughter High comes in.

Despite containing every single one of these tropes and change, Slaughter High is a film so singularly misguided, so exquisitely strange, that I defy anybody to attempt to categorize it. As it happens, the film came out in 1986, after non-paranormal slashers had gone out of vogue and producers of such resorted to bigger, splashier deaths to balance out the revenue. This is the roiling, primordial pit that Slaughter High oozed out of, and that is why – in spite of its astoundingly low grade production values in almost every capacity – it remains an indelible classic of the form.

Though, that may not be high praise.

Slaughter High begins on April Fool’s Day, a holiday with robust murder potential and on which two of my favorite slashers are set. The track team of Doddsville County High School is right in the middle of a prank to end all pranks: namely, luring nerdy punching bag Marty (Simon Scuddamore) into the girls’ locker room, getting him naked, and filming the scandalous results. This prank gets interrupted by the Coach (Marc Smith of Deep Red and The Omen III), precipitating a new, even crueler prank on Marty in the chemistry lab that accidentally results in a chemical explosion, leaving him covered in acid scars and severe burns. This prank is execrable. These people are horrible. You will hate them and want very badly to see them die painfully. Luckily, you picked the right subgenre.

Ten years later, the gang arrives for their class reunion only to find an empty, abandoned school as they realize that they’re the only invitees. This leads to a wild night of drunken carousing, getting locked inside, and being efficiently murdered by a scientifically-minded killer in an April Fool’s jester mask. No prizes for guessing who’s beneath it.

The group of Meat (and the degree to which the actors are patently too old to play teenagers is only rivaled by the degree to which they are patently too old to play 28-year-olds) comprises the following.

Carol (Caroline Munro of Maniac) is the beautiful vixen who seduces Marty into evacuating his clothes and is now an unsuccessful actress trying like hell get a single offer that isn’t in porn; Skip (Carmine Iannacone), the team captain/class clown whose nipples heroically strain to be visible no matter what type of shirt he’s wearing; Stella (Donna Yaeger), a spineless blonde bimbo with a voice like a rusty hinge; Joey (Gary Martin, who played a guitarist in Shock Treatment, to nobody’s interest but my own), a dumb gearhead who ends up marrying Stella; Frank (Billy Hartman), a greaser guido with chest hair you could make Velcro out of; Ted (Michael Safran, famous for his role as “Mustard Goon Two” in 2002’s The Ketchup King), who I’m pretty sure doesn’t actually appear in the film until his grisly demise; Carl (John Segal), a blonde law student who mostly just smiles quietly in the background; Suzie (Sally Cross), who is gone half the time meeting her fiancé’s parents only to instantly perish upon arrival; Nancy (Kelly Baker of Don’t Open Till Christmas), who is British; and Shirley (Josephine Scandi), who materializes once the filmmakers decide that we haven’t seen quite enough boobs yet.

 

A vital service.

The most distinctive feature* of Slaughter High is its sheer unpredictability. And I don’t mean the plot – that old chestnut could be figured out from the opening credits. I mean that Slaughter High is such an abominable example of cinema that literally no line of dialogue, aspect of performance, or character reaction is remotely comprehensible to anybody who’s even mildly film literate. It took three whole directors to cobble this mess into a reasonable whole and is captivatingly inane.

*Aside from its score – an eight note progression that is repeated incessantly on every instrument available to session musicians in the 80’s – which mainly means saxophones, electric guitars, and synth boards because the 80’s were the Modern Renaissance. This was composed – if you could call it that –by Harry Manfredini, who had exactly one great idea in 1980 with Friday the 13^th that he spent the rest of his career flailing to recreate.

Presumably it took two entire co-directors to keep the pile of cocaine from blowing away.

Slaughter High is a frustratingly difficult film to pin down. It’s like trying to pick up an ice cube with chopsticks: Just when you’re laughing derisively at the film’s manner of proving that the women have aged by draping them in prodigious fur coats that threaten to swallow them whole, or their dogged insistence that April Fool’s Day ends at noon, or the pitiful jingling of Marty’s jester cap as he tries to stalk menacingly behind defenseless victims, you find yourself laughing at something even more inexplicable: an actual joke. That is not to say that any of Slaughter High’s badness is intentional (in all honesty, it’s probably the goodness that’s unintentional), but there are some genuinely funny gags that crop up in unexpected places, like pens that have fallen off your desk.

And the kills! Oh, I could wax poetic about the kills. Never in cinema history has there been such a striking collection of frantically off-the-wall murders. Between a chemically-spiked beer that makes a guy’s intestines explode out of him, an acid-filled bathtub that reduces a trauma victim to cinders, and the metal bed that electrocutes a woman mid-coitus, blasting the guy off of her, but taking great care to make sure we can still see her waggling breasts, there is no shortage of mystifying carnage around every corner. It’s over the top, boldly idiotic, and surprisingly gory when it gets the chance. A couple of these scenes shade a smidge too far into torture porn for my tastes, but the rest are like an endless big top carnival of biological mayhem.

Between the cheesy laughs, the actual laughs, the spectacular kills, and an ending that devolves into a maudlin fever dream that would make Salvador Dalí do a double take, Slaughter High is a fascinating antique.

Also there’s a penis! And a man ass! The film is practically progressive at this point.

I think I’ve done a great job at describing the manifold wonders of Slaughter High while leaving room for your own personal discoveries along the way. But I must leave you with a warning: Campy or not, Slaughter High is a piece of crap. It is what a piece of crap would crap after eating too much crap.

It’s impossible to see through the sludgy murk of the exterior scenes, there’s as much tension as an episode of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, and the Final Girl sequence unravels the conflict with a weak, overlong wet fart. No actor is turning in decent work, but Marc Smith seems to be actively falling asleep, several of the women screech their dialogue as if they’re hanging in a cage suspended from a tower, Caroline Munro seems to have her lines erupt from her entirely by serendipitous accident, and Simon Scuddamore screams like an elderly spinster cooing over a tray of tea cakes.

It’s in the firestorm of awful that Slaughter High is able to find its true, ineffable self, but that doesn’t make the awful stuff any easier to sit through. I will leave you with two fleeting, concluding impressions – one good, one bad – after which you can balance out your options and decide if this movie is for you. Here goes:

1: The single best element of the production is its set design, which reliably renders a school building as something gothic and spooky.

2: In an attempt to make him look younger in the high school scenes, an industrious makeup person vigorously rubbed an actor’s cheeks with bright crimson rouge.

Until next time, I'm your faithful servant in slasherdom. Happy belated April Fool's!

Killer: Marty Ranson (Simon Scuddamore)

Final Girl: Carol (Caroline Munro)
Best Kill: Ted's intestines explode out of him after he shotguns a chemically-altered beer, for so many reasons. First, because people have been drinking beer all night and somehow this is the only dangerous one. Second, because it is so unexpected and so boldly gory and just so damn strange.
Sign of the Times: When the pranksters film a naked Marty in the locker room, they scream "Where's the beef!"
Scariest Moment: Lights explode above Carol as she runs down the hallway.
Weirdest Moment: The ending, which transforms the school into a fog machine hell dimension.
Champion Dialogue: "Dirty talk? Um... Fuck. Tits. Screw."
Body Count: 13

1. Caretaker has his head impaled on a coat hook.
2. Ted's intestines explode out of his gut.
3. Carl is stabbed through the back with a sword.
4. Shirley is dissolved in an acid bath.
5. Suzie is killed offscreen.
6. Joey is crushed by a lawn mower and his torso is mowed.
7. Stella and
8. Frank are electrocuted in a metal bed.
9. Nancy is drowned in slurry.
10. Skip is axed in the face.
11. Carol is speared in the heart.
12. Nurse is killed offscreen.
13. Doctor is stabbed in the eye with a syringe. 

TL;DR: Slaughter High is a mystifying, terrible, magnetic presence that makes this project the exciting adventure that it is.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1805

Houston, We Have A Sequel

Year: 2001

Director: James Isaac

Cast: Kane Hodder, Lexa Doig, Lisa Ryder

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

So here we are, the end of Jason Voorhees. No, not the last film in the franchise. That cash cow's udder might be drawing blood, but Hollywood will keep squeezing it until it snaps off. The tenth Friday the 13th sequel, Jason X, is the final film in the continuity of the original series. 

Granted, that's not saying much.

Consider this fun fact, which I read on a F13 trivia post last week: Jason has died in 6 Friday the 13th films. He has been resurrected in 3 of them. And that's all you need to know about the franchise. Narrative consistency is the redheaded stepchild of Crystal Lake. Nevertheless, Jason X is the tenth and final film of a series dimly recognizable as a whole. The 2003 followup Freddy vs. Jason was a crossover picking up loosely after part nine, and the 2009 remake scraps everything and fills in the cracks with pretty people.

They might as well have renamed Crystal Lake to "Michael Bay."

Now that we're revisiting the de facto swan song for Friday the 13th, let's take a moment to reflect on the franchise as a whole. After young zombie/ghost boy Jason was introduced in Sean S. Cunningham's indie fright flick Friday the 13th, he was taken on by Paramount, who gave him human form in Friday the 13th Part 2 and his iconic hockey mask in Friday the 13th Part 3: 3D. He was summarily offed in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, palely imitated in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, and desperately resurrected in Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives at the behest of axe-sharpening fans.

In Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, Kane Hodder donned the hockey mask to battle a bargain basement Carrie, then took a cruise to Vancouver, briefly stopped over in Times Square, and was destroyed by toxic waste in the Day-Glo nightmare sewers of the Big Apple in Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. For some inexplicable reason, audiences didn't respond well to that classic entry, so Paramount upped sticks and sold off their cash cow for some magic beans. 

New Line took on the burden, stripping the franchise of its name and putting the villain front and center, at least in the title. They then burned the whole affair at the stake in an attempt to Nightmare it up with the Lovecraftian body-hopping demon worm fiasco Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. When that film also inexplicably failed to resurrect a cult following, the franchise lay dormant in the New Line basement for over half a decade. While the planned Freddy vs. Jason crossover was being turned over hot coals in Production Hell, New Line decided to renew audience interest with a new installment to the long defunct Jason saga by sending him to space and tossing an acid-trippingly massive $14,000,000 budget at him.

Really, it's a miracle that Jason X even made it into theaters, let alone with that kind of money at its disposal. Naturally, the filmmakers, acknowledging the massive respect involved in being trusted with such a (relatively) gargantuan coffer, made the worst film in the franchise. Seriously, Jason X is the butts.

Not even the good kind.

Jason X begins by immediately retconning JGTH, which isn't the worst decision. It opens with Jason Voorhees (Kane Hodder for the fourth and final time) totally alive and evidently fished out of Hell, restrained in the futuristically chrome Crystal Lake Research Facility, which is the worst decision. Sexy researcher Rowan (Lexa Doig of Andromeda) is the leader of a team that has tried executing the mass murderer via every method under the sun, including firing squad, which seems like more of a formality than anything. However, his psycho/zombie/plot device body keeps regenerating itself to full health like the world's least adorable Pokémon.

Her team wants to put Jason into cryogenic sleep until they can figure out what the hell to do with him, but some Evil Capitalists, led by David Cronenberg, want to exploit his regenerative abilities for monetary gain. When they enter Jason's holding cell, obviously their team is eviscerated within seconds, and Rowan uses herself as bait to lure Jason into the freezing chamber. After Jason punctures the chamber with the sturdiest machete in the known universe, they are both frozen until they are discovered by an exploratory team of students four and a half centuries later in the arbitrarily chosen year of 2455.

The crew brings the two bodies onto their spaceship, where they resurrect Rowan and leave Jason to thaw, believing him to be dead like so many Paramount executives back in the day. As the Space Teens scatter to get it on in their bunks, the filthy magic of premarital sex goes to work and Jason rises from his stasis, good as new. He grabs a standard-issue Space Machete off the doctor's table and goes to work.

This sounds like the setup to an awesomely cheesy "psycho killer in space" movie. Don't be fooled, my child. Once upon a time, putting Vanilla Ice in a movie sounded like a great idea too, and look where that got us.

Although I think we can agree that necking next to a serial killer's corpse is NEVER a good plan.

There's far too many useless characters floating around the movie to provide for its record-breaking body count, but let's Meet a selection of the Meat, shall we?

Joining us today is the crew of the good ship Grendel, including Azrael (Dov Tiefenbach), the annoying Space Stoner who proves that history is doomed to repeat itself; Janessa (Melyssa Ade), who is apparently a skilled recombinant DNA researcher, but is more important to the story as a Space Slut - the patriarchy will never die; Professor Lowe (Jonathan Potts), who will sacrifice any number of his young students for his own financial gain; Sgt. Brodski (Peter Mensah), who is the leader of the ship's security squadron and Jason's biggest opponent; Tsunaron (Chuck Campbell of Stargate: Atlantis), who is an expert robotics designer and whom I called "Matt" in my notes because not only are these future names confusing, they are also mumbled; and Kay-Em 14 (Lisa Ryder), Tsunaron's female android/love interest with a Corey Feldman haircut.

It's like Her, but with more gratuitous nudity.

There's about 8,000 more characters bouncing around the Grendel, but these are the only ones who make any sort of impression. The rest are mere fodder for the gore sequences, which are generally quick, fumbled, and in the dark, like all of James Franco's sexual encounters. The one thing I can say about Jason X is that, what with all the faces, places, and kills whirling past the screen, it's over before you know it. Its episodic scene structure pushes and shoves you through what would have otherwise been a supremely boring slasher flick.

There is no aspect of the film that isn't riddled with leaden incompetence. Sometimes a moment or a line of dialogue will shine through the gloom like a beam of sunlight in the eye of a storm, but then the maelstrom sweeps everything away again.

Perhaps the most waterlogged area of Jason X is its special effects. Although three of the kill sequences are instantly memorable classics, the rest are indistinct and brief, relying on state-of-the-art  early 2000's CGI technology that has aged about as well as The Baha Men. The computer imagery (and the astoundingly varied sets) sucked the budget dry, so the moments that are practical hit with all the force of a wet tissue. A spaceship crash looks more like the opening theme song to Mystery Science Theater 3000 and the bionically enhanced Über-Jason of the third act (which, yes, is a thing that exists) wouldn't look out of place in a Mattel catalogue.

Jason Voorhees, now with triple-action kung fu grip.

And before that atrocity is unveiled, Jason's costume is the laziest bit of design in a series for which the high-water mark is denim short-shorts. Honestly, it looks like they literally just jammed a hockey mask on Kane Hodder's face with no touch-up work at all, not even attempting to disguise his terrible late-90's mullet.

In those eyes, you can see the forlorn weariness of a man who has been on the set of Jason Goes to Hell and lived to tell the tale.

Typically Hodder is the best actor on any Friday the 13th set, but he is sleepwalking here, surrounded by the worst cast in a series made famous by poor acting. Perhaps it's the expectation created by the distinctly sci-fi setting that causes the performances to seem so hyperbolically shrill and unbalanced, but the Teen Meat has never been more aggravating. The fact that very few of them seem to die at all is even more frustrating.

Only Jonathan Potts' obsequious professor and Lisa Ryder's cheerfully badass android rise above the muck. And considering the fact that Ryder brings a human warmth and nuance to a role intended to be robotic, maybe it doesn't even count after all.

The Final Girl is vaguely badass but empty, the frequent attempts at comedy fall flat save for one scene set in a virtual reality Camp Crystal Lake, and the action sequences mostly comprise the floor shaking and knocking the cast down like bowling pins over and over and over. It'd be a great pinball game, but it doesn't make for a memorable film.

At least Harry Manfredini's music isn't too self-indulgently spacey. It's nowhere near the frenetic charm of his best franchise work and it scarcely includes the iconic CH-CH-CH motif, but it doesn't sound like Space Mountain, and I'm going to have to put that in the plus column.

At the end of the day, it's still Jason and he's still killing horny teens so it's not the worst horror flick ever invented, but sometimes that just isn't enough. Jason X is without a doubt the nadir of the franchise, and one I would only recommend to the most hardcore Jason fanatics. 

I've seen it three times.

Pray for me.

Killer: Jason Voorhees/Über-Jason (Kane Hodder)

Final Girl: Rowan (Lexa Doig)

Best Kill: Adrienne has her face frozen by liquid nitrogen and slammed on the counter. It shatters into a million bloody pieces and is the only truly memorable gore effect in the film. But it's still one of Jason's career best kills.

Sign of the Times: Apparently in the future, the hot new retro fashion is to dress like you're about to be kicked out of Lollapalooza.

Maybe I should start including fashion victims in the body count.

Scariest Moment: As the crew investigates a rattling door, Jason bursts through a glass window behind them.

Weirdest Moment: Janessa sleeps with Professor Lowe to improve her midterm grades. Future Sex apparently involves having your steel nipple rings twisted by a comically giant clamp. "You pass!"

Champion Dialogue: "I couldn't be with a girl whose balls are bigger than mine."

Body Count: 25; not including the entire population of the space station Solaris, three virtual reality aliens, or Über Jason, who, let's face it, is probably fine.

1. Private Johnson is choked with a chain.
2. Guard #1 is smashed in the head with a machine gun.
3. Guard #2 choked and tossed into gunfire.
4. Guard #3 has his face bashed in with a noose pole. 
5. Guard #4 is choked with a chain.
6. Dr. Wimmer is impaled by a noose pole.
7. Sgt. Marcus is thrown through a steel door.
8. Adrienne has her face frozen in liquid nitrogen and smashed on the counter.
9. Stoney is stabbed in the gut.
10. Azrael is snapped in half.
11. Dallas has his head crushed against a wall.
12. Sven has his neck broken.
13. Condor is impaled on a mining drill.
14. Geko has her throat slit.
15. Briggs is impaled on a large hook.
16. Kicker is sliced in half.
17. Fat Lou is dismembered offscreen.
18. Professor Lowe is decapitated offscreen.
19. Kinsa dies in a shuttle explosion.
20. Crutch is smashed into a control box and electrocuted.
21. Waylander dies in an explosion.
22. Janessa is sucked through a metal grate.
23. Virtual Camper and
24. Virtual Camper #2 are smashed together in their sleeping bags.
25. Sgt. Brodski dies falling into Earth 2's atmosphere. 

TL;DR: Jason X is a tiring, shallow mess unworthy of the Friday the 13th name.
Rating: 4/10
Word Count: 2085
Reviews In This Series
Friday the 13th (Cunningham, 1980)
Friday the 13th Part 2 (Miner, 1981)
Friday the 13th Part 3: 3D (Miner, 1982)
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (Zito, 1984)
Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (Steinmann, 1985)
Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (McLouglin, 1986)
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (Buechler, 1988)
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (Hedden, 1989)
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (Marcus, 1993)
Jason X (Isaac, 2001)
Freddy vs. Jason (Yu, 2003)
Friday the 13th (Nispel, 2009)