Weirdhouse Cinema: Jason X

In this special Friday the 13th episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe blast into the future of terror with 2001’s “Jason X.” That’s right, with their 100th film selection, they finally venture into a new decade, century and millennium of cinema. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema. This
is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. And Hey,
this is the one hundred film selection on Weird House Cinema.

(00:24):
And we're we're marking the occasion by finally entering a
new century, a new millennium of film. Um, we're we're
gonna be talking about our most recent film yet, the
twenty two year old Jason X. Now it's Friday on
the day of this episode releases. Uh, and of course

(00:46):
it being our hundredth episode. I feel like these facts
were significant robbed in your suggestion of Jason X for
for today's episode, But I think it's an excellent choice.
Not so much because I think it's like a great
movie or one that I've I'm going to tell people
they must go out and see, like I would say
about Inframan or Ship of Monsters. There's some of the
other ones we've we've looked at that are just you know,

(01:08):
you just want to share that joy with the world.
It's not really in that category, but I think it
will be fantastic fun to talk about. And I also
think It's a great choice because it's a movie with
a literal three word plot summary. What's the elevator pitch
on Jason X. It's Jason in space? Right, it is
known character in previously unexplored setting. Very Dracula goes west. Yeah, yeah,

(01:33):
I mean it's looking back on it, it's easy to
think this was a no brainer. Of course, Jason goes
into space. But another thing about this movie is that
not only does the character known to us by by
the point this movie came out go to a new location,
the character is himself changed by the journey because this
is the movie where Jason becomes a cyborg. One of

(01:55):
the taglines featuring on posters for Jason X was evil
it's an upgrade. Yeah, it's um. I mean, there's so
much fun in this movie because it is like a
character from one genre stepping into another genre, bringing all
of his own tropes with him, but then also encountering
all the tropes of the genre that he is stepping into.

(02:19):
Uh So, it's it's there's so many idea Like you
can imagine that the writing process and the brainstorming process
for this was was pretty rich with ideas. It's a
ten car pile up of genre cliches. Now, I thought, Rob,
you you found the link to Roger Ebert's half star
review of this film. It was not even a whole

(02:39):
star for him, uh, and I thought it might be
good bye by referencing some of the things he says
about this He begins by quoting a line of dialogue
from the film, which is this sucks on so many
levels in the movie, literally referring to a whole pressure
breach in a spaceship where characters are at the risk
of being sucked out into into the void. But Ebert

(03:00):
goes on to say, quote rare for a movie to
so frankly describe itself, Jason X sucks on the levels
of storytelling, character development, suspense, special effects, originality, punctuation, neatness,
and aptness of thought. Only its title works. Now, I
think that's that's maybe a little overly harsh, but I mean,

(03:22):
I want to recognize that my my appreciation for this
movie is an appreciation that is tempered by the context
of my relationship with the rest of these movies and
my knowledge of horror cliches. I'm not going to like
defend Jason X deeply on its own terms. Or say well, no,
it's actually good. Yeah. Yeah, this this review actually gave

(03:45):
me pause when I was revisiting this film as a
potential Weirdhouse selection, because I look back and I saw, oh, gosh,
half a star. I don't. As I've said before, I
don't always agree with with Ebert's reviews. Sometimes I agree
with them, you know, pretty wrongly. Sometimes we're on on
different planets. And I was suspecting it might be the
case here. But I was like, maybe there's something I'm

(04:07):
misremembering about this film, and I really need to go
back and view it again. Before I even suggested Joe
that we we cover it. Um. Yeah, I ended up
disagreeing with Ebert on on a lot of this, But
at the same time, I've got some kind of like you,
I can't say I'm not going to defend Jason X
on storytelling and character development or any of these other

(04:28):
categories either beyond this, you know. Ebert notes that the
movie opened on the sixteenth anniversary of the Chernobyl meltdown. Um,
and then he says the movie is basically a rehash
of Alien, where I think that's quite unfair. Only about
a third of it is a rehash of Alien, and
the other parts are transporting Friday thirteen tropes into space,

(04:49):
and then the last third of it is a rehash
of Aliens, the sequeled Alien. But you know this, so
the Monster stalks crew members in in dark spaceship corridors,
picks them off one by one. You can't see the
similarity except here, of course. The Monster is not an
original design like the Xeno Morph, but the by the
year two thousand one quite familiar figure of Jason Vorhe

(05:11):
is a big lug in a hockey mask with a
machete who just kills people for some reason. What are
the strangest things about how people reacted to this movie
when it came out? Uh? Is that I remember something.
I was just in high school at the time, but
I remember some people being like Jason in Space, Okay,
they've gone too far. That's just silly, you know, like

(05:34):
as if there were an important core of realism and
seriousness that the Friday thirteenth franchise had maintained up until
this point, only to cast it aside by going going
full edwood and allowing an undead revenant to board a
rocket ship. I would say, not only is this premise untrue,
I think sending Jason into space and turning him into

(05:58):
a nanobot cyborg actually elevates the series in a hole,
and I want to sort of explain how I mean
that in a roundabout way. But first I want to acknowledge,
as we did in our previous episode on Jason Takes Manhattan.
So this is our second film in the Friday the
thirteenth franchise we've covered. Uh. Despite the fact that these

(06:18):
movies are for the most part, I admit, quite poorly
made by most measures, maybe apart from makeup effects in
in some installments like like the first one and so forth. Um.
And despite the fact that they were nearly universally panned
by critics, Friday was and is immensely popular up until
just recently. I think it was the highest grossing horror

(06:40):
franchise in history, and I think for a while, certainly
in the eighties and nineties in the United States, if
you went up to a random person on the street
and you said, think of a horror movie villain, I
suspect the answer you would be most likely to get
would not be Dracula or Frankenstein or even Pizzuo Zoo.
It would be Jason Vorhees. For some time, the hockey

(07:03):
mask became the symbol of the horror genre, which is crazy,
right if you're approaching this from a from a sports standpoint, right, Yeah, yeah, totally.
I mean it's it's kind of weird that such a
thing ended up in these movies to begin with. I mean,
this is just a piece of sports equipment. Yeah. So
a film critic like Roger Ebert or any number of

(07:25):
others might think of the Friday Thirteenth movies as uninteresting, predictable,
or formulaic, kind of mindlessly violent and puerile, uh, just
generally ranking low in I don't know, artistic innovation and
stuff compared to a lot of other great spooky horror
movies that that that do much better on those accounts,
And in fact, I have no way to disagree with them.

(07:47):
But something about these movies kept audiences coming back. And
as I think I also said in the Jason Takes
Manhattan episode, I find the Friday the Thirteenth movies and
movies like them kind of psychologically revealing, like in the
same way that it is revealing when people tell you
about their dreams. It's like you're peeling back some membrane

(08:10):
that usually kind of filters your thoughts for maturity and uh,
tastefulness before you share them with other people, and instead
you're just looking straight into the filmmaker's id. Now, when
it comes to the predictable or formulaic nature of these movies,
you can try to history where the series does sort

(08:31):
of keep trying new things in a way, like in
parts two through four, those are all in a way
just pretty much the same. Jason is a mad slasher
who it attacks a house full of misbehaving eighteen to
twenty somethings. Uh. Then that that kind of gets played out, Uh,
they start switching up the formula. In part five, there

(08:51):
is a twist where it's not Jason at all, but
it's a copycat killer. In part six they really switch
things up by introducing the soup or natural because it's
only in part six that Jason now is a re
animated corpse with powers that seem to include super strength
in vulnerability and teleportation. In part seven they switch it

(09:12):
up again. This is the one where they have Jason
face off against a final girl with the power of telekinnsis,
So it's kind of Jason versus Carrie that it's pretty fun. Yeah.
Part eight, which is the one we previously covered on
the show, they try to switch it up by changing
the location. So this is Jason Takes Manhattan, a movie
that is mostly about a boat. They should have called

(09:33):
it Jason Takes Boat. But then he has a few
brief scenes in Vancouver, which and there's one where they
actually shot it in Times Square. Also a lot of fun, yes,
And another piece of context outside of the uh, the
fictional movie canon, sort of the real world context is
that up until about part seven, the series was a

(09:55):
money printing machine. You know, you could make a movie
on the cheap for like two were three million dollars
and then make twenty million dollars in ticket sales. But
after part seven, box office returns started to become more disappointing.
I think Jason Takes Manhattan had a slightly uh more
disappointing return, and that trend would continue with the next movie.

(10:17):
So in part nine, Jason goes to Hell, things get
really weird in a bad way. There's some plot about
like there's like a little little rat snake demon that
lives inside Jason and can jump into other people's mouths
and possess them so they become Jason, but they just
look like whatever actor it's jumped into. Um. But like

(10:37):
many people, I find Jason Goes to Hell just unwatchable,
excruciatingly gross, unpleasant, hideous visuals, awful music, not really much
redeeming at all, except for uh, some some brief but
excellent weird vibes from the actor Steven Williams, who plays
a bounty hunter on the trail of Jason Vorhees, which

(10:58):
is a hilarious concept to be in with. Uh, but
I also believe that he's the character who introduces the
concept of a magic dagger to the series canon. That
one would be And I don't think I've ever watched
Jason Goes to Hell and full but I've just seen
like some clips that you've sent me. But like this
one seems to be a case where the title really works,

(11:18):
Like Jason goes to Hell. That that that sounds like
a bold new direction. That sounds like Jason is venturing
into the underworld, into the afterlife. They're gonna be demons.
Who knows what else it's gonna contain. No, it's just
another slasher movie, but like grosser and less funny than
than previous ones. And most of the time Jason doesn't

(11:39):
look like Jason. He just looks like somebody walking around
and then they look in a mirror and it's Jason's reflection.
Oh man, Like they couldn't even have the possessed individual
have this, like this compulsion to put on a hockey
mask or something not that I recall. So that one's
really bad. Um. But then come so here we're coming
up on the tenth film in the franchise. Uh, any

(12:00):
returns of started being not so good. Um not like
the series ever had like real artistic integrity. But I
think even from a critical appraisal point of view, like
the movies are getting less good. Um. So the concept
was relatively empty and vulgar to begin with, and attempts
to vary the formula have been made, and the last
movie is just this anti fun bucket of slop. So

(12:23):
what what are you going to do next? What are
you gonna do? Where can you go from here? And
I think you've got a couple of options, especially at
the time this was made, because they're developing this in
the late nineties. Uh, this is after Scream comes out.
So one option you have is you could sort of
do what Wes Craven did with Scream, do the movie
equivalent of the mirror self recognition test and create a

(12:46):
film that acknowledges or even satirizes the conventions of the
genre to which it belongs. But another option is to
just spread the wings of absurdity and take flight. And
Jason X does a little bit of the former, but
more of the latter, And in doing so, I think,
despite the fact that it's not actually a great movie,

(13:07):
it performed a kind of retroactive benediction upon the earlier films,
acknowledging that yes, these movies like have always been exactly
this ludicrous. Jason X made the earlier movies feel less
violently sadistic and more like overt grand gueniall in camp.
It is the space Buddies phase of the property. Uh

(13:29):
you know. Jason X breathes this innocence back into the
subject matter, kind of stupid innocence, and Friday Thirte becomes
what it was always meant to be. And personally, I
think they should have kept going in this direction and
made movies where Jason becomes Santa Claus like in the
Tim Allen sense, he is caught by the Santa Claus
and he's forced to become St. Nicholas and deliver presence,

(13:52):
or he's drafted by the NFL according to Airbud style loopholes.
But alas that is not what we got. I have
to understand that the pitch meeting for for the or
maybe not the pitch meeting, but the initial brainstorming for
Jason X involved a number of different concepts. I think
that like they talked about doing like like Christal, like

(14:12):
what if they did Jason in winter you know, like
it's Crystal Lake camp, but it's winter time, so I
don't know, Jasons to kill people with icicles or something. Uh,
sounds pretty solid, But they didn't. They didn't do that,
and they started coming up with these crazier ideas. And
part of the reason they ended up going with something
futuristic was that they knew that Jason versus Freddie was

(14:33):
more or less in the pipeline and that was going
to be coming up more or less next so they
didn't want to do anything that would get in the
way of that. I don't know why you need to
get too worried about that. Clearly, like logic film, the
film in the Friday the thirteenth series. Well, weirdly, I
would say, so far the films actually did maintain basic continuity,

(14:56):
like they all acknowledge the ones that had come before.
Once you get Ason X, that kind of all goes
out the window. And I think that may have been intentional.
It may have been like, well, this one is going
to get so absurd and go so far afield that
audiences will no longer expect the films that follow to
maintain continuity with it. Yeah, like this is this is

(15:16):
shooting so far ahead into the future that it doesn't
matter what the next Can Friday that thirteenth movies consist of.
But to your point, it's it seems kind of shocking
that they didn't keep going. Uh in this vein with
with Jason that we didn't get the Santa Claus of
the NFL concept or something equally ridiculous. It's really a

(15:37):
shame we we did not get that stuff. But I
should also note one last thing. Despite everything I've just
said about my own opinions, Jason X was of course
also panned by critics, not just Ebert but generally, and
also did very poorly at the box office, so it
did not save the franchise in terms of money returns. Uh.
It was also released at a very weird time. It
came out November two thousand one, which I don't know

(16:00):
who wanted to see a Jason movie. Then it's it's
kind of weird to figure out where people stand on
this movie, because on one hand, this is a movie
that I had a favorable opinion of, uh and still
have a favorable opinion of. I think it's a fun film.
It's a film that has been recommended to us for
Weird House before. People have written in and said you
should do Jason X. And if we said we're gonna

(16:22):
do a Friday the thirteenth, they're like, oh, is it
Jason X. So um. You know it has its followers.
When I go on to letterbox dot com and I
pull up our episode list of the different films that
we've covered in Weird House, if I sort by popularity,
it is the fifth most popular film that we've talked about.
And yet at the same time, you go somewhere like IMDb,

(16:43):
and I know IMDb user ratings um and not not
the gold standard perhaps, but it only has a four
point four out of ten on there, So I guess
enough people think it is bad or or actively dislike it,
But it's hard to tell how much of that too
is like it's a sort of so bad it's good
sort of view of things, and even though they're giving
it a low rating, they still have a higher opinion

(17:05):
of it. Well. I think it's the kind of movie
where just the concept, like just the sheer force of
the concept and the fact that this concept was followed
through on to production and release is enough to take
it like most of the way there, Like at that point,
you're not super concerned, like, uh, you know, is the
script really that clever, like or the actor is good.

(17:28):
It's just kind of like it's Jason in space and
they actually made it. That's not just a joke. And
the crazy thing about it is that it's the sort
of concept where it could easily work better as a
trailer than a movie, but because the energy, it might
be hard to keep that energy up. But I feel
like the movie does keep that energy up. They're able

(17:48):
to actually keep you engaged with this ludicrous concept throughout
the run. So, speaking of let's let's hear the trailer audio.
You're gonna hear a lot of the snappier lines from
this film. In the trailer in the year, on a

(18:09):
routine training mission, a team of students is about to
discover a life form frozen in time. Wow, they're on
their back. Pay for talcum power of the lab. You
brought him on board. Everything's under control. Man, the hell

(18:34):
is going on? Jason fourties, That's what's going on. He's
an unstoppable killing machine. It's okay. He just wanted his back.
How do we get off the ship? I don't know. Look,
we're gonna be all right. What are you high? He's here.

(18:56):
You have got to get them out of there. He slappy.
I think we're finally okay. What the hell is that?
You've got to be kidding me? Oh wow, it's been modified.

(19:18):
You guys might want to run, all right, and before
we keep moving on here, I'm just gonna go ahead.

(19:39):
Mentioned If you want to watch Jason X, you can
watch it most places. You can buy it or stream
it digitally pretty much anywhere. You can pick it up
as a physical Blu ray or a d v D.
Though I don't think it's received any kind of really
glowing um re release or anything. I don't to my knowledge,
there haven't been any really crazy special editions of this film.

(20:00):
Maybe I'm wrong and and maybe in the future will
get something like that. Well, there's a there's a really
good UM full full series disc pack of Fred screen
Factory or shout Factory, whatever you call it. UM. But
but yeah, I don't know if it has a standalone
release of that type. Okay, yeah, I kind of forgot
about the elaborate Friday the thirteenth full series releases. Like,

(20:23):
for example, the version of it I watched is the
disc from that pack, and it begins with an optional
introduction of Kane Hotter, the man who plays Jason. He
says to the audience. Uh, he says, please enjoy the
film as you watch it, or I will kill you. Well.

(20:47):
Shall we get into the people involved in this film?
All right? So at the top of the list here
we have the director James Isaac. James Isaac lived as
a special fects guy. Isaac's work goes all the way
back to three Return of the Jedi, on which he
was a creature effects technician. He followed that up with

(21:09):
helping to make the Grimlins in four as part of
the creature crew, and subsequent special effects credits include five
Enemy Mine, nine seven's House to the Second Story nineteen nineties.
Look who's talking to Virtuosity and David Cronenberg's Existence in
nine Okay, here's the Cronenberg connection. We'll come back to

(21:33):
that a couple of times as we moved down the
cast list. But Virtuosity, isn't that the one that had oh,
what's his name? It had Australian man Russell Crowe. Russell
Crow strutting while staying alive plays on the soundtrack. Yeah,
he's like a three D printed, the blue blooded super
clone of all the serial killers ever, and Denzo Washington

(21:56):
has to hunt him or something. I think I watched
it on TV many years ago. Well, um, Like, like
you said, though, Isaac worked on Existence, but this wasn't
the only time he worked with Cronenberg. He did creature
effects on The Fly and eight six, and he was
project supervisor on his film Naked Lunch. Other special effects

(22:17):
credits include eighty nine Deep Star six, directed by Sean S. Cunningham,
who was the original Friday the Thirteenth director and a
producer on Jason X. That was one of those nineteen
eighty nine underwater peril or horror movies that we've talked
about on the show before. Uh. That is the one
that I mainly recall for a scene where Miguel Ferrare
uh jumps into an escape pod to get out of

(22:40):
the deep sea base and then does rapid explosive decompression.
Oh yeah, yeah, I watched this one on an airplane
at one point, and I don't remember. I think I
was kind of out of it when I watched it.
But it has a big spacebug. And no it's not
a space bug. It's it's a deep deep sea bug.
But it has a big bug in it. They get attacked.
Is it a killer clam? I think do they? It's

(23:05):
a It's all kind of a dream to me. It
is some sort of killer mollusk from the depths. Um oh,
and Isaac also worked on es A Rachnophobia. I don't
want to be unkind, but it's interesting to me that
he did visual effects on all these movies with great
visual effects um and apart from like one special effect
that is very good and widely acknowledged as very good,

(23:28):
I feel like the effects in Jason X are not great,
and part of that maybe, I mean, there's obviously the
digital problem, which Hubert was very vocal about there are
a number of digital effects in here. In fact, I
think this is the first time in the Friday the
Thirteenth series where we have some digital blood effects, which

(23:48):
I know m film fans and gore hounds alike tend
to dislike in their films. I would not consider myself
a gorehound, but I do not enjoy that nonetheless, m Um.
Isaac though, how did he become a director? Well, it's
a similar scenario that we've seen in other cases. There's
a there was a film House three, the Horror Show

(24:10):
said Lance Hendrickson and Brian James and it and the
director's chair was vacated due to some reason or another,
and so Isaac stepped up and directed the rest of
the thing. And then he did Jason X. And he
followed this up with just two films before his untimely death.
He did two thousands sixes skin Walkers. I think I

(24:31):
saw a part of this one, and then two thousand
eights Pig Hunt, which is I believe a killer or
mutant pig movie. M oh, alongside the likes of that
Russell mulkahe movie that's basically like Australian Jaws meets Texas
Chainsaw Massacre, but the Jaws part has a pig instead
of a shark. Oh man, it's kind of it's still
kind of alarming that we haven't done Russell Mkay film

(24:54):
yet on Weird House. We will, all right, Let's get
to the screenplay credit, also an acting credit, because this
guy also plays the character Dallas in this. It's Todd
farmer Born. This was his first screenwriting credit and his
first acting role, and he's gone into act and write
in a string of horror movies, including the two thousand
nine remake of My Bloody Valentine. He was also one

(25:16):
of the writers on the two thousand eleven Nick Cage
film Drive Angry. I already mentioned uh some of the uh,
the the other possibilities that came up, and these are
for this film that Farmers mentioned in interviews. Another one
that he mentions is Jason takes the Middle East was
at least explored to some degree as a concept. I'm
glad they did not go in that direction. I can't imagine.

(25:38):
That sounds terrible, but also I guess it makes sense
that around that time they were they were thinking of this.
But yeah, thankfully they did not go in that direction.
But two ideas that they mentioned were Jason blade Runner
and Jason Alien, which obviously it seems like some of
the ideas from those two buckets ended up in this picture. Yes,
this film has both a replicant and a monster loose

(26:01):
on the spaceship. So yeah, the monster, of course is
Kane Holder. Like we said, who plays Jason Vorhees and
credit is playing Jason Vorhees slash uber Jason. Um, this
is cyber Jason that you know, we get. I mean
he's in the trailer. You know what's going to happen. Uh,
He's gonna be upgraded into some sort of half mechanical,
cybernetic superman killer. But we we profiled Kane on the

(26:27):
Jason Takes Manhattan episode. But yeah, basically born five stunt
man turned stunt coordinator and actor, with the stunt acting
credits going all the way back to the nineteen seventies. Um,
he didn't start playing Jason until New Blood in but
then subsequently appeared as him in three more Jason movies.
But before new Blood, he'd appeared as an actor in

(26:47):
such films as House to an Alligator, playing the alligator uncredited.
And he's done stunt work in The Hills Have Eyes
Part two. He also did a leather face stunt work
in TCM three, and he played Freddie's gloved hand at
the end of Jason Goes to Hell. So Jason is
a non speaking role, but but Kane Hotter brings a
lot of performative posture to the character, Like he really

(27:10):
kind of signals Jason's inner life just in the way
he sort of like heaves his chest as he breathes
or turns his shoulders in his face. Oh yeah, absolutely,
we we we talked about this is a good bit
with Jason takes Manhattan, he has he has. It's it's
easy to dismiss the man behind the mask and say,
well that's not important, but it is a great physical performance. Agreed.

(27:32):
Our main protagonist are I guess she's kind of our
final girl that this movie kind of flips the script
enough that you don't really have the final girl scenario
going on here. But uh, the character that that that
hangs out the longest alongside Jason in this film is
the character Rowan played by Lexi Dilick. Yeah, she's kind

(27:53):
of different than than the standard Friday thirteenth final girl.
Um in that She's not like the the smart, well
behaved youth among a bunch of party people. She instead
is from literally a different century. Yeah. But in that
I guess, because I guess one of the ideas and
the other Jason films is the Good Girl. The Final

(28:14):
Girl is also more traditional. She's not one of these
new youth that are so problematic. And in this yes,
she's very um traditional because she's from four hundred years ago,
that's right. Uh. And she's some kind of scientists. She's
like the director of the Crystal Lake Research Facility, whatever
that is. We never find out what her research specialty

(28:37):
is other than maybe cryogenics. Yeah, so she ends up
essentially being our time traveling Final Girl. Lexidag a Canadian
actor who started on on such TV shows as The
Hidden Room and Tech War, but eventually went on to
act on such shows as Earth Final Conflict, The Chris
Isaac Show, and Dromedat hundred, Stargate SG One, Supernatural, Smallville,

(29:00):
and Continuum. She played Talia al gool on TV's Arrow,
and she has a major role on The Chucky TV show,
which I have not watched, but my friend Dave Streepy
tells me that it is great and uh yeah, she's
she saw it in this and I think correct me
if I'm wrong, but she may be the first lead
actor of Asian to send in a Friday the Thirteenth movie.

(29:20):
So I don't know, but I agree she slid in this.
I mean, no roles in this movie are really written
with enough panache to like really give the actor is
anything to grab onto, But she does great with what's there? Yeah,
I mean, if nothing else, it is the character that,
at least for a while very much is the one

(29:41):
warning everybody like you're doing what you still have Jason
on the ship, etcetera. And so that energy propels her
for a good, good bit of the run here. Yes,
we also have a character by the name of Professor
Lowe played by Jonathan Potts born ninety four. This is
the sleazy professor that is lead this excursion to Old Earth.

(30:01):
Will explain all this that uh that ends up resurrecting
Jason forties for for greed. I don't know why he's
a professor. He doesn't do anything professor really. I think
it was just like, you know, an excuse to have
a cast full of eighteen to twenty four year olds
as they're often are in these you know, in the
Friday Thirteenth movies, are like the students, and so I guess, well,

(30:24):
there should be a professor, but he what's he a
professor of? He just seems to be like a grave
robber professor of earth studies. I believe Earth one study
really is that it. He's an archaeologist but also sleeps back. Um. Now.
Jonathan Potts himself again Canadian actor, has done a ton
of TV, especially Canadian TV, over the years, including The

(30:46):
Hitchhiker in eight nine. He was the voice of Link
on the Legend of Zelda TV series. Okay, yeah, he
was on Wait Forever, Hold on a second, there was
a Legend of Zelda TV series. Yeah, apparently there was.
I don't remember it, but he he did the voice.
He was also a voice on a Super Mario series.
So I don't know if these were Japanese productions that

(31:09):
were then exported maybe to the North American market, and
then they've just been brought in. I mean that's probably
what it was, right, Super Mario Super Show. He may
have done that one. I think he's credited on that one.
But mainly he's the voice of of Link on the
Legend of Zelda TV series Oki Doki. Yeah, but anyway,
also such credits as Forever Night, the Canadian vampire series

(31:33):
that maybe many of us probably remember. That one's big
in my memory as like a thing I would watch
on hotel cable when my family went on vacation. Yeah,
it's one I remember as being like one of those
shows that's on at strange times to watch TV when
there's nothing else on, and you just find yourself watching
part of Forever Night, but but not being drawn into
Forever Night. But also another show pretty much fits the same.

(31:57):
Bill Kung through the legend continues. But he was in
Due South, he was in Russell McKay's nine film Resurrection
alongside Christopher Lambert. He was on Queer as Folk. He
was in the two thousand ten film Devil, he was
on the Strain. He was in Supernatural, Working Moms and
The Coomy Rule. So I've not seen much of that,

(32:19):
but I would like to see how this actor would
be used in a Russell mukayy production. And this he
plays a greedy, sleazy professor. And I don't know if
there's all that much to say about the part. Like
like I said about Basically, none of the characters are
all that interestingly written a right, and it's it's not
an interesting performance either, Like he's I think it's safe

(32:39):
to say he's done better in plenty of other places. Now,
one character that is a fun addition to the lineup
here is the cyborg k M fourteen played by Lisa
Rider born nineteen seventy. Okay, now here, they're kind of
injecting something into the movie. This is something we never
expected to see Jason versus a robot. It yeah, and

(33:01):
and it's it's great that they went there. They didn't
hold back there, Like we're putting Jason in the future
on a spaceship, should we also have him, uh do
battle with with an attractive female cyborg? And they said, yes,
of course we should do that. Why why would we
set this up if we're not going to give that
to the viewer. Also, I detect like once she goes

(33:22):
into Jason battle mode, her character seems strongly at least
aesthetically matrix influenced with like the gun play in the
kung Fu and the outfit. That's right, this movie's post
matrix anyway. Lisa Rider is a Canadian actor still very
active but she also played a computer woman on TVs
Andromeda and other TV credits include Earth Final Conflict, Forever Night,

(33:45):
and The Strain. I hope they're going to be a
number of these titles that keep coming up. It's kind
of the same scenario. I encountered a lot watching nineties
episodes of the Outer Limits. Uh, you have this, this
this talented pool of Canadian actors, but they appear in
a lot of these different Canadian productions. Yeah, this is
the thing that seems to be emerging as we look
at all the people here. It's just Canada, Canada, Canada.

(34:08):
It's it's very Yeah, it's a very Canadian film. Um.
It reminds me a lot of Outer Limits in many
respects because Outer Limits was a series that was filmed
in Canada, featured mostly Canadian actors, had often really good
practical effects, but often uh, really underperforming digital effects. And

(34:29):
uh and I would say to digital effects on some episodes,
maybe many episodes of of Outer Limits when they really
went for it, were worse than anything we see in
this film. Wow. But sometimes they also didn't lean as
heavily on it and so forth. Okay, but so uh,
this movie has not just a. I guess in switching
it up, it doesn't have a final girl. It has

(34:50):
more of a final boy. There's kind of a good
boy who's like nice in contrast to all of the
other young characters, right, would you say, yeah, yeah, we
have Sunarin played by Chuck Campbell nine. He's he's a
robot technician. He's also the robot's boyfriend. He is he's
the boyfriend of of k M fourteen and um and

(35:12):
and he's I guess he's also the nerd character, Like
he's the good boy nerd of the film, but not
the kind of doomed nerd. I mean, there's two different
kinds of nerds who show up in a Friday the
Thirteenth ensemble. There is the nerd who you see as
clearly marked for death by Jason, and then there's the
kind of sweet nerd who will make it to the
end of credits. Yeah yeah, which I guess kind of

(35:33):
It shows how the nerd character in cinema progresses over
the years, where it's this this character of pure mockery,
uh in pity becomes this character that is like I
think from many fans, like we realize, oh, well that
is us, and so that maybe this character should survive.
We should focus on the survivability of this character as

(35:54):
opposed to anything else. We got to flatter the audience,
which is in this case a theater full of nerds. Yeah, yeah,
myself included. Though I did not get to see it
on the big screen. I probably saw this on DVD,
but at any right, campbell Um. His other TV credits
include Stargate Atlantis, and he also had a small role
as a customer I'm not sure which customer in John

(36:17):
Carpenter's in the Mouth of Madness. Oh and then we
have another fun member of the cast here. Peter Mensa
plays Sergeant Broadski. This is our head space marine aboard
the ships called the Grendel. If I'm the Grendel, Yes,
the Grendel, lead space machine on the Grendel. Sergeant broad
Sky here space marine, space marine. Yes, what I say

(36:42):
space machine. No, but he is a machine because he
is he is quite a physical specimen. Uh. And I
think a charismatic, fun performance like It's I feel like
it's impossible to not like Peter Mensa in this movie.
I agree totally. Once again, there's not a lot to
this character on the page, Like basically for all the characters,
but Peter Mensa brings a lot to the role. He's

(37:04):
He's just very charming um and delivers even lines that
would be cringe e off the lips of another actor
with with you know, a good sense of fun. Yeah.
I think he's a solid action movie acting presence and
uh and it is very likable in the film. Um
he's a Ghandhian English actor who gamers will probably recognize

(37:26):
for his voice and likeness as Zach Hammond in two
thousand eights dead Space, the original Dead Space video game.
I don't think he's a part of the remake that
they're putting out soon, but hey, he mince has been
busy with other things because his TV credits include Earth
Final Conflict, Highlander, The Raven that's the spinoff, um Star

(37:48):
Trek Enterprise, Terminator, the Sarah Connor Chronicles. Uh, the Spartacas
TV show or TV shows is a big one. He
had a recurring character on those UM those series. Uh,
let's see, he was on True Blood, Sweepy Hollow, the
Agents of Shield. Um. On the film front, he was
in two thousands Bruiser, the George Romero film. Oh, and uh,

(38:10):
a lot of people will remember him from two thousand
six is three hundred, in which he played the Persian
messenger who gets kicked down a well. This is of
course the famous this is Spartat scene, bummer, how dare
you kick Peter Mensa down in a well? As Sparta sucks?
They maybe they felt bad about it, and that's why
they brought him back for three hundred, Rise of an Empire,

(38:30):
a movie that I watched like a minute of in
an airplane once. Oh. But he was also in two
thousand eighth, Incredible Hole, two thousand nines, avatar Um. He
was in the Scorpion King Colon Book of Lost Souls
from two thousand eighteen and Snake Eyes from one So
he's been a very busy man over the years. He's
got a great moment where the sleazy professor is trying

(38:52):
to talk him into uh taking Jason alive, and uh,
you know, he keeps offering him increasing sums of my
me and then at one point he seems to acquiesced, like, okay, yeah,
give me five hundred thousand dollars and we'll take Jason alive.
And then he walks away to his grunts and says
to them Okay, professor wants me to take him alive,
so you know, after you blast him to pieces, put

(39:14):
one in his legs so it looks like we tried. Yeah,
he's just he's just a good character. He has a
good moral fiber. And correct me if I'm wrong in this,
because your knowledge of the Jason movies farser passes my own.
But I feel like this character, uh, the sergeant here
is unlike anything Jason's gone up against before, Like this
is a strong, physically capable and trained guy that he

(39:39):
has to combat. Yeah, basically, well, I mean, so do
do I want to discuss the details of Jason Goes
to Hell? So Jason Goes to Hell begins with Jason
like getting blown up by a I don't know, military brigade,
swat team or something. They like blow him to pieces,
and then they take the pieces to uh coroner's office,

(40:02):
I think, And then the corner like starts looking at
his heart and then eats it and then becomes Jason.
This is what I recall happening. So, I mean, he
has faced real force before, but I think only in
that instance. Um, so, no, he he has never like
done battle with a with a tough guy like Peter
Mensa and so so this is pretty much new all right, Um,

(40:24):
there's another character in this Gecko. Is Gecko a space
marine as well? I don't remember. Okay, See, she didn't
stand out to me all that much in in previous
viewings of the of the film, but she stood out
this time because if you've spent any amount of time
during the pandemic watching Canadian comedy series on Netflix like
I have, then you will recognize Gecko, played by Amanda

(40:46):
Bruegel as pastor Nina from Kim's Convenience and also as
the character Sonia from Working Moms, another popular Canadian uh
comedy that aired on Netflix here in the States. I
haven't seen either of those shows. Yeah, yeah, she's a
she's a talented comedic actor. She didn't really get to
do that in this film. She's just another space marine

(41:10):
killed by Jason in this. But yeah, she's been in
a ton of things. She's recent She recently played Rita
Blue on thirty five episodes of The Handmad's Tale. She
was on The Snow Pierce for TV series, which I watched,
but I you know, I don't remember her from that
as much. Uh. She was on Orphan black and on
the movie front, she was in Suicide Squad and she's
going to be in Brandon Cronenberg's upcoming Infinity Pool among others.

(41:34):
That's a movie title, not a not no, not yet,
not just his infinity pool in his backyard. He yeah,
he has it on that that website where you rent
out your pools two people, and she's going to she's
gonna rent it. It's it's exciting. Hey, but you just
said the name Cronenberg and we've been talking about Canada NonStop.
What what what? What? What's going on here? Oh? Well, yes,

(41:55):
David Cronenberg himself shows up playing Dr Wimmer or Dr Wimmer.
I can't remember how they pronounced, you know, if they
say his character's name, I don't even recall it because
it's just David Cronenberg on screen and the character I
think is David Cronenberg. Yeah, this is David Cronenberg, the
legendary Canadian director born three. We talked all about David
Cronenberg the director last week on our Scanners episode, but

(42:18):
this week we're talking about David Cronenberg the actor. And
did he end up in this I'm not sure, but
I mean it is Canadian and he just shows up
at the beginning to say it's almost as if he
got wind this film was being made near his house,
and he was like, I would like to be skewered
by Jason. I mean it. It does seem to be

(42:39):
the Isaac connection here, the connection to the director. But
but yeah, it's It's interesting to look at Cronenberg's acting
credentials over the years, because, as is often the case
with directors, you do find him cameoing in his own
works as early as seventy five Shivers. He also did
a cameo in John Landis five film Into the Night,
but his first er role in another director's film was

(43:02):
his fun turn is Dr Philip K. Decker and Clive
Barker's dark fantasy horror film Night Breed. He's super creepy
in that. Yeah. Yeah, and I think that that really
put him more on the radar for everyone else. They're like, oh,
Cronenberg is like he can he can actually act. He
has a nice screen presence and and uh, and I thought, yeah,

(43:24):
I think that film Night Breed is a very interesting
one to sort of hee's apart and figure out it
has a lot of I think a lot of strong
things going for it that have been appreciated over the years.
It's a It's Barker's um adaptation of his own novella Cabal.
But yeah, Cronenberg has a great role in that is
this uh this uh, this doctor that seems to be

(43:44):
very much on the side of our troubled protagonist but
then turns out to be a um a psychopath. Yeah,
he's uh incredibly unsettling in that movie. He does a
kind of soft spoken performance that's I guess how Cronenberg
actually talks in life as well, but it's it's effectively unsettling. Um.
And oh hey, we we got another Cronenberg connection, right

(44:07):
a character actor we talked about in last week's episode
on Scanners. Oh yeah, Yeah, that's right. Robert A. Silverman
um is in this one playing Dieter Perez uh Silverman
born ninety three. Uh. Like we said last week, guess
the Cronenberg regular another Canadian actor. He played the scanner
artist and Scanners who makes the big head sculpture that

(44:28):
he goes inside to talk to the main character in. Yeah,
he plays a great weirdo. This film is no exception,
but his part is essentially a zoom call from bed
he's he's he's almost literally phoning it in in a
modern sense, though they clearly had to set this up
to get the zoom experience in two thousand and one.

(44:48):
And then, finally, the music in this film is by
The score is by Harry Manfordini. Three. You know, when
we watch Jason Takes Manhattan, I think we, or at
least I d of bemoaned the fact that fred Moland
did the music instead of Harry Manfredini, who scored the
original Friday the Thirteenth score and also created that excellent

(45:09):
uh Friday the Thirteenth Part three song that was a
legit disco hito uh And we're like, oh, why couldn't
man Fordini be on board for this one? Well, man
from Deeedy did compose the score for Jason X, and
from from from my cast, it ranges from forgettably mediocre
and serviceable to just actively annoying. I think I can

(45:30):
say it without feeling bad because he's had a lot
of success in other ways and and done great stuff.
The music in this movie is awful, just terrible. Yeah,
yeah again, that bit from the score for part three
is amazing and this is not okay, You're ready to

(45:56):
talk about the plot. Let's do it because it's a Friday.
The third movie, same thing came up in Jason Takes Manhattan.
We're not going to do every scene in this movie.
A lot of it is formulaic slasher stuff, but we're
going to talk about the set up and then some
broad themes and interesting things that stick out. So the
opening credits play over what seems to be a vision
of Dante's Inferno that they're suggesting some kind of demonic

(46:20):
cavern deep in the earth. It's full of spires and mountains,
gloomy clouds and castle ramparts, and everything is dark and
dank and bursting with fire. And this is a particular
kind of murky, ugly two thousand one c g I
a look that I very much associate with horror movies

(46:41):
and video games of the early to mid two thousands.
Think of c g I environments where everything is kind
of muddled and muddy and hard to see, and that
the dominant colors are like brown and orange, and there
are modeled texture mats over everything, modeled like m O
T T L ed uh. And so I think of

(47:02):
like Silent Hill or Resident Evil, for do you know,
what I mean with these these animated textures. Yeah, definitely
on the Silent Hill front night. I spent a lot
of time in the in the Silent Hill game, so
I know exactly what you're talking about. And here I
think it might be useful to refer back to Roger
Ebert's review to see to what extent we agree or
disagree with his comments. So Ebert writes about the effects

(47:24):
in this movie. He says, quote. With Star Wars Episode two,
Attack of the Clones opening in mid May, there's been
a lot of talk lately about how good computer generated
special effects have become. I was, I was like, what
citation needed? But then I remember people used to talk
about the Star Wars prequels this way. I mean, no,
I'm not trying to knock on the Star Wars prequels again.

(47:46):
They have their detractors and their defenders, and and their
their pluses and minuses to them. But I think one
of the things I do not love about the Star
Wars prequels is the kind of uh weightlessness of the
c g I and frorements in them. Yeah. Yeah, there's
certainly plenty of things that that still hold up well
on those films. But there are some some areas that

(48:07):
could use a fresh code of digital paint if such
a thing were possible. Yeah. But but Ebert goes on
on the basis of the effects in Jason X and
the much more entertaining Scorpion King. Okay, we can also
chat about how bad they are getting referring to computer
generated effects. Perhaps audiences do not require realistic illusions, but

(48:30):
simply the illusion of realistic illusions. Shabby special effects can
have their own charm. And you know what, that took
an interesting turn. And I agree with that last sentence
in multiple ways, because I often not only enjoy, but
especially seek out a certain kind of artful non realistic

(48:52):
practical effect. Non realistic practical effects as their own art form,
and I think you can appreciate them the same way
you would appreciate like the design of a theater set.
So if you go to see a play with good sets,
usually the set is not going to conform to strict realism.
It's not like tricking you into thinking that that's a

(49:13):
real tree. Instead, it will lightly suggest a location in
an esthetically pleasing way. And non realistic special effects in
movies can be pleasing even if you wouldn't mistake them
for like real footage of whatever phenomenon they're attempting to suggest.
The effects in Jason X have a totally different kind

(49:35):
of charm. They're certainly not realistic looking exactly. I mean,
they're those you know, two thousand one era c g
I effects. Uh, there's there's one notable exception that looks
pretty convincing. They are definitely not beautiful again, except for
maybe one exception in a perverse way. Instead, they are pleasing,
and I would say exactly the same way that it

(49:56):
is pleasing to look at tasteless but elaborately dirt tattoos.
Like imagine a guy with a full back Shrek tattoo.
That's kind of what the effects in this movie are like.
It's like, I'm not saying it's like beautiful, but it's
also kind of not something I want to stop looking at.
It's interesting because I definitely went into this film with

(50:17):
that Ebert review and his critique of the special effects
in the forefront of my mind, and so I was
ready to hate on them. But for the most part,
I did not have that experience with him. I think
part of it, and I very much agree with with
with with abridge. General take on effects here, I think
the thing is that a lot of these special effects
that we see and Jason next, the purely digital effects

(50:38):
are of spaceships moving through space, and in that it's
detached enough from human interaction that it can look a
little uh raw, It can look a little rough by
our modern standpoint, and it doesn't really um throw me
out of the experience of watching the movie. Likewise, there's
a scene where we see a couple of big alien

(51:00):
looking monsters in this and then we realized pretty quickly
that they are simulations on like a hollow deck environment,
and therefore we're like, Okay, well, of course they don't
look realistic. This is a simulation, and so that distance
makes sense. Yeah, they look kind of like an ugly
computer game. And in fact I didn't mind that scene
at all. I kind of like that. Yeah. So yeah,

(51:21):
I guess by and large, it would be different if
there was an actual digital thing, like if Jason were digital,
that would be like it's it's hard to imagine just
how ugly this movie would be if for some illogical
reason they're like, we don't need Kane Hoder, We're going
to simulate Jason virtually, Like, imagine all the things we
can do now if he's a pure digital effect, and yeah,

(51:43):
it's that that would be horrible. Well I feel like
that even that, if done right, could succeed on the
Shrek Tattoo level, but not not so much on the
other levels. Yeah, I you know, you get into I
guess the pure digital effects, you get into the weightlessness problem,
like how is it interact with the environment? How are
people interacting with that? And I mean that's a problem
even in really well done digital effects movies or not,

(52:06):
maybe not a problem, but it's it's, for instance, very
noticeable if you go back and watch the Harry Potter films,
like watch the films with Adobe, the Elf in Adobe
being a digital effect, watch how other actors interact with
that character, or or more particularly, watch how Gary Oldman
acts opposite the house Elf versus everyone else, Like Oldman

(52:28):
brings that character to life in a way, uh that
no one else in the in the films, for the
most part, is able to do. And it's due to
just how talented Oldman was, talented in a way you
cannot expect of just an average performer. Yeah, yeah, I
see what you're saying. I mean, like Gary Oldman, I'm
sure you could just put opposite a brick wall and
have him imagine that that wall is giving a performance

(52:50):
for him to react to. Right, But you give any actor,
say a rubber snake to wrestle with, and they're probably
gonna do something that you can get into, Like there's
a certain physical reality there that even if they're only
going you know, half energy on it, you can still appreciate. Yeah,
it's a bride of the monster. Bell will go see
wrestling with the octopus arms. Yeah, and we know it's

(53:12):
not a real octopus arm, but it's like it's being touched.
It's physical. We can see it, and therefore the it's
easier for us to buy. It's not that you look
at it and say that looks real. It's that you
look at it and say I like that. Yeah, you
look at it, and you go on on another level,
this is truth, what I'm seeing, what I am observing
experiencing his truth. Okay, But anyway, so you start with

(53:36):
this like sort of hideous c g I environment and
you zoom out to reveal that this like fire blasting
hell cavern is actually the inside of Jason's head. It
was like the it was like the sort of the
veins in or the arteries whatever those are in in
Jason's eyeball. And uh So for the credit sequence, we

(53:57):
see Jason is restrained in the laboratory and scientists are
looming over him with hypodermic needles. They're doing jason Ology.
And this is the beginning premise of the film that
you know they're doing studies on him. I guess it's
never established how he was captured. Yeah, yeah, they mentioned
that they have tried multiple ways to kill him, and

(54:20):
I didn't cross check the ways they mentioned with how
they actually kill him in other films, so, as far
as I know, those were all within a laboratory setting. Yeah,
I think that when she's talking, when the main character
in this movie is talking about how he was captured
and that they tried to destroy him, that's all off screen.
That's not like what happened in the movies before. So

(54:41):
there's a new scene, big dark room with Jason on
a raised platform. He's like secured by locks, and um
we see text on the screen and the terminator font
saying Crystal Lake Research Facility subject to Jason Vorhees status
awaiting cryogenic suspension, and Jason's just staring the floor expressionless.
You can see his one of his eyes through the

(55:04):
hockey mask. But then, oh, is that I'm going to
drift up and look at somebody. There's a guard nearby.
I don't know that. This opening is just really like
out of nowhere and throws you straight into this absurd situation.
And I like that. Yeah, this whole opening could be
a short film of and and it would it would
still be richly amusing. Um. I get a big kick

(55:27):
out of a research facility being established at Crystal Lake
to properly study the localized phenomenon that is Jason Vorhees.
It's kind of like if they established the Elm Street
sweep Studies lab or the hadden Field Gunshot Survivability Workshop.
You know, yes, yes, Uh, it's it's a good concept.
So we see Jason there, like his his eye locks

(55:48):
on the bumbling guard and then kind of squints like
like he's like, I'm gonna get you. And the guard
gets creeped out and throws a blanket over Jason. Uh.
And then next thing, Oh, here comes von Kronenberg. I
mean just here he is. Uh, he's walking down a corridor,
a shiny corridor with a platoon of military dudes, and
a lady pops into frame. This is Dr Rowan. Her

(56:11):
last name, according to Wikipedia is La Fontane. They just
call her Rowan in the movie, but Dr Rowan Lafontaine.
This is Alexa Doeg And she she asks David Cronenberg, Hey,
you know what are you doing. He says he's going
to take the specimen. And she says, wait, you can't
do that that the cryd stasis facility isn't ready yet.

(56:32):
And David Cronenberg is like, well, we're not going to
freeze him. I want him soft. I'm taking him to Scranton,
which was a real laugh out loud moment for us.
I think he says, to the Scranton facility. So what's
at the Scranton facility. Well, they are going to study
Jason Vorhees regeneration ability. Think of all the medical advances

(56:54):
we could unlock if we turn regular sick people into
Jason Vorhees is. Now there's a whole movie concept they
just leave right there on the table. Now Rowan objects
to this because this would involve I guess he's just
taking Jason down the highway in a truck or something,
and she says, I'm moving him over open country or

(57:14):
she asks are you willing to risk the deaths of
innocent civilians for your research? And David says yes, but he,
you know, he assures her, he's like, look, don't worry
about it. I've got a bunch of unnamed military grunts
with me, so it's impossible for anything to go wrong. Yeah,
He's like, don't worry about it. He's he's already not

(57:34):
your problem anymore. Yeah, I'm surrounded by extras. How could
you imagine something bad could happen? So anyway, David Cronenberg
and all his buddies going to to get the meat,
and they go into the big room and there's the
figure covered in a blanket, just like Jason was when
we saw him last. But oh reveal they pulled the
blanket off and it's the guard, not Jason. Jason jumps

(57:56):
up out of nowhere. He massacres all the military dudes.
He throws a spear through David Cronenberg's stomach. Rowan observes
this carnage, and then there's a chase, and she cleverly
tricks Jason into the cryogenic freezing chamber, which, by the way,
she just said was not ready yet, so I don't
know when it got ready. Um, But she like tricks

(58:17):
him in there, slams the door on him, and initiates
the freezing sequence, so she won right movie over. Yeah,
Like I say, if they'd ended it right here, this
would have been a pretty fun little Jason gets frozen
short film. But nope, Jason uh takes his machete and
stabs through the wall of the freezer and so he

(58:37):
kind of pokes her with the machete and she's like
and falls over injured. But then the I guess the
cold air or the freezer gas starts gushing out of
the chamber through the machete hole into the room, and
then another door locks to contain the leak. So Jason
gets frozen, and then Rowan gets frozen as well. They're
both frozen, and then seemingly the whole Owl facility is

(59:01):
just abandoned for the duration of life on Earth. Yeah,
nobody ever checks to see what happened in there, because
we cut two hundreds of years later and we get
a copy of the opening scene in Aliens Deep Salvage
Team prize into the facility to check it out, except
it's not a deep salvage team. It's a professor and

(59:21):
a group of college students and a robot or cyborg
named KM, and so they come in looking around at everything,
and they're consulting the robot. KM has information on everything,
so they're like, what's this. You know, they're consulting her
about the make and model of the cryogenic freezer in
the room, and I noticed continuity error because she says

(59:42):
that this uh freezer was manufactured in the year but
later in the movie they say that the movie is
taking place, it's in the year and she says that
is four hundred and fifty five years after she was frozen,
so they say that the freezer was manufactured ten years

(01:00:03):
after she was frozen. Okay, well, yeah, that's that's wrong.
I'm I'm disappointed that Jason X didn't do it. It's
an ath that right here. Let's open up the freezer.
They do, and it's Jason in a raised machete pose.

(01:00:26):
I guess he froze like that. They say humanoid but
organic composition unclear, and then they're like, what's that on
his face? And this will begin a trend of future
jokes in the movie. There's a lot of just jokes
about like, oh, the future is very far from now,
so they say, well, this is facial armor used in
a sport that was outlawed in so as of this year,

(01:00:50):
we've only got like another year or two left of
hockey all right, strapped in for that. But there are
a lot of jokes like this in the movie. It's
like at one point, um uh, Alexa Doeg says, uh,
you never forget this. It's just like riding a bike,
and one of the characters says, what's a bike? Yeah, yeah,
they it's a fun it's a fun trope to to

(01:01:13):
use in your cryogenic time travel film. So anyway, they
discover Jason, and they discover Roman, both of them, and
they realized that she can be thought out. Um oh,
and also one of the student guys gets his arm
chopped off when ice Jason tips over and falls on
him machete first, which is a pretty hilarious moment. Yeah,
it's a great moment. And uh, I like how they

(01:01:35):
they're establish they've already alluded to this with the whole
you can't carry Jason cross country, the idea that that
Jason is so dangerous that he's still extremely dangerous and
potentially lethal even while he's completely inert, like he can
just fall over and kill people, right. And fortunately for
the the guy, this is the twenty five century, so

(01:01:55):
like his arms off now. But there's nano medicine on
board the ship that can easily repair a severed arm. Uh,
the nanobox will heal all and they do. Yeah, we
just pour a little gray goo on there and it'll
do its work. So they bring Rowan and Jason, both
frozen on board the spaceship and they blast off. Oh
and by the way, on the on the way out,

(01:02:15):
we see that the Earth in this timeline is now
a horrible waste land and humans are now based on
a planet called Earth. To Earth kind of looks similar
to the inside of Jason's head. It's like in the
hundreds of years since then, Earth became Jason's soul. It's
you know, stormy brown and orange c g I desert.
Oh and also Earth orbit is just thick with space junk.

(01:02:38):
It kind of mirrors what you were talking about with
the Friday the Thirteenth franchise, though, like everything has just
been just been written to death. We just completely drained
it of all its resources and and and enjoyment and life,
and this is what we're left with. We've got to
have a new beginning on Earth too, and Jason X
is kind of that Earth too for the franchise. Yeah, okay,

(01:03:00):
I can see that. Uh So, anyway, there's a bunch
of cliche ridden chatter from the various characters who we
meet as the as the students and the frozen people
come back on the ship. And you've got the three
sort of buckets of characters, Like it's not just the students.
You have the Space College students, who are you know,
your standard Friday thirteenth type characters. But then you also

(01:03:22):
have Space Truckers and Space Marines. Yeah, and I guess
the Space Truckers they kind of they're like the Space
and Guild of this of this this world, this universe.
They control movement between the worlds. They've got a monopoly
on it. Uh You've got the Space Marines, they've got
to protect these the Earth to interest when you go

(01:03:43):
to the lawless world of Earth one. And then yeah,
the Space College students that it's the college that's paying
for this whole thing. This is a journey of exploration.
This Jason Retrieval was done with grant money. Yeah yeah,
part of again, part of the Earth one Studies program. Well, anyway,
all of these buckets of characters, again, they behave pretty

(01:04:04):
much exactly as horror conventions dictate. I'm not gonna pretend
there's a lot of originality here. It's sort of, you know,
it's be horror movies by the books, except it's in
a kind of funny way, smashing several very different be
horror genres into one movie. So you've got kind of
an alien clone with the Space Truckers, You've got an
Aliens clone with the Space Marines, and then you've just

(01:04:25):
got straight up Friday thirteen. Yeah. And there are a
lot of characters in this, and I I I do.
We didn't have time to really mention them all, and
for some of them, Jason X is probably their most
notable picture. But again, a lot of Canadian actors and
I think most most of the most of them did
pretty good with what they had to work with in
Jason X. Yeah, so we're almost done with the set

(01:04:46):
up here, but we've got Jason. They bring him and
he's lying on an operating table throwing out in the
ship's laboratory just drip and slime for the floor while
while Rowan is revived from cryosleep by the nanobots, which
they the ants, and she wakes up, she's instantly lucid.
They tell her it's the five and she says, uh,

(01:05:07):
that's over four hundred years in the future. Well, she's
she's in shock, She's in shock. Yeah. There is a
scene where the greedy, scheming Professor gets on a video
call with Robert Silverman, the guy from Scanners. Uh and uh,
Silverman's I think he's playing like like a fence or
something like a guy who will market a stolen artifacts

(01:05:29):
for the Professor that he loots from twenty one century Earth.
And so the Professor is like, I've got a gold mine,
and Silverman says, a box of DVDs is not a
gold mine. I can't move them, suggesting that he's been
repeatedly showing up with DVDs recovered from from the dead Earth. Uh.
And I don't know exactly how to interpret this line.

(01:05:50):
Is it like, oh, is this, you know, like old
media that people want to watch, or is it more
like this would be a valuable artifact the way we
would regard like medieval manu script today. Mm hmmm, oh yeah, yeah.
Are they watching their cinemas or or is it just
the the physical artifact like kind of like a Jerry
or something, you know, the cinemas. Yes, I was thinking

(01:06:11):
of overdrawn at the memory bank. Is it like DVDs
are illegal in the future and people seek them out
from older Yeah, and it's so like is it kind
of like a Jerry McGuire situation, where like the vast
majority of the CDs are just one or two different pictures.
It's whatever was mass produced off of a particular blockbuster.
I want these movies from two thousand one. Get me

(01:06:34):
a copy of Domestic Disturbance starring John Travolta. Yeah. I
guess The joke here, though, is that DVDs were still
really hot and in two thousand and one and didn't
start declining until years later. I guess mhm. But anyway,
the professor is like, Nope, not DVDs. I've got a
couple of frozen people from more than four hundred years ago,

(01:06:56):
and Silverman is unimpressed. Apparently, this future timeline is just
flood with people who have been reanimated from hundreds of
years earlier Rowan now is going to be the oldest
ever revived. But that's just not interesting to Silverman. Yeah,
how's he gonna make any money after that? But then
he looks at the file. He's like, wait a second,
this other one you recovered, that's Jason Vorhees. He killed

(01:07:19):
nearly two hundred people and simply disappeared without a trace.
He could be worth a fortune to the right buyer. Why,
I don't know, but the greedy professor he wants money,
so he's he's going to get the money by selling
Jason's like this, this slimy hockey mask guy to somebody
even that that presents possibilities that could have been their

(01:07:41):
own movie, like a collector of of strange and grotesque
things from the Old Earth. They want to, you know,
to put put Jason Vorhees on display, uh in their
in their mansion and their Earth to mansion, Like that
would be a whole movie right there. Or you could
go back on that whole regeneration lab thing, like oh yeah,
people on Earth two they want to live forever. They've

(01:08:02):
been working on it. They've got those nanobots. But nothing
beats good old fashioned supernatural immortality. That's true, and we
could learn how to harness that supernatural immortality for ourselves.
We could make Jason nanobots. What if Jason became a
swarm of nanobots? That would be there? You go, Oh,
I'm glad they did not go in that direction purely

(01:08:24):
for the effects, because that is exactly the the the
full digital Jason that we did not want to see.
That would be the scorpion King Jason that that the
effects department here was not ready for and the viewers
were not ready for either. Okay, here, I think we're
just gonna uh skip more lightly over some of the
other things that happened in the film. One thing we

(01:08:45):
got to discuss is a particular gory special effect. Because
while the effects and Jason X are not generally considered
a highlight of the series, not generally considered all that great,
there is one notable exception. The first space youth that
Jason kills after waking up. Uh. This is a scene

(01:09:05):
that even Roger Ebert seems impressed by. And this is
the the frozen face scene. Yeah, this is a quality kill,
to be sure, and I think we we probably referenced
this one in our stuff to boll your Mind episode
on freezing and shattering organic materials. But basically what happens here,
it's like when Jason first wakes up, he grabs a
lady and he like shoves her face into liquid nitrogen

(01:09:27):
and then smashes her head like an ice cube. Yeah,
it's gross and effective, but also not too bloody by
virtue of all the blood being frozen. Right. Yes, it's
it's it's cuboid instead of instead of liquidity. Yeah. Yeah,
a new territory for Jason trying new things. Right after that,
there is what I thought is actually a genuinely quite

(01:09:47):
funny moment where Jason goes to the tray next to
the operating table in this lab where he's throwing out
and you see, I guess he's looking at you think
he's looking at like scalpels or whatever, and then he
picks up a surgical chetty. Okay, um. Next thing the

(01:10:08):
level of self awareness of this movie, So Jason X
is not a fully self aware of parody like you know,
the Scream movies or Cabin in the Woods or something
where the characters would openly talk about the tropes and
acknowledge them and sort of critique them. But It is
the first movie in the Friday Thirteenth series that has
partial elements of this kind, and this did come out

(01:10:29):
after Scream went mainstream. With these observations about horror movies,
for example, the sort of implied punitive morality of many
slasher movies, where characters seem to be punished for uh,
for trivial sins like premarital sex or drug use. And
this this is openly discussed by characters in Scream, But

(01:10:51):
then in Jason X we see this knowledge kind of
incorporated as a knowing parody. Like you see Jason become
their their cuts where he's like in Ray, aged and
powered up for violence. When characters break one of these
slasher rules of conduct, when they like drink or engage
in brutally cringe e sex scenes awful. But here this

(01:11:12):
reaction of Jason's has not done implicitly as it is
in earlier movies, but explicitly I think for intentional comedy.
I think here they are poking fun at the previous
movies in this series. Yeah, yeah, I think so. There's
a certain amount of self awareness to the picture. And
then then they also go for sort of broader comedy

(01:11:33):
other places in the picture plenty of times with mixed results.
Like there's a nice moment where Mins's characters, the sergeant
Um initially seems to be killed by Jason. Jason stabs
him through it like stabs him I think from behind,
like drew a wall through his chest. And Sergeant Brodsky
here says it's going to take more than a poke
in the ribs to put down this old dog. And

(01:11:54):
then Jason stabs him through the chest again and he goes, yeah,
that ought to do it. That seemingly dies. Yeah, that
was good though. Actually he comes back after that. But
but that line was good enough that I actually thought
that was probably a Peter Mensa improv. Yeah, it might
have been. There's also a scene on the other end
of the spectrum. There's this scene uh that we can
refer to tastefully as k M fourteen wants Nipples to Um,

(01:12:18):
where she's talking with her boyfriend the techy about how
she wishes to have nipples like other uh female members
of the crew. And it seems like it's it's not
an actually funny scene. The comedy falls flat, and it
seems at first like it's going to be super cringe
e In establishing the relationship between the Thimbott and the technician.
But then it actually lands in this sort of like

(01:12:39):
sweeter area where it's it's made clear that their relationship
is not exploitive. It's not like a purely physical relationship,
but it is um it's it's very consensual and very
genuine in these this robot and this nerd love each other.
It seems like true love. Yeah, Okay, one more thing
this movie does get into is virtual reality. I think

(01:13:00):
this is one area where the movie actually stumbled across
a really good idea, one that had the potential to
be much more interesting and funny than it was, though
it's used for some good moments Jason interacting with essentially
the hollow Deck from Star Trek. What happens when you
put an unstoppable undead monster into a virtual environment. Yeah,

(01:13:21):
they they bust this out, and it's kind of thought provoking,
like how long could they have contained Jason Vordhees with
more preparation. They end up throwing it together as a
as as like a stalling tactic. Uh so they can
try and escape. But but what if they had actually
prepared for Like what if this had been the plan
upon thawing and out. And then also, what are the

(01:13:41):
ethics of creating a never ending kill sim to contain
an undying killer? Well, I mean, if he actually doesn't
hurt anybody, I would say the ethics are good compared
to him getting loose and hurting people. Right, So, well,
it depends, I guess, on the NPCs. And that's sim right,
getting into territory of disgust on stuff to blow your
mind before, are like, oh, we like or the holograms conscious? Yeah?

(01:14:03):
Or they on what level? Are they feeling pain? I
don't know. But then again, if it's preventing Jason from
killing hundreds of people in the real world, then I
don't know. I guess I didn't take it as implying
that the holograms were conscious, but that would be its
own kind of horror movie. I guess. Oh, we have
created a like a literal digitally created hell. Yeah, it's

(01:14:26):
a This is often called the Jason X problem in philosophy.
I imagine some of you out there have studied it,
But I do think, I mean like that you could
have made a whole like interesting horror movie out of
an idea like this, like monster versus illusion. Yeah, I mean,
it really almost kind of creates a you could have.
It's kind of like a Jurassic Park scenario because obviously

(01:14:47):
that's where you'd have to go in such a film,
is that something would break the illusion. The illusion would
break down in the monster, would the Jason or whatever
you have in there would bust loose and you'd have
to somehow subdue them again. I mean, it does kind
of deal with the nature of Jason that gets discussed,
which is that like, you can't destroy Jason. He always
comes back, but you can like freeze him for a

(01:15:07):
period of time, like you can do things to sort
of prevent him from acting, but you can never destroy him. Yeah,
you can. You can move him closer to a massive
black hole. That that would be I guess the thing
to do. Yeah, one last thing before we finish up
Uber Jason. I mean they're in the trailer. It's the

(01:15:29):
advertised Jason is of course going to get swarmed by
nanobots after he's been uh taken out a commission by
k M. The robots. She does some like gunfo on
him and then blows him up sort of, and then
the nano bots in the medical bay, aren't they sweet?
Aren't they helpful? They just restore him and make him
better than ever, and even I guess like doubly invulnerable.

(01:15:49):
He's more invulnerable than he's ever been before. Yeah, they
I guess the way to read this is the nano
bots are trying to do what they normally do, repair damaged,
injured human being. But this is not a human being.
His physiology is weird, his flesh is weird. He's like
an undead thing, and they don't really seem to know

(01:16:09):
how to handle this, so they end up building Uber Jason.
Like even his hockey mask is like weirdly incorporated into
his his head in a way that that I think
really works. But it's like computer air here processing error. Uh,
we think we've healed him, and this is the results.
This is one of these like AI alignment problems. Yeah,

(01:16:31):
all you did was programmed me to help people, So
I helped Jason. So yeah, the basic structure of the film, yeah,
ends up being Jason thaws out, rampages, is killed, nanobots
restore him to Uber Jason form, and then battles everyone again.
And finally we get down to the survivors, uh, making

(01:16:51):
a break for it, And we also get this great
scene where Jason is flying through space at the essentially
the escape hot but then here comes Mensa, here comes
Sergeant Brodsky, and essentially like supplexes Jason Vorhees through the
atmosphere of Earth two, and they seemingly burn up as
they fall through the atmosphere to this new world. And

(01:17:15):
then they appear as a shooting star going through the
night sky and we see like some camp counselors on
Earth to being like, oh wow, it's beautiful, let's go
over check it out. Yeah, so we're left with this
weird and I think it totally works. It's a nice
moment at the end where it's like Earth two was
a new start. It was we put behind all of
our our awfulness from Earth one. But what have we done.

(01:17:37):
We've gone out and we've brought Jason Vorhees to Earth,
to a planet that is clearly not ready for him,
and thus concludes the tale of Jason X. Yeah. Yeah,
we and and like you said, we this film was
not successful enough in in any way for there to
be a proper follow up to Jason X, not that
we needed one. Jason X delivers on all its promise.

(01:18:01):
It does everything it's set out to do seemingly um
but Ebert even in his review, he's like, people are
probably gonna love it, and we're probably gonna get Jason
X two, but we didn't get that this is all
we have. Yeah, he was even lamenting while imagining that
audiences would eat this up that uh, it would not
be called Jason eleven, it would be called Jason X

(01:18:21):
two or Adjason X Part two. I think he said, Oh, man,
I signed me up. I would have seen it. I mean,
it's kind of like the counterintuitive ordering of like the
Rambo movies, doesn't it go like First Blood, first Blood
Part two, Rambo, then Rambo three, then Rambo. Yeah. So yeah,

(01:18:45):
I feel like they could have done X part two
and it might have been good, But I don't know
if they could do it now. Like, like the alchemy
of something like this has to be just right. You
have to have just the right balance, and and they
managed to deliver on that for the most part with
Jason X. If you make Jason X Part two and
you go too serious or you go too silly with it,
and it would just all fall apart. Yeah, yeah, Yeah,

(01:19:07):
it is an artifact, much like a case of DVDs
discovered by by grave robbers from the year two thousand one.
It is an artifact of a previous time that we
should study and understand. All right, well, help us to
study and understand this artifact. If you out there have
thoughts on Jason X in its place in the Friday
the Thirteenth film franchise, if you have memories of seeing

(01:19:30):
it for the first time on DVD, on VHS or
in the theater itself. I always love a good uh
theater viewing account right in let us know we would
love to hear from you. Just a reminder that we're
primarily a science podcast. Here it stuff to blow your mind.
But every Friday and the Stuff to Blow your Mind
podcast feed, we set aside most serious concerns and we
just talk about a weird film like Jason X. And

(01:19:52):
I mentioned letter Boxed earlier. If you go to letterbox
dot com is L E T T E R B
O x D dot com you can look us up
weird how This is our user name, and we have
an ongoing list there of all the films all one
hundred now that we have featured on Weird House Cinema.
Huge thanks to our audio producer J. J. Pauseway. If

(01:20:13):
you would like to get in touch with us with
feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a
topic for the future, to share something interesting, or just
to say hello, you can email us at contact at
stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow

(01:20:33):
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