Jason X (2001)

What I Knew:
I've seen this one before, though its all a blur. I think Jason is on a space station and he uses one girl to beat another girl to death. I remember it being very tolerable so i'm kind of looking forward to it. Really, i'm looking forward to anything after Jason Goes to Hell. I hope there's a call back to "Does he think i'm a farthead?" in this one.
What I Got:
 Hell. This film begins in hell. The title card says JAXON. Hell is apparently inside of this guy's eyeball, judging from that cut. Oh, Kane Hodder (the Jason from the previous few movies) is reprising the role eight years later. That's pretty cool. Something to look forward to, i guess, since Kane is a pretty imposing bro.
At the Crystal Lake Research Facility, Jason Voorhees is apparently alive and not in hell and chained up. He of course is wearing his mask. A lone guard is guarding him. He approaches to cover Jason's face because he is creeping him out.
Jason is going to be frozen but a guy wants Jason soft to move him to Scranton. A hot doctor thinks thats stupid. Its none of her concern now. The doctor and a cadre of soldiers take the hood off Jason's face, but it turns out that the guard is under it. Jason is free. He kills everyone except the hot doctor.  The hot doctor grabs a shotgun and tries to hide. Jason stalks her into a science room that is making a hissing noise. She shoots him into a pod thing and freezes him. Jason stabs his machete through the pod door, stabbing the hot doctor and making the whole science room freeze.
In the fairly distant future a group of folks are exploring the old Crystal Lake Research Facility. They stumble into the cryo room. There's a cyborg encyclopedia with them. The open the door to Jason's pod. He is still frozen and intact. They also find the hot doctor who they can save. Jason, still frozen, falls and slices a kid's arm off. The group of folks take Jason and the hot doctor to a spaceship that looks exactly like Jason's mask.
The ship is apparently a marine corps vessel. They fly the USS Jason to a space station where they begin to bring the woman back to life. The kid without an arm's arm is growing back. The people in the ground party were apparently Space Medical University students. They use some kind of technology to reattach armless bro's arm all the way.
They take off Hot Doctor's clothes and start reanimating her. They check if Jason is able to come back. He has a tiny brain and a big dick. They use the arm reattach thing to bring hot doctor back and start ripping out Jason's eyeballs. The arm reattach thing is a system called "ants," lil nanobots apparently that cover a surface and start repairing tissue. Hot doctor revives and punches a dude. She finds out she is in the year 2455. The ship is called Grendel.
The guy she punched, apparently some kind of professor, calls his boss to tell him there are two 455 year old bodies on his ship. Tons of people have been reanimated. He wants to charge people to look at the bodies, but his boss thinks its a bad idea, but selling Jason Voorhees could net him a huge income. He is excited
The space coroner is sawing away at Jason's mask. Jason bleeds a black, viscous liquid. Definitely not blood.  Meanwhile the professor is having weird femdom sex with one of his students, a guy is attaching nipples to the android, an annoying couple is having sex, and Jason is beginning to move around. Jason sits up and kills the coroner by pushing her face into liquid nitrogen and then shattering it against a counter. Jason finds a future machete and begins stalking the space station.
The professor brought the hot doctor some food and told her that Earth is dead. She tells the professor that Jason can't die. The professor introduces her to the students and lets her know that Jason is stowed on board. She freaks out and they discover the coroner's corpse. Jason shows up in the sexing couple's room, kills and kidnaps the guy. The girl stumbles, bloodsoaked into the rest of the gang and tells them that her boyfriend is dead. The marines assemble and load up on guns. There is going to be nothing left of Jason by the time they reach Solaris, according to the sergeant.
Some kids are playing Doom when Jason shows up and kills them but it turns out they are simulations of people. When the simulation ends its just two kids in a room with Jason. One of them shoots Jason while one jumps on his back. Jason breaks the guy on his back in half and then slaps the other one into a wall.
The professor offers to pay the sergeant $500,000 if he brings Jason back alive. The sergeant agrees and makes sure one of his marines has a BFG. I'm not making a joke there or whatever, he says "Do you have the BFG?" This movie is Doomier than Doom was. Behind the professor's back, the sergeant says to just kill him. The marines find the corpses of the video gamers and track Jason to the cargo bay.
At his rainy day craft table in the cargo bay, the ship engineer is listening to some tunes and putting together some puzzles. Maybe they are Gundam models. Jason nearly kills him when the marines light him up and also tear apart the rain day craft table. Rest in peace, fair gundams. Jason has disappeared. The marines fan out and search for him.
That proves to be a bad idea as Jason snaps a bro's neck. Another guy tries to have a karate fight with Jason, but he just shoves him onto a big screw where he spins down to the bottom. When the other marines find him, they say he's screwed. LOL. They find the other marine and everyone starts panicking. He slits one marine's throat. She doesnt die though and stumbles gurgling towards her teammates. One marine opens fire at him with his miniature chaingun and picks him up using a crane. After the guy reports Jason as dead, Jason climbs off the crane and slices him in half. As the sergeant approaches, he sees his last marine dangling from the crane. The sergeant is the only one left. Jason stabs him twice in the stomach.
The professor is lying to his students now and they are all waiting in one room for Jason to come and kill them. The engineer shows up in the lab with the students. The pilot sends them to land at the Solaris station, but Jason kills him. They crash into the Solaris and mostly destroy it. They do that Star Trek thing where the camera shakes and everyone holds onto a bit of the set. Solaris then explodes. They are stranded.
They are stranded with no propulsion and limited life support. Jason starts breaking down the lab door but quickly gets bored. He crashed through the lab window and everyone runs. They're actually keeping together which is a refreshing change of pace for the Friday movies. The professor tries to sell Jason on the idea of being celebrities. Jason just wants his machete back. "Guys, its okay he just wanted his machete back." The professor then gets macheted.
The survivors try to formulate an escape. They decide to use the docking shuttle. The android and her programmer go to a different room and kiss. Definitely creepy. They grab a bunch of guns. The engineer and the other male character go to the bridge to start the launch procedure. The others head towards the shuttle bay. The hot doctor finds a gun and goes on the hunt for Jason.
The engineer and bro find the bridge and see the pilot's corpse vivisected and scattered around the bridge. Gross. Hot doctor finds the sergeant in the cargo bay. He's not all the way dead. Gross. Hot doctor promises that she'll get help. The male bro in the bridge leaves the engineer alone to go help. When he arrives, the sergeant's body disappeared and the engineer gets fried. One of the girls has locked herself on the shuttle and wont let the people in. She takes off on her own but sucks at flying and just crashes the shuttle into the ship. They're trapped now, except the android shows up wearing bondage gear and wielding mad guns. Jason just stabs her in the stomach. Jason thinks she's dead but she's just playing android possum and blows him into the next room. She chases him, filling him with bullets all the way. She kicks him in the groin and he falls down. She hops on top, yells "giddy up," and gets shot in the face. Jason has her cornered when the sergeant reappears and stabs him in the back. She gets up and shoots Jason through a wall and then blows off his leg and his head. She stabs him in the chest with his own machete and the nightmare is over... OR IS IT.
They start patching the sergeant up when the ship begins shaking. The ship is dying, but a rescue ship is 45 minutes away. The ship's core is going to explode in 30 minutes. The male student tells the rescue ship not to bother. Hot doctor comes up with a good idea to separate the combat bridge or something and the rescue ship is continuing on its vector.
Jason starts to get healed by those nanobot things. The students set some c4 charges to blow one of the pontoons away so they can survive the core explosion. Jason, now mostly made out of metal, arrives. The android opens fire and starts fighting, but Jason no-sells and punches her head clean off her body. The male character blows the charges and sends Jason into space with the pontoon and the android's body and himself. The rescue ship shows up just in time. Jason punches through the airlock and sucks the last female student out into the vacuum. Its just the sergeant, hot doctor, the android's head, and the programmer left. The escape shuttle attaches but the escape doors wont open. The sergeant goes EVA and Jason goes IVA.
The programmer and hot doctor decide to buy the sergeant some time by throwing Jason a surprise party. The programmer wires his robot girlfriend into the mainframe. Jason makes it into the holodeck. They run a Camp Crystal Lake simulation. They spawn some naked girls in sleeping bags. Jason beats one girl to death by smashing her with another girl in a sleeping bag, and then slamming the second girl into a tree.
The escape hatch opens and they run into the rescue boat, slamming the door on Jason just in time. Just the sergeant and Jason remain on the ship and start fighting each other as the ship catastrophically explodes. Jason's body launches at the rescue ship, but the sergeant tackles him and they hurtle towards Earth-2, incinerating in the atmosphere and crashing into Camp Crystal Lake-2. Some campers decide to investigate. OH NOT AGAIN!
How I Felt:
So this was the fourth best Friday movie which really, really, really isnt saying much. Its almost the right amount of stupid and campy and violent but they overshoot their mark a few times and enter the realm of "silly at best and unwatchable at worst." They're clearly going for a Doom meets Alien meets Friday vibe, which makes sense and should be exactly what they are aiming for with this style movie, but unfortunately they land often on none of the above.  Its not terrible and the special effects are dated but okay for CG, so really its a perfectly mediocre film, which again makes it stand leaps and bounds ahead of Fridays 2, 3, 6, 8, 9 and edges seven pretty far out of contention.
Sequel:
I figure now that i've seen all the Friday the 13th movies i have the right to say how i feel about them and this is the perfect space in my opinion. I'd say that, taken as a whole 15 hour long series, these movies are absolutely horrible. The redeeming aspects of the few good, "good," films is vastly overwhelmed by the bad bad bad bad badness of the greater-in-number bad films. If i was forced to rank them from best to worst, i'd probably say 1, 4, 5, X, 7, 2, 8, 3, 9, 6. The Alice Hardy and Tommy Jarvis movies (1, the first act of 2, 4, 5, and 6) show the most potential for being quality. They both have protagonists we care about in situations that feel familiar enough to relate to acting (mostly) like real people. I think anyone who watches 1 is rooting for Alice to take out Mrs. Voorhees and 4, 5, and 6 for Tommy to put an end to his nemesis once and for all. Its a shame 6 opts for poor meta-humor and "sly" winks-and-nods at its own expense. "Does he think I'm a farthead????"
More than anything in this new series of Friday the 13th movies, I want Tommy Jarvis. I want an adult Corey Feldman in the role he was born to play. Maybe cross it over with the Lost Boys franchise and have the Brothers Frogg show up in Crystal Lake to fend off Jason. I just want more Corey Feldman. All Feldman, All the Time.
In my opinion, the worst Friday movies were the ones that either tried to establish additional continuity (his backstory in 2, him being a lil lizard dude in 9) and the ones that ignored previous continuity (Mrs. Voorhees coming back as a zombie in 3, Jason being able to teleport in all of them post-6, Crystal Lake changing location like a million times in the later films). There's enough established in Friday 1 where you didnt need the overexplanation of 2 and you dont need Jason to be magically retconned in 6. Jason can show up in 2 and just be a full-sized killing machine and there's no need to explain, no need to say "he was a swamp mutant who lived in the lake and loved his mother very much," no need to show his face. Just say, "He's Jason Voorhees, he wants to kill people, he does kill people, nothing can stop him." And never, ever show his face. Jason without his mask is just a dumb idea. Any masked monster without their mask is a bad idea. It humanizes them, shows them not as unstoppable killing machines like Jason or Michael Myers, but as people like you or I. Makes them seem like they have emotions and I don't know about you, but emotions don't terrify me as much as an absolute cold lack of them.
If you ask me, Friday 1 is classic, a must-see. 4 and 5 are excellent if you are into a very specific kind of campy, funny, violent movie. I guess if you enjoy Crispin Glover and Corey Feldman, 4 is a must-see and 5 is just a solid follow up. Avoid 3, 6, 8, and 9 like the plague. They don't add anything to the canon and only take away.
So next on the campy 80s horror docket is the A Nightmare on Elm Street series, culminating with Freddie Vs. Jason. Then the remakes!