Jason X (2001)

Jason X arrives as the tenth entry in a franchise that had already exhausted Crystal Lake, Manhattan, and hell itself, so the producers sent the man to space. It is a decision of pure arithmetic. The year is 2455, Earth is a toxic brown ruin, and a field trip of graduate students happens upon a frozen hockey-masked problem. The film knows exactly what it is and never pretends otherwise, which places it in a strange category of slasher: the honest kind.

The cast is drawn from the 2001 Toronto talent pool and reflects it, a reasonably mixed group of faces going about its business. Peter Mensah's Sergeant Brodski meets a heroic end. Nobody remarks on this. Race is not the subject here, and the film has no interest in making it one. Rowan runs the cryogenic facility and survives, and KM-14 is a female-presenting combat android with a flamethrower arm, but the franchise's machinery grinds on unchanged. The polluted planet and the flight to Earth II are backdrop. Professor Lowe carries crushing debt and a collector's market exists for Jason's remains, so money drives the plot. It is greed as slasher plumbing, nothing more.

What remains is camp. The film pokes at its own mythology: holographic campers, a liquid nitrogen death, a cyborg rebuilt by medical nanites. It has no sermons to deliver about bodies, minds, or the historical record, and it never reaches for one. Roger Ebert gave it half a star and the film simply absorbed the blow. This is entertainment without an argument, which in the current climate is almost restful.